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End of an Era: The Outdoor Retail Scene Loses an Iconic Shop

objmigrationbot — Sat, 05 Feb 2022 06:07:02 +0000

The retail landscape in the outdoor industry is about to feel a shift. Some will see it as another nail in the proverbial coffin of specialty stores. Some will simply see it as a sad day for gear shops. After 39 years in business, Black Creek Outfitters (BCO) is shutting down.

The Jacksonville, Florida-based business, founded in 1983 by Helen and Joe Butler, Jr., is one of the last of a rare retail breed in the U.S.—a single location that has been family owned and operated since its inception. Offering mainly paddlesports gear, it’s perched on the edge of a local lake, where customers can demo products before they buy. The main sales floor spans 14,000 bright and airy square feet.

It’s the kind of shop that makes other retailers swoon with envy. And by all accounts, it’s solidly in the black and posting strong sales numbers, even amid the pandemic’s supply-chain woes. Given all that it’s doing right, the first question that most are likely to have is why the closure?

“I’ve always said I’m a businessperson more than I’m a retailer,” said Joe Butler, the shop’s current owner and son of its founders. The end of BCO, Butler says, boils down to the right business decision at the right time.

It’s not an unfamiliar move for the Butler family. “With my parents, it was always about being able to throw everything up against the wall,” said Butler. The store began as a sailboat shop in the early ’80s, pivoted to focus on outdoor gear in the mid-90s, and has since added (and periodically dropped) category after category with the “emotion taken out of it,” as Butler said, based on what makes sense for the business and the family.

Behind the scenes at BCO, that same calculus has led the Butlers to a bittersweet—though, they say, appropriate—conclusion: the time to say goodbye has come.

Unpacking the News

The decision to wind down BCO wasn’t made suddenly, Butler told OBJ this week. The chain of events that led to the news began a year ago, in February 2021. Butler’s parents, who are both in their 70s and still own the building in which BCO is housed, were approached with an offer to buy the space.

“It was an insanely high offer,” Butler said, noting that his parents, at that time, were in the middle of transitioning to retirement. The attractiveness of the bid got them in the mood to sell, and even though that first deal fell apart, when their broker came back with another offer a couple months later, the family jumped on it. “Even that second offer was above the building’s appraised value by a significant amount,” Butler said.

Joe Butler III is the second-generation owner of Black Creek Outfitters, which his parents, Helen and Joe Butler, Jr., founded in 1983. (Photo: Courtesy)

At that point, with a deal closed, Butler wanted to find a new location to keep BCO going. “We started looking around for [properties],” he said. “With inflationary pressures and real estate struggling, I thought I could get a good deal. The reality is, though, when you’re a 40,000-square-foot, purpose-built shop on a lake, what you’d have to settle for—going down to 4,000 or 5,000 square feet—would lead to the perception among customers that you’re going out of business. It would have taken BCO from an A-level experience to a B-level experience.”

That reality, combined with the vendor challenges squeezing just about every other specialty shop in the country right now, led Butler to an inevitable conclusion. “When we started to put all that together, it kind of melted our secret sauce here at BCO,” he said. “If I followed my heart, we’d have another store somewhere, because I love what I do, but I’ve always been a businessman first. We had to ask, from a business standpoint, what’s the right thing to do?”

The Changing Specialty Retail Landscape

In some ways, the end of Black Creek is emblematic of the lopsided nature of specialty retail more broadly across the country. The shop—not unlike many paddlesports retailers in the past two years—has posted strong numbers lately. But Butler still feels like there’s something missing.

“We had tremendous growth in 2020,” Butler said. “We had growth close to 40 percent. In 2021, it was still about 9.7 percent. If we had gotten everything we wanted from every vendor, it probably would have been more.”

The floor of Black Creek Outfitters is a staggering 14,000 square feet of bright, airy space. (Photo: Courtesy)

That last sentiment is exactly the point. Butler and his team at BCO couldn’t get all the product they wanted into the store last year—not even close. That struggle flew in the face of everything BCO has tried to stand for over the past four decades. “When we got into this business, we always tried to be a leader in what I call the ‘new hotness,’” Butler said, by which he means the latest and greatest cutting-edge gear. “My philosophy has always been that we have to have that new hotness in the store, because that’s the expectation of the customer.”

Those cutting-edge products have been harder and harder to get lately, but in Butler’s estimation, the pandemic isn’t 100 percent to blame. There’s a larger cultural slowdown happening in outdoor innovation, he said, that makes retail ownership less exciting than it was 20 years ago.

“There was a tremendous amount of technical innovation that happened in the outdoor space from the early 90s to the mid-2000s,” Butler said. “That’s when Polartec and Gore went from being unknown to known. Footwear changed completely. There was a tremendous shift in how products were made. We were fortunate to be [doing business] in that period. The outdoor industry has been much more iterative since about 2005. There’s been incremental change [in product innovation], but not what I would call big leaps.”

Loyal Customers, Loyal Vendors

Industry-wide changes aside, it’s clear from speaking with BCO vendors and customers that few others saw the shop as anything but cutting-edge and ahead of the pack in both its product mix and attention to new trends.

“I kept returning over and over to BCO because I trusted everyone at the store,” said Chris Burns, a longtime customer from the Jacksonville area. “They didn’t carry just any brands. They promoted brands whose products were excellent, and dealt with manufacturers who were environmentally conscious, good to their employees, and stood behind their merchandise. When you bought something from BCO, you felt good about your purchase.”

The crowning jewel of BCO was its demo lake, just out the back door. (Photo: Courtesy)

It’s a sentiment echoed among the shop’s vendors. “They listened to their customers really well,” said Frank Stapleton, an independent sales rep who for years sold Hobie products to BCO. “They did a really good job keeping their ear to the ground and paying attention to trends. Other retailers in the area would actually drive to BCO to check out what they were doing.”

Most of all, it seems, they treated people well. “Joe always came to a meeting with a casual demeanor that was a veneer for the roiling imagination and energy that was about to come forth,” said Ben Tendel, director of sales at Yakima, whose products were perennial bestsellers at the shop. “His passion for authenticity and community involvement inspired his vendors to engage more effectively with money, personnel, and imagination. I left, every time, whether at a show or in their store, energized. Every time.”

The final piece of the puzzle, indispensable to the shop’s success, was the lake out the back door (featured consistently in the shop’s promotional strategy, as in the Instagram interview below). Fifty feet from the shop, product demos took place daily. “BCO exemplifies what we consider a specialty retailer,” said Chris Decerbo, director of sales at Tahe Outdoors. “The extensive product knowledge, the high-level service of the staff, and the on-site demo opportunity set BCO apart for the customer experience.” The lake, in fact, is one of the pieces of the business Butler says he’ll miss most. “I think we’re leaving a little bit of a hole in the community,” he said. “There are only three or four stores nationwide with a lake right out back where people can try paddleboards and kayaks. Jacksonville had that, and they probably won’t for a while.”

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What’s Next?

When BCO winds down, Butler will also step aside from his position as chairman of Grassroots Outdoor Alliance, in which Black Creek has been a longtime member. In contemplating the next phase of his career, Butler says he got some choice advice from Rich Hill, Grassroots’ executive director.

“Rich put it to me straight,” Butler said. “He told me, ‘You’ve been doing this for 30 years. You just need to take three or four months off so you can figure out what the next thing is.’ So that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

Whatever that is, Butler will bring a wealth of knowledge and experience along with him—more than most retailers in the country will ever be able to claim. He stresses the point, though: he’s excited for the next thing. BCO’s legacy will continue to shape the retail scene in Florida and beyond, even after it’s gone. But in Butler’s mind, there’s more he has left to accomplish.

“It’s very bittersweet,” he said. “But it’s definitely happier than sad.”

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Grassroots, Armed with New Data-Collection Tool, Publishes Annual Retail Sales Report

objmigrationbot — Thu, 11 Nov 2021 05:58:59 +0000

Following Grassroots Outdoor Alliance’s of its new nonprofit trade association, Indie Outdoor, the buying group released its first annual trend report highlighting sales data from more than half of its retail partners.

The report compiled POS data from 101 retail locations across the U.S., representing $239 million in sales and 2.08 million individual consumer receipts. The formal reporting period highlighted the up-and-down nature of independent outdoor retail from November 1, 2020 to October 31, 2021.

“Financially, it’s been a record two years,” said Grassroots executive director Rich Hill. “We’ve lost zero of our stores [as Grassroots members] and seen 30 percent year-over-year growth.”

To create the report, Grassroots partnered with retail data platform Locally to aggregate product data, imagery, and classification of various outdoor products. The group also partnered with retail analysis service PivotPoint to compile a ranking of the top 20 brands with the most penetration across the 101 stores.

To some outdoor industry pros, the results may be surprising.

While Patagonia took the top spot, with penetration across 82 percent of retailers, footwear and apparel company On Running was a strong second-place finisher with a retailer penetration of 51 percent. In fact, three out of the top 10 brands were running brands, Hill said, with Hoka One One and Brooks Running also posting strong numbers.

Hill was quick to point out that this first group of data was weighted heavily with Southern retailers, so the results may change as the collection group continues to diversify geographically. It may also explain why niche outfitter Free Fly Apparel—based in Charleston, South Carolina—came in ranked at No. 9 with a penetration rate of 55 percent.

It’s also probable that supply chain issues played into the results.

While Hill was quick to champion the tenacity and passion of specialty outdoor retailers, he also noted that the supply chain crunch is still putting a lot of strain on sales, and likely dampening numbers. “If we didn’t have supply chain issues, sales would be 20 percent higher,” he said.

Hill is optimistic about the growing value of the new Grassroots’ data, especially considering that he projects the group will gain up to 50 percent more reporting locations for the next iteration of its trend report.

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Grassroots Launches New Trade Association Focused On Accurate Sales Data, Advocacy, and Marketing

objmigrationbot — Wed, 10 Nov 2021 00:55:04 +0000

Grassroots Outdoor Alliance, the 200-door buying group of independent outdoor retailers, this week announced a new project called Indie Outdoor, a nonprofit trade association for independent outdoor retailers. Rich Hill, president of Grassroots, unveiled Indie Outdoor to a room filled with retailers, vendors, and sales reps gathered in Kansas City, Missouri, for the twice-annual Grassroots Connect Show, which has been on hiatus for more than two years due to the pandemic.

Indie Outdoor Starts with Data

Indie Outdoor is an idea that has been percolating for several years. Hill has been outspoken about his organization’s frustration with the retail data reported by market research firm The NPD Group, which he contends is more reflective of big-box stores rather than of independent specialty retailers.

That frustration led to Grassroots’ June 2021 launch of its own proprietary data project, PivotPoint. The initiative aims to collect and analyze data that better serves Grassroots members and the vendors who partner with them.

But after the project’s launch, something quickly became clear to Hill and his team. Merely reporting on data collected from Grassroots’ 98 retail members was not enough. There are more than 1,000 independent outdoor specialty shops around the country and Grassroots retailers are just a small snapshot of them.

That realization led to the creation of Indie Outdoor, which Grassroots says will harness the collective power of indie retail sales data, improve consumer understanding of the economic and community value of local businesses, and speak with a collective and inclusive voice on key national topics.

By 2025, Indie hopes to count 1,000+ independent outdoor, ski, bike, run, fish, and paddle shops as members. Retail shops can join Indie Outdoor for $250 per year for a basic membership, which entitles them to inclusion in advocacy efforts, newsletters, trend reports, and other perks. A $900 “plus” membership connects participants to PivotPoint data, real time reports, anonymized peer data, inventory tools, and vendor-funded marketing campaigns.

“With more data, more locations, and more voices coming together from throughout the indie community, it’s going to help us all individually be better at our daily business,” Joe Butler, board chair at Grassroots and owner of Black Creek Outfitters, told OBJ. “Without a doubt, it’s also going to enable us to finally tell a complete story about what’s really happening at independent specialty. We are pioneering a whole new type of data insight in the outdoor industry, and it’s going to be extremely valuable to both retailers as well as brand decision makers who are looking to fill in the blanks left by big-box trend data.”

The Proven Power of Banding Together

Indie Outdoor is taking a page from independent bookstores and their recent resurgence. Years back, with the arrival of the first Amazon e-reader and the growth of big-box bookstores like Borders and Barnes & Noble, industry experts far and wide proclaimed the death of the indie book market.

Small bookstores realized that, in order to survive, they needed to band together and focus on what they do best: bringing their communities together and keeping dollars in their local communities.

The American Booksellers Association reported a 49 percent growth in the number of independent booksellers between 2009 and 2015. One key to success was data collaboration—a move that allowed bookshops to create a powerful collective voice and show that they were important economic drivers in their communities.

“While the headlines continue to say indie bookstore sales are down, we’re collecting data that proves otherwise,” said Greg Squires, CEO and founder of PivotPoint and Parable Group, data firms that serve the outdoor industry and the indie book community, respectively. “In fact, indie bookstores continue to see 5 to 15 percent increase year over year. And we believe that independent outdoor stores can follow this model with Indie Outdoor.”

Retailer Reactions to Indie Outdoor

Despite the pandemic, or maybe because of it, Grassroots retailers have had a very good year. Year-to-date sales have increased by 32.1 percent over 2020, and 27.6 percent since 2019. Maura Kistler, co-owner of Water Stone Outdoors in Fayetteville, West Virginia, said business has been off the charts. “This October was the best month we’ve had in 27 years and every month this year has set a record for us,” said Kistler.

“I’m excited about Indie Outdoor,” said Susan Anderson, owner of Eagle Eye Outfitters in Dothan, Alabama and a Grassroots member since 2012. “I like the distinction between the Grassroots members and the Indie members, so that we can preserve the integrity of the core Grassroots community but still be able to leverage the power of a strong unified voice.”

Regarding the distinction between Grassroots and Indie Outdoor, Hill characterized it like this: “Grassroots is exclusive, Indie is inclusive.” In other words, Grassroots members are committed to collaborating and sharing only among participating retailers—that’s a key part of the group’s value. Indie Outdoor is not about those intimate connections, but about advocacy, data, and marketing programs.

Anderson is in the midst of converting her shop, which has 150,000 SKUs from 200 brands, to UPC (Universal Product Codes), which is a key part of PivotPoint’s being able to collect and aggregate data across all of Indie Outdoor’s member stores.

“We haven’t needed to be on the UPC system until recently, when we began to expand our e-commerce,” said Anderson. “It will take us about six months to convert. Each brand has tables with unique UPC codes for every size, color, and style. We need to import all those codes into our POS system, but we hope to be up and running by early spring.”

What Do Vendors Think?

Grassroots vendors are also optimistic about what Indie Outdoors can do for the industry.

“I’ve watched how powerful the Brewers Association logo has been for craft brewers,” said Ryan Krusemark, sales manager for Rab. “People search out that product because they know where it comes from. A lot of people want to shop indie, and I think the outdoor industry has struggled to define what that means for us. I’m interested in having a conversation about also defining what an ‘indie vendor brand’ is and how indie brands and retailers can work together and support each other.”

Troy Sicotte, president of Mountain Hardwear, concurred. “Once again, Grassroots is looking to the future, which is something this industry needs,” he said. “The resurgence in demand for true specialty retail experiences is something that we, as vendors and retailers, really need to cherish, especially after acquiring so many new consumers over the last 20 months. My hope is that this will help us hang onto these new consumers and continue to give them amazing experiences that only specialty retail can deliver. The end goal is to create lifelong outdoor lovers.”

Sicotte noted that he’s excited about access to data from a broad field of independent shops that will help his company come to market with more regionally relevant products.

The Indie Opportunity

When Hill introduced the concept of Indie Outdoor to the crowd at Grassroots Connect, he reminded audience members that history shows that you can’t fight big, existential threats on your own. To him, the existential threats facing the outdoor industry are clear: inaccurate data, big-box retailers, Amazon, and the abuse of pro purchase channels, to name a few.

“We’ve always been able to see the challenges ahead,” said Hill. “With Indie Outdoor, the opportunities are now really coming into focus.”

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Grassroots Connect Show Will Require Proof of COVID Vaccination

objmigrationbot — Fri, 27 Aug 2021 03:50:13 +0000

Grassroots Outdoor Alliance, the retail association currently preparing for its first in-person trade show in more than 600 days, will require attendees of its upcoming Connect event to provide proof of COVID vaccination, according to show leaders.

“No exceptions,” Grassroots executive director Rich Hill told ��ԹϺ�� Business Journal. “This was one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever had to bring to our board. I feel a personal responsibility for people who come to our event.”

The show, scheduled for November 8-11 in Kansas City, Missouri, has roughy 1,300 attendees registered, with more interest coming in on a regular basis, Hill said. Although Grassroots leadership hasn’t yet decided how vaccination proof will be collected from attendees, Hill said that through the month of September the team will be “gathering research” before coming to a decision about logistics. Vaccination “proof” might be as simple as signing an honor-system pledge, Hill said. Or it might be more intensive, involving authentication by a third-party service.

“It’s my opinion that when you treat people like adults, they tend to act like adults,” said Hill. “I’m leaning toward trusting everybody. I don’t see us as a community where people would try to cheat. But we’re researching it through the end of September.”

Blowback and Support

Hill says that, so far, about 95 percent of show registrants—including retailers, brand exhibitors, and sales reps—have responded positively to the news. The other 5 percent have been vocal in their opposition.

“It has been mostly reps in that 5 percent, interestingly,” Hill said. “We had one instance where a rep at a certain agency refused to get vaccinated, and when one of their brands caught wind of it, the brand fired the agency on the spot.”

Overall, though, Hill believes the decision has increased interest in the show. “Many people saw it as us taking a leadership position,” he said. “I think it added to the potential attendance of the show.”

Other Changes to Show Policy

The invitation-only trade show will also offer a new refund policy in light of COVID uncertainty, Hill confirmed. A full return of deposit funds will be granted for for any exhibitor that cancels its show registration on or before October 1.

“In the week prior to that deadline, Grassroots will provide registered attendees an overview of the show’s latest health and safety plans, and will host a Zoom open forum to answer vendor questions,” Grassroots said in a statement. “If Grassroots cancels the show after October 1, full refunds will be available.”

“We are fully aware that there’s still some legitimate reasons for travel anxiety out there, and we’re doing our best to address those realities head on,” Hill said. “We’ve built an extensive list of health and safety considerations around Connect—even our contingency plans have contingency plans—and I think it’s safe to say that many of those considerations are going to become best practices for gatherings in 2022 and beyond.”

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Outdoor’s Big Data Problem

objmigrationbot — Fri, 13 Aug 2021 22:42:16 +0000

We live in an era of big data. Enabled by technology capable of tracking every consumer sale and even the whereabouts of consumers themselves—within two feet if you’re running certain apps—data capture drives growth across industries. It’s not a coincidence that your favorite streaming service is teasing you with that new series you Googled last night, or that the banner on The New York Times hit you with a ski pass sale shortly after your last day on the hill. Knowing who buys what, when, and where is a clear advantage—an advantage the outdoor industry just does not have. I’ve spent my career reporting on the outdoors. There’s something very fishy in our numbers.

Hell, we can’t even get the easy point-of-sale (POS) stuff right. At least, that’s true if you believe the folks behind Grassroots Outdoor Alliance, which acts as the unofficial voice of much of outdoor specialty retail.

This past January was a WTF moment for Grassroots. The dispute started with a column written by Dirk Sorenson, an analyst for the consumer research firm NPD Group, in the January 2021 edition of Outdoor Retailer magazine.

Most of the commentary was innocuous and obvious—consumers wanted to get outside during the pandemic. But in paragraph six, Sorenson slipped in an incendiary statistic. Outdoor specialty retailers, he wrote, were down a staggering 32 percent through October of 2020. He followed that up with a vague claim that “outdoor specialty retailers have faced challenges due to store closures.”

Grassroots—a collective of independent specialty retailers—was tracking different numbers. Over the same time frame, its research showed top-line sales for the 196 storefronts in the group down just 2.18 percent. This, during what The Washington Post called the worst economic downturn since World War II. As for permanent closures, Grassroots lost only one shop—due to retirement. Grassroots was done with the tired narrative about brick and mortar dying. Ditto with the running oversimplification that specialty brick and mortar and specialty e-commerce are disparate entities; 50 percent of Grassroots shops run e-commerce platforms. More than that, Grassroots disputed the notion that NPD’s analysis speaks for what most industry people think of as specialty retail. Of 73 stores Grassroots surveyed (the coalition has since grown to 96 members) only two reported to NPD.

In a letter to Outdoor Retailer and NPD, Grassroots demanded clarification and an apology. The magazine published their demands. Some back and forth between Grassroots and NPD followed, but Grassroots wasn’t satisfied with NPD’s counterargument. There’s too much at stake, said Rich Hill, Grassroots’s executive director. If a CEO on the vendor side believes that specialty is in trouble, Grassroots asked, what happens to the co-marketing dollars or the test products designed for specialty shops and their opinion leader clientele? When CEOs rely on incomplete or just plain wrong retail sales data, Hill said, those types of investments get cut. In effect, the prophetic narrative “specialty is in trouble” fulfills itself.

“NPD put out a misleading statement about the health and wellness of our industry,” Hill said. “That’s all that CEOs read. Somebody has to say it: nobody that we talk to in outdoor specialty retail trusts their data. The path to redemption starts with an apology.”

Whether derived from political pollsters or POS transactions, data are usually taken as fact—it’s human nature to assume there can be no nuance in projected numbers; no sampling errors; no muddy language in surveys. But it’s high time we embraced some skepticism. In politics, we now know those most likely to answer a call from an unknown number are older liberals. Even with robust margins of error, when a sample isn’t representative, neither are the projections. The more you extrapolate, the worse it gets. Something similar might be at play with the NPD and Grassroots misfire. Do the Grassroots and NPD definitions of specialty retail even line up? It depends on whom you talk to. NPD says it has a good handle on outdoor specialty. Grassroots says it’s not even close.

But the story of data in the outdoor industry is bigger than the recent spat. Tracking participation is even tougher than the POS stuff. Unless we’re selling tickets, booking campsites, or issuing licenses, what is there to count? And what about all the people taking advantage of free access to our public lands? All we can do is estimate the number of people running, hiking, backcountry skiing, climbing, paddleboarding, and biking. And frequency is even harder to track—after all, there’s no turnstile at the trailhead. For an industry that prides itself on its bona fides, we often don’t have a clue about what’s actually happening outdoors.

How Do You Count an Outdoorsperson?

My favorite participation stat comes from telemark skiing. Back when I was the editor of Skiing magazine in the mid-aughts, Outdoor Industry Association (OIA) estimated that in the U.S. there were 4.2 million telemark skiers. Sound accurate? There were only 7 million total skiers then. The slow hippies in their Peruvian hats would have outnumbered snowboarders two to one. Of course, this was total bunk. Even in tele hotbeds like Telluride, Colorado, alpine skiers dominated. I knew this because I looked around lift corrals.

My editors at Skiing tried to investigate the telemark glitch. But with OIA standing by its data (they have new researchers now, by the way), we were left to surmise the survey respondents confused telemark skiing with telemarketing, which had reached critical misery at the time. As in: “oh hell yeah I’ve been telemarketed. I can’t stand those people.” Just as peculiar, though, in 2007, OIA’s Outdoor Foundation (OF) counted 1.7 million telemark skiers, but by 2016 that number was back up to 2.8 million—this during a stretch when anyone in the ski business would attest that telemark skiing had fallen off a cliff.

This stuff matters to the outdoor industry. Do you really want to be producing telemark boots, or trail running shoes, or expedition backpacks with a cloudy estimate on participation numbers? It also matters for advocacy. “If you want new trails,” said the International Mountain Bicycling Association’s executive director Dave Wiens, “there are many boxes to check along the way. One of those is building community will. That’s true nationally and locally. Mountain biking is a hard sport to really calculate user days on. Right now frequency is going way up because of better bikes and trails, but the industry numbers don’t reflect that. Which means it can be hard to communicate to someone how important trails are to people. Better data would help.”

The trade groups and their research arms have done better lately, but I still see suspect numbers. Backcountry snowboarding is one example. Snowsports Industries America (SIA) counts 650,000 “snowboard tourers” in the U.S. For perspective, that’s only 50,000 fewer snowboard tourers than backcountry skiers. But even though splitboard sales have been strong for years, those sales don’t add up to 650,000 users. (And certainly not to the 1.5 million snowboard tourers that OF tabulates.)

Since 2016, SIA told me, the splitboard market has done roughly $17 million in retail sales. If each splitboard sells for $800, that’s 21,000 splitboards sold. Even if you doubled that number ($34 million top line in splitboard) by going back to 2010, that would mean that 42,000 people bought splitboards in the last decade or so. Let’s be generous and say that another 100,000 snowboarders who hike the backcountry in boots or snowshoes, or on approach skis (haven’t seen that in a while) identify as “snowboard tourers.” Rounding up, that gets us 150,000 snowboard tourers. Maybe. Brendan Madigan, owner of Alpenglow Sports in Tahoe City, California—the healthiest snowboarding market in the country—told me that he sells skis to snowboards at a ratio of 30 to one. As for participation, said Madigan, in Tahoe it’s more like seven to one. “There’s no way those participation numbers are accurate,” Madigan said. “Snowboard touring has grown, but the sales don’t come close to those estimates.”

It’s this type of calculus—mine, not SIA’s—that people like Adam Howard, the publisher of Backcountry magazine, do all the time to gauge market size. “Frankly, we’ve never trusted the numbers that OIA or SIA provide,” Howard said. “Our best numbers have always come from talking to friends in the industry who make and sell gear. If passionate backcountry skiers—the ones we focus on—burn through AT boots every three years, we can get a feel for how many of those skiers are out there.”

Trail running is another tricky one. With 11.8 million trail runners in 2020 according to OF, it would seem that running on dirt is leaving the stratosphere—doubling participation since 2012. OF researcher David Mudd told me they feel good about the data. After all, the survey goes out to 18,000 people.

But do the numbers bear out? I’d argue they don’t. And here’s why: simply owning a pair of trail running shoes might make a survey respondent identify as a trail runner. “There is no way that the trail running numbers are accurate,” said Wes Allen, co-owner of Cody, Wyoming’s specialty retail shop Sunlight Sports. “Not to denigrate trail running, because participation is certainly up. But most trail running shoes are worn in grocery stores. Bad analytics have warped the outdoor industry. And worse, it distracts the industry from what it should be doing. Instead of focusing on trail running, what if, as an industry, we were talking about trail access and diversity? We wouldn’t be so far behind the eight ball right now.”

Imbroglio Revisited

And then we have the Grassroots and NPD squabble. To an outsider, it might seem overblown, but to the Grassroots crowd it isn’t. Grassroots retailers are convinced there’s a fundamental disconnect between the shops NPD collects POS data from and the ones that Grassroots considers specialty retail. In fact, said Grassroots’s Hill, the two may barely overlap. “The way they describe specialty retail and the way we describe it are two different things,” Hill said.

NPD is a global corporation that runs market research on more than 20 industries—everything from toys to makeup. The group collects POS data from more than 600,000 retail locations and issues more than 12 million consumer surveys each year. Under the NPD umbrella you’ll find sports. And under sports you’ll eventually find specialty outdoor. (NPD claims 1,450 sports specialty doors, including specialty outdoor, cycling, snow, and run.) Contrariwise, Grassroots, as its name implies, is a bottom-up collective of independent specialty retailers. If, as Grassroots asserts, NPD is missing its type of store, that’s a problem.

It’s in proving or disproving that claim that things get nebulous. Because NPD won’t share its independent outdoor specialty retail list, all we really know is that when Grassroots interviewed 73 of its members a few months ago, only two were reporting POS data to NPD. While NPD asserts that its take on outdoor specialty retail only includes stores with five doors or less with a core focus on the goods shown at the Outdoor Retailer trade show, independent analysis done by people like Allen and Hill make it easy to question that claim.

Case in point: the products NPD says are top movers are sometimes duds within Grassroots. By way of example, Allen singled out a tent from a few years back. He wasn’t aware of much buy-in by outdoor specialty, but NPD data called it a top performer. Upon asking another retailer about it, he learned that a bunch had been dumped on closeout. He also learned that the tent maker hadn’t even produced as many tents as NPD predicted it would sell.

Now imagine you’re a tent maker. Should you build a tent to compete? If you’re a specialty retailer, should you buy such tents? On the flip side, Allen strongly suspects that major vendors (he doesn’t want to say which) have killed or defunded successful specialty product launches because of incomplete data like this. Part of this is specialty’s fault—they haven’t been as good as Amazon and Backcountry.com types at capturing sales live—but part of it, said Hill, is on NPD and how outdoor specialty retail is defined.

The next level of confusion, said Grassroots, arises when NPD produces outdoor specialty analysis based on such data. NPD’s analysis is often obfuscated with lines like this: “over the last year, the sports industry has exceled [sic] in using unrequited demand to drive consumer interest.” But NPD’s logic frequently doesn’t track, either. Information vacuums, like the confusion between brick and mortar and specialty e-commerce, are common. Because NPD often doesn’t do a good job of explaining its data and analysis, the fallout can be confusing. Would you know, for instance, that the category “accessories” includes backpacks, bags, and duffels? Or that NPD doesn’t “see” sell-in data, only sell-through?

Which gets us to yet another Grassroots beef: confirmation bias. Because NPD has been so bullish on e-commerce, are they too beholden to the trope that if e-commerce is strong then brick and mortar must therefore be weak?

Sorenson denied the allegation and described himself as optimistic on independent specialty retail. In fact, Sorenson disputed most of the allegations I presented. The discrepancies in product performance between Grassroots and NPD, he said, are due to the fact that NPD’s sampling is larger, more diverse, and includes retailers that aren’t part of Grassroots. Sorenson also discounted the weight of NPD analysis among outdoor industry CEOs. “Many of our retail and manufacturer partners dive far more deeply [into the data] than an article,” he said. “It’s far more robust. Those conversations aren’t based on a single article, but more on deep analysis.”

Nuance Beats “Data,” but Good Data Helps

Alpenglow’s Madigan recently told me that retail is sort of like legalized gambling. You study the market and your customers, and place your bet. The same is true with the industry at large. With so much uncertainty and so much at stake, it’s natural that we’re attracted to numbers. When we’re looking to defend a decision—to our bosses, investors, or families—numbers feel like our best armor.

But are they? A ski product manager who wanted to remain anonymous* told me that when the market research firm Leisure Trends was sold to NPD in 2013, the quality of some of the data he got via SIA immediately sank. (SIA partners with NPD for part of its research.) As with outdoor, he said, NPD’s winners and losers in the gear wars just weren’t matching up with what he was seeing. A bike industry source on the vendor side said much the same thing, adding that when he’s in the business of identifying trends, he isn’t turning to NPD—he’s working the phones. Yet another anonymous source, this one a market researcher, put it more bluntly: “NPD data have long had a blind spot in specialty. I think that’s agreed upon in the industry.”

NPD disputes that the quality of its specialty retail data declined when it acquired Leisure Trends. On an initial phone interview, NPD’s David Riley called this idea “sour grapes.” Sorenson was more careful. By increasing the scale of the sample and introducing more rigorous methodologies, he said, NPD’s specialty data grew stronger. But by expanding to that larger collection of shops, the numbers also changed. They would have to. “I could see that causing some disconnect,” Sorenson said. “The old [sample] might have been a really targeted subset. [But now] NPD allows retailers to compare [themselves] to the aggregate—the rest of the market, not just a small subset.”

That, of course, brings us back to the fundamental question: Is NPD talking to specialty retailers as we know them? Again, Grassroots says no way. And as a result, Grassroots is in the midst of building its own market research tool to better serve its member shops and vendors. The platform, called Switchback, is the brainchild of Hill and Greg Squires, the founder and CEO of Pivot Point Solutions. The seed of the idea, though, came from work that Squires did for a similar category—independent booksellers.

Like specialty outdoor, ski, and even bike, indie booksellers had long lived under the cloud of a narrative that spelled their doom. But the prognostications didn’t match reality. Between 2009 and 2018, new independent bookstores grew by 49 percent. This, while chain retailers lost storefronts and Amazon consolidated its power. Could it be simultaneously true that independent bookstores could thrive while the world’s largest bookseller did, too?

The answer is yes. Business is nuanced, and tired tropes are symptomatic of lazy thinking. A Harvard Business School researcher made a case study of bookstores in 2020. The takeaway? Indie bookstore success could be attributed to “community, curation, and convening.” Meaning they served specific customers, found products that worked for them, and opened up their stores as gathering places. To Grassroots, that sounds like modern specialty outdoor retail.

To those three Cs I’ll add a fourth: capture. To push back on doomsday narratives, one needs solid data. With Switchback, if a product is flying off shelves somewhere, the rest of the network will see the trend coming. If vendors want to know how a flagship jacket is performing with early adopters, they’ll know in days. There will be no projections made based on a sampling. Thus far, Hill and Squires have signed on 82 Grassroots storefronts with 65 more in the works and have plans to include a broader coalition in a project called Indie Outdoors. They’ve invested more than $1 million in Switchback. “Extrapolation is often misleading,” Squires said. “This platform does not attempt to extrapolate. The data are the data. And that’s meaningful to the market, to the brands, and to the retailers.”

Live the Lifestyle and Believe Your Eyes

Keeping with the theme, I’m not going to end this piece with projections and extrapolations. The outdoor industry’s data problem is just the reality we live with as retailers and manufacturers, and even guides, magazine editors, and trail advocates. It’s tough to know what’s actually happening in our world.

That telemark anecdote? It dates to a time before the current research team at Outdoor Foundation. OF researchers will continue to hone their craft by cleaning up survey language, excising joke respondents from lists, and diversifying sampling. They have to. OF researcher Mudd once saw stick-and-ball-sports category data that indicated that one in seven humans on earth play volleyball. “Data science is significantly better than it was a decade ago,” he said. “I feel confident in our current data. We’re not leading the witness. Or using confusing terminology. But with any research methodology, as much as you try to perfect it, there will be imperfections.”

That type of humility and the Switchback experiment offer hope. Some healthy data skepticism helps. From what I can tell, nobody is trying to get the numbers wrong. When in doubt, make some calls, ask questions, get outside, and believe your eyes.

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Should Outdoor Sales Reps Unionize?

objmigrationbot — Wed, 17 Mar 2021 03:01:48 +0000

Keith Reis’s typical week has changed a lot since last March. As a sales rep, he’s used to being on the road, hosting clinics, meeting with clients, and visiting stores. These days, though, you’ll mostly find him on video calls, negotiating inventory, untangling supply chain issues, and mediating discussions between clients. “It’s a lot of one-off communications,” said Denver-based Reis. “Back in March, it was all hands on deck, and it still is.”

While some reps work in-house for brands, the majority, like Reis, are independent contractors, operating solo or for a sales agency. When the pandemic struck, independent reps were left on their own to navigate underemployment and job uncertainties. The industry shakeups of 2020 also magnified preexisting issues, like lack of workers’ compensation or salary security. Adding to the stress: waves of returned inventory from some retailers, and demand from others that brands couldn’t fulfill.

“When brands stopped shipping products, reps stopped getting paid,” said Cami Garrison, director of the Western Winter Sports Rep Association (WWSRA). “Reps spent March, April, and May canceling orders, reordering, and emotion- ally navigating what was going on for them personally, as well as for their retailers and brands.”

Rich Hill, director of Grassroots Outdoor Alliance, worked as a sales rep before he spent 25 years managing them. Grassroots serves specialty vendors and retailers, but sales reps have no such representation. Hill believes a national organization would help reps stay relevant and support collective initiatives, such as health care, commission management, the overhauling of data systems, and contract negotiations. “Reps are powerfully effective, but as a group, they’re stuck in the ’70s,” said Hill. “They need to elevate their game, become easier to work with, and organize to have a seat at the table.”

According to Dana Caraway, founder of the sales agency Caraway & Co., regional associations already provide many of these perks and cooperate regularly (six, including the WWSRA, form the United States Reps Association). Still, she’s for larger-scale collaboration, especially if it gives women and the younger generation a say in an industry dominated by older male reps. “It would be cool to have a co-op where we could trade resources and ask questions,” said Caraway. “We’re an important part of the ecosystem and we need to have a bigger voice.”

As the uncertainty of COVID-19 persists, reps are as crucial to successful retailer and brand operations as ever. But sometimes, they need a champion. “The more I sell, the more I’m supposed to do for my retailer,” said one rep, who requested anonymity to preserve working relationships. “But the more I sell, the more my brands want to cut my commission.” Without a unified voice, many ongoing issues or similar grievances never get aired publicly.

Working conditions for sales reps vary by brand and contract, with little to no oversight, so a national organization could also help provide transparency and minimum rates. “Contracts are so one-sided—there is zero protection for the rep,” said the anonymous source, noting that reps are also discouraged from disclosing their contracts. “No one wants to stick their head out unless everyone does.” And when brands break contracts, reps must decide if they want to fight for pay and risk losing a client.

Why then, hasn’t a union gained steam? Reps’ schedules remain diverse and overloaded, leaving little time for organizing. Sales is also naturally competitive, contributing to a lone-wolf mentality amongst reps.

“I think the regional organizations would be the place to start,” said Reis, citing their membership and unique insight. “But do they have the bandwidth or finances?” Garrison, from the WWSRA, confirmed that although the organizational capacity is there, time and resources are the limiting factors. Still, she said, “I think we would all be up for it if the industry wanted to mobilize.”

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Straight Talk with Rich Hill of Grassroots Outdoor Alliance

objmigrationbot — Tue, 11 Aug 2020 18:00:00 +0000

In this edition of Straight Talk, editor-in-chief Kristin Hostetter sits down for a free-wheeling conversation with Rich Hill, president of Grassroots Outdoor Alliance.

Hill, known as one of the straightest shooters in the outdoor industry, gives us insights on which outdoor specialty shops are thriving and which ones are hurting during this coronavirus crisis. You’ll also hear about some new tools Grassroots is developing that will help independent retailers and vendors grow, and how Grassroots is addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion. And Hill explains why rampant, unchecked pro deal programs are ticking off retailers, especially in mountain towns.

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Retailers Are Reopening, with Promising Results

objmigrationbot — Sat, 16 May 2020 03:37:52 +0000

After months of closures that spelled disaster for some and extreme hardship for many others, retailers both small and large have started reopening across the nation as states lift the stay-at-home mandates that have kept them closed. The results so far, according to multiple sources, are promising.

Headlines this week have concentrated on two of the industry’s largest players, REI and Columbia, which reopened stores on a limited basis. REI began offering curbside pickup at more than half of it stores across the country in time for its anniversary sale, May 15-25, and launched zero-contact bike shop services in select locations. It also opened three Montana stores to customers in Bozeman, Kalispell, and Missoula, with more likely to follow if operations in those locations go well.

Bree Warner, store manager at REI Bozeman, told ��ԹϺ�� Business Journal on Friday that the store has seen steady traffic since reopening, though it’s limiting capacity to 20 customers inside the building at one time.

“The reopening has been very well received by employees and staff,” Warner said. “The majority of customers coming in are wearing masks, even though they’re not required to, just strongly encouraged. Customers don’t seem nervous because we’ve lagged behind the other retailers in town opening up. A lot of the independent outdoor stores have been open for weeks. Customers are getting used to shopping this way now.”

Warner says bikes, footwear, and camping products have been especially popular with customers coming in. Because of the 20-customer limit, the store has occasionally seen lines outside the building, though Warner says they’ve moved quickly.

“Our customers have generally been patient, understanding, and appreciative. They know that safety is our number-one priority.”

Columbia went even further than REI, opening 30 stores in 10 states today, which returned 250 furloughed employees to work. This comes on the heels of a pilot run in Nebraska, where the company reopened a single store last week with positive results. Both companies have implemented stringent new health and safety rules for all open stores, with REI’s outlined in a letter from CEO Eric Artz to customers and employees. Some of the measures include “operating on a reduced schedule and limiting the number of people allowed in stores; requiring employees to wear face coverings and asking customers to do the same; socially distanced queuing at store entrances, cash registers, and shop counters; installing plexiglass shields at all registers; and maintaining enhanced cleaning procedures with thorough, frequent cleanings of high-touch surface areas.”

Columbia, for its part, will require face coverings for employees, adjust store layouts for social distancing, and wait 24 hours before restocking any clothes brought into fitting rooms. Staff will also routinely clean high-touch areas and cashiers will wear gloves.

Between these bigger announcements, smaller retailers across the country have been resuming operations more quietly, also putting in place new rules for keeping customers and staff safe. According to an OBJ poll that ran this week, however, those precautionary efforts are much more varied than the safety rules seen at large companies, with little consensus on the best course of action. Out of 296 retailers who responded to the OBJ poll, only 16 percent said they will limit the number of shoppers inside their stores at one time, while 15 percent will offer curbside pickup, 14 percent will provide hand sanitizing stations, and 12 percent will offer masks or other PPE for customers and employees. A mere 2 percent—six total respondents out of nearly 300—said they will wash all try-on garments.

“Without having a coherent national process about how we deal with this [reopening], everything is different state by state, county by county, town by town,” said Rich Hill, president of Grassroots Outdoor Alliance. “The lack of a national policy for how we’re supposed to be doing this is causing real problems. We definitely have retailer members who are dealing with negative reactions from consumers about safety efforts. Some people don’t want to wear masks and they’re getting into confrontations.”

An earlier OBJ poll, run two weeks ago, asks retailers more simply, “Will you require customers to wear masks when you reopen?” The results: 57 percent voted yes, 27 percent voted no, and 16 percent say they would encourage masks but not require them.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that all—or even most—stores are having problems with reopening. Despite some disagreement over safety practices, the comments from store owners and managers have been largely positive.

“Our reopening day was fantastic,” said Shelley Dunbar, owner of Neptune Mountaineering in Boulder, Colorado, which resumed in-store operations yesterday. “Sales were robust—better than our average sales for a Thursday. We had a limit of ten customers in the store at any one time and it was well received.”

Customers and staff are required to wear face masks at Neptune Mountaineering in Boulder, Colorado. Here, a customer makes a purchase on reopening day, which happened this week. (Photo: Courtesy Neptune Mountaineering)

Dunbar passed along a note from longtime Neptune customer Bob Barron, who came out for reopening day, that read, “To celebrate the [reopening], I went in about 11:30 A.M. and bought a few small things and a gift card to show my support for the store and staff. It was a great experience with all the appropriate safety precautions in place and a very helpful and friendly staff.”

Nearby, the reopening of Fjällräven’s Boulder location went just as smoothly.

“People were gracious in their movements and remained aware of other guests in the store,” said Sarah Tava, director of brand stores for Fjällräven North America. “People provided space, but they didn’t shop scared.”

Fjällräven’s Boulder shop saw about 200 guests come through the door on the first day, entirely without incident, Tava says. This was due partly to the work of the store’s new Health and Safety Liaison, who made sure customers followed the company’s new rules for shopping responsibly. Fjällräven has installed a similar health officer at each of its brand stores.

“The reopening wasn’t a bad start, but we’re still being mindful about store hours,” Tava said. “We’re providing personal shopping appointments for the people who aren’t ready to go fully back. People are still being cautious about what they’re going out into public for.”

In the absence of coherent national guidance, Hill says that the most important factor for retailers in the weeks and months to come will be access to reliable information about best practices.

“Grassroots is trying to parse all the information that’s coming in, identify what really works for people, and spread that information,” he said. “How to sterilize products, how to keep keep your stores clean—there’s plenty of information out there on these topics. As we move forward, we want everyone to be up to speed.”

As to whether the reopenings will continue to go well, he added, “We’re a resilient group. I’m cautiously optimistic.”

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Virtual Events Will Become the New Normal—for Now

objmigrationbot — Wed, 18 Mar 2020 00:58:43 +0000

As COVID-19 infections continue to mushroom, causing unprecedented border and business closings as well as event cancelations globally, virtual events are getting a more serious look than ever before.

Currently, the coronavirus is reshaping the way we do business—if we are able to do business at all: Mandatory telecommuting is forcing virtual meetings to stay connected; canceled events are, in some cases, morphing into virtual gatherings as a way to keep a team connected; and classes and educational programs are moving online.

ATTA Hosts Successful Virtual Conference

On the heels of learning ITB, the world’s largest gathering of travel trade professionals in Berlin, was canceled just days before it was to open, the ��ԹϺ�� Travel Trade Association moved quickly to change its planned ��ԹϺ��Connect gathering there to a virtual one.

“We are saddened by the news that ITB Berlin has been canceled due to concerns around the coronavirus; however, nothing can stop the adventure community from gathering so please join us for our first-ever digital ��ԹϺ��Connect,” ATTA stated in an email to registered attendees.

Casey Hansiko, president of ATTA, says that the March 5 video conference had 335 participants (certainly a smaller number than the 615 registered to originally attend) but that it was great because “we were able to use the polling function so we could ask questions of all the attendees. That gave us and everyone else an immediate pulse on the opinions of the industry about the topics the panelists discussed.”

Hansiko noted that because this was a virtual event, attendees could participate in the conversation in ways that might not be so easy when having a physical event.

“It was great to use the Q&A chat function so we could see the questions that the audience had in mind,” said Hansiko. “I liked how the attendees used the chat feature to ask questions, provide their own feedback and expertise as well.”

ATTA is no stranger to online meetings or events, though, and is well down the path to offering online educational programming to its members. It has also offered a Digital Access Pass to its event programs for the last several years. Being so familiar with operating in a virtual environment is one reason ATTA could pivot so quickly from a physical meet up to a virtual one in ways other companies might find initially challenging.

“We are a virtual organization so using online tools for virtual meetings and gatherings is also already part of our everyday,” said Hansiko. “I believe this is what made it so easy for us to quickly create a virtual option.”

Grassroots Planning for Virtual Connect Show

That level of preparation and planning for a virtual event is also what is driving Rich Hill, executive director of the Grassroots Outdoor Alliance. As he and his team are getting ready to hold the June 12-15 Connect buying show in Knoxville, Tennessee, Hill is planning for both contingencies – a physical show with a virtual component, or a virtual-only event.

“We’ve set the first week of May to make any formal announcements regarding a potentially disrupted show, but we’re well-prepared,” said Hill. “We’re planning for both a physical event and a virtual show centered around online meetings and line presentations with the support of digital workbooks.”

Hill noted that Grassroots Outdoor Alliance is well-positioned to succeed in a virtual environment because “we’ve been on a warpath to kill the paper workbook and nearly 80 percent of our buyers are now using digital workbooks already.” Adding a strong virtual component to Grassroots’ Connect event, assuming it gets held as planned, just makes good business sense, too.

Vendors have wanted to go virtual for ages and a few brands have already created virtual line presentations for buyers who miss the physical one, Hill told us. Additionally, Grassroots has been training its store owners to use Zoom, a video conferencing and webinar tool, and plans to use that for what Hill termed “live-path line showings and scheduled business meetings from a brand showroom.”

Shows May Become a Hybrid of Virtual and Physical

Will we ever see a day when B2B or B2C shows enter a virtual-only world?

On the heels of having to cancel Canoecopia, Darren Bush, owner of Rutabaga and co-founder of the upcoming Big Gear Show (BGS) in Salt Lake City, told me, “You simply cannot do a virtual B2C trade show. You can offer consumers drive-through options to get gear, which is what we are doing now, and you can certainly put educational components online. But it has to be such a very high quality or people will simply not be interested in watching. And achieving that level of quality is expensive and requires more than a company intern to pull it off.”

As for the BGS, Bush says his team is certainly keeping an eye on things, since July is so far off. However, at this point going entirely virtual is not in the plan, he added. The outdoor show director for BGS, Kenji Haroutunian, has more than a little bit of experience with trade shows. In 2010, Haroutunian, then the show director for Outdoor Retailer, produced the Virtual Design Center, an interactive conference for designers, developers and suppliers, complete with interactive webinars and virtual tradeshow booths.

“What worked in the online platform was discovery, in the same way that webinars and whitepapers deliver online works now to facilitate education and information exchange,” said Haroutunian. “Attending online ed tracks on a particular topic and taking a deep dive into aspects of the industry that are either lost or emerging at trade shows is a solid value for virtual event attendees and sponsors.”

Haroutunian added that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to truly network in a virtual world. “Discovering other people to reconnect, collaborate or partner with is awkward in an online environment. Also finding competitors, potential allies, future employees, and media mavens who are relevant to your particular business angle is also difficult in a 2D or even 3D virtual environment,” he said.

Hill agreed. “I think that there will still be the need to gather. But I’m excited to learn to do this digitally because it may just reinvent and elevate what we do when we’re having face time. It’s costly, both environmentally and economically, to produce a physical show so when we are together, let’s really make it matter.”

Could this pandemic crisis inspire entrepreneurial companies to develop online show tools that combine the best of LinkedIn and Zoom in an interactive and online sphere that mimics physical networking? Perhaps. More likely is that as show and event managers learn to effectively conduct business virtually in order to survive, future trade shows will morph into the best of a trade gathering with robust virtual components.

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Aggressive Discounting: How Big Online Holiday Sales Can Crush Brick-And-Mortar Specialty Retail

objmigrationbot — Thu, 16 Jan 2020 08:50:10 +0000

Black Friday was a success for Salida Mountain Sports, but not because they lured customers in with steep discounts. Prices stayed steady, and if the Colorado store missed some sales because they weren’t discounting, store owner Nate Porter said so be it.

Small specialty outdoor shops around the country felt even more pinched during the holidays—a time when business should be booming—because the very brands they sell in their stores were offering unbeatable prices online and in their own namesake stores.

“There is no way we can compete with the deep discounts and direct-to-consumer sales promoted by our vendors and other online sellers,” Porter said. “So, we stay the course and continue to provide community support, great customer service, and great products that separate good brick-and-mortar shops from the rest of the marketplace.”

As advocates for specialty retailers, Grassroots Outdoor Alliance has been monitoring promotional emails from nearly 200 brands since 2017 to better understand the ebbs and flows of the industry. And as the data set grows, Grassroots says it has become a way to identify and illuminate the companies that are doing healthy things for the marketplace and industry.

Data from 2019 shows that some brands have drastically ramped up emails with words like “sale” and “Cyber Monday” in the subject lines, while others have decreased frequency and volume. But overall, Grassroots saw a 31 percent increase in 2019 over 2018 of promotional emails.

“Vendors aren’t sharing their promotional calendar when they sell specialty retailers the line, but retailers now have a growing amount of data about when to expect a spike in promotional activity,” Grassroots President Rich Hill said.

“We’ve learned that MAP (minimum advertised price) policies are so fluid that they are essentially worthless,” Hill added. “They are designed to establish a sense of trust during the sell-in process, and then re-interpreted all season. The best indicator that retailers have to predict pricing volatility is to study what a vendor did last season, not what their policy says they’ll do next season.”

It’s not that brands shouldn’t run holiday sales. It’s that Grassroots is advocating for a leveler playing field.

Grassroots Outdoor Alliance has been monitoring the promotional behavior of nearly 200 core outdoor brands. (Photo: Grassroots Outdoor Alliance)

Diving into the Data

From November 1 to December 31, Grassroots monitored 195 outdoor brands—members and non-members—and their email behaviors. Of that, only 50 vendors did not send any promotional emails in 2019. The other 145 collectively sent 1,355 promotional emails—a 31 percent increase over 2018 numbers.

Other key takeaways:

In 2018, 63 percent of promotional emails were sent in November and 37 percent in December
In 2019, 43 percent of promotional emails were sent in November and 57 percent in December
91 vendors (47 percent) increased their promotional cadence from 2018 to 2019 accounting for 429 additional promotional emails
25 of the 91 had not sent a promotional email in 2018 and began doing so in 201
40 vendors (20 percent) decreased their promotional cadence from 2018 to 201
64 no change (33 percent) year over year

Hill noted, “There’s a misconception about promotional behavior that it’s somehow isolated and happening in a vacuum, with no real impacts other than a few points on margin. The unfortunate reality is that aggressive promotional behavior creates distinct and negative impacts that are felt by both retailers as well as other vendor brands. Labelling it as ‘sales fracking’ might be considered a little dramatic, but it’s accurate.”

Grassroots uses this data to engage in conversations with retailers and vendor partners about how to work together to make both online and brick-and-mortar sales channels healthy. Overly promotional behavior is a red flag.

For Forsake (maker of outdoor/adventure footwear), retail partners are top of mind during the holidays. Marketing Director Jack Knoll said that between 2017 and 2019, the brand maintained a consistent and well-communicated promotional window so retailers could plan for and match promotions. Additionally, he said Forsake doesn’t adjust MAP policies in-season.

“Holiday discounts are important to our growth strategy,” Knoll said. “It remains the most effective way to get ourselves in front of new customers. By allowing our retailers to latch onto our promotions during pre-arranged windows, everyone can benefit from using this tool to attract new business.”

Smartwool has a different strategy. The premium sock brand aims to never be promotional, VP of sales Scott Bower said, even though consumers have come to expect deals all year round.

Instead of fighting prices, Smartwool partners with like-minded brands—YETI and MPOWERD are two examples—to offer gifts with purchases during the busiest shopping days of the year. And when Smartwool does go off-price, those discounts live in a designated spot on the website and are communicated with their retailers.

“If we’re up against other brands that are highly promotional, it does to an extent hurt. But is it worth a short-term effort (discounts) that could have long-term negative impacts to your brand?” said Bower. “Retailers want to partner with brands that have longevity. We’re in this for the long haul.”

Specialty Retailers Take a Hit When Promotions Spike

Mike Massey, owner of Massey’s Outfitters and founder of Locally.com, has said it before: It’s really hard to return to being a full-price seller after using discounts to build goodwill with customers.

“One of the things that has been frustrating for us is that we will get a notification [from a vendor] that we have something on sale that is violating a MAP policy. But then it’s inevitable that within a day, we’re getting emails from the brand violating their own map policy,” Massey said. “It’s a double standard…What are we supposed to make of that? If your MAP policy can be changed at any moment during the season, and enforcement is spotty, you basically don’t have a MAP policy at that point.”

Already facing thin margins, Porter said competing with vendors by playing the volume versus margin game is a slippery slope.

Massey says his stores were clobbered after he chose not to play the discount game and keep products full-price in November for the first time in six years. He says the amount lost in November carried into December.

Alpenglow Sports owner Brendan Madigan said Black Friday was also a total bust for his Tahoe City, California-based store. He agreed that it’s impossible to compete when brands are marketing so aggressively with 20 to 25 percent sales, and sometimes even higher.

“The brands that engage in this behavior have retrained the customer to only shop online these days due to their blatant discounting—it’s like Pavlov’s Dog,” Madigan said.

While some retailers struggled over the holidays, others found success in new places.

Hala GearSpace, a SUP brand and new brick-and-mortar store in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, skipped out on offering a maximum discount online, so they could focus customers’ attention on retailers offering the discount, communications coordinator Victoria Ohegyi said.

The Base Camp, which has two locations in Montana, also had a successful run during Black Friday and Small Business Saturday, after teaming up with Red Ants Pants, a retailer from a small town nearby. Together, Scott Brown and Sarah Calhoun, the two businesses owners, wrote op-ed pieces in several state newspapers about the importance of small business collaboration and support. Brown said the collaboration was a success—sales were up at The Base Camp by 23 percent over the previous season.

But for the entire industry to win during the holidays, it’s the brands that need to scale back from being too opportunistic, Massey said.

“They can’t have a policy that enables you to sell in with a bunch of flowery promises and then void the policies when your sales are suffering,” he said.

Otherwise, brands risk losing key retail partners—and therefore, sales.

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