December 07, 2011 (Washington, DC) – SnowSports Industries America (SIA) and The Leisure Trends Group have released the first set of RetailTRAK Data (Aug – Oct 2011) for the 2011/2011 snow sports season. The data reveals that snow sports retail sales are off to a strong start this season and equipment is leading the charge.

Overall, snow sports retail receipts are up 14% in dollars sold and 7% in units sold August – October (pre-season) 2011. Total snow sports pre-season sales increased from $565M through October 2010 to $644M through Oct 2011.

“We entered this season with inventories full of 2011/2012 gear after last season’s epic conditions that kept participants on the slopes and in the shops well into spring. Consumers began this season with uninterrupted enthusiasm for the coming La Niña repeat and it is definitely showing up in equipment sales.” commented Kelly Davis, SIA’s Director of Research.

Pre-season sales in the snow sports market traditionally serve as opportunities for consumers to get discounts on items left in inventories over the summer, but this year consumers were buying snow sports gear at full price at the Labor Day and Columbus Day sales. This phenomenon is most apparent in alpine equipment where buxom sales led the pre-season market. Apparel and accessories sales also gained over last season and strong prices seen at the end of the 2010/2011 season continued into the early 2011/2012 season.

Trends to watch in 2011/2012
– Reverse and mixed camber ski sales doubled compared to pre-season sales a year ago to 32,000 pairs.
The fatter, the better – flat skis with waist widths 95mm-110mm are up 60% in units sold to more than 20,000 units in the first months of 2011/2012.
– Rocker/Reverse camber snowboard sales continue to rise; now 70% of all boards sold are rocker.
– Bargain hunters will notice that snowboard apparel average prices are down 4% from August – October 2010.
– Helmets sales continue to grow, unit sales are up 12.5% so far this season.
– Sales of beacons, probes and shovels, necessities for the backcountry experience, are up 19% in units sold.

Consumers are looking for snow sports gear in every sales channel and all three retail channels measured experienced growth in the early season. Online sales are up 12% in units sold and 19% in dollars, while chain store sales are up 10% in units and 10% dollars sold. However, specialty retail continues to dominate the snow sports market with 70% of all retail equipment sales and almost 50% of all retail sales overall. Specialty shop sales reached $319M, a new record for the August to October time frame; up 12% in dollars sold, driven by big gains in equipment sales. Equipment sales in specialty shops increased 12% in units sold and 19% in dollars sold. Chain stores sell about 25% of all snow sports apparel and accessories but just 6% of all equipment. It’s very clear that core snow sports participants, particularly those that purchase equipment enjoy the distinctive expertise that snow sports specialty shops offer to savvy consumers.

The market data presented in this report comes from the Snow Sports RetailTRAK produced for SIA by the Leisure Trends Group. The Leisure Trends Group gathers RetailTRAK data directly from the Point of Sale systems of more than 1,200 snow sports retailers. For more information about snow sports retail sales and other SIA Research products including the Snow Sports Participation Study, Revisiting Growing the Snow Sports Industry, the Snow Sports Uniform Purchasing Study, the Snow Sports Rental Equipment Survey and much more, please contact Kelly Davis, SIA’s Director of Research at KDavis@snowsports.org.

Topline/category retail sales data for the snow sports market is available as a member benefit to all SIA members. In addition, you gain free access to topline data for the Running, Outdoor, and Paddle Sports when you register. The topline data is accessible on a 24/7/365 basis on the Leisure Trends Cross-Industry RetailTRAK data portal. Non-SIA members may subscribe to the topline portal for just $375 per year. To sign up for topline data click HERE.

October 27, 2011 (Putney, VT) – We’ve been sort of quiet on the website lately. It’s not because we don’t have anything to say. As usual, this time of year, it’s because we don’t have a lot of free time to say it. Ski season has definitely arrived.

A brief history of Caldwell Sport mark II (abridged)
We moved from Boulder to Vermont at the end of May. We had two trips to Europe for factory visits and ski picking (June and August). We bought a new house/shop with the closing coming at the very end of August (just in time to watch the flood waters from Hurricane Irene come up and lick our toes). We started right in with building out the new shop, and didn’t quite finish before it was time to get rolling on work.

With help from Pat and Will O’Brien and Noah Hoffman, we got the grinder moved from Uncle John’s sugarhouse down to the new shop on a flatbed trailer in the pouring rain. About three hours after we moved the grinder the sugarhouse driveway washed out in a deluge that could only be appropriately appreciated on rollerskis. Ask Pat and Noah about it sometime. According to the official Osgood meteorogical and hydrological records, it rained 4.5 inches that day. OK – that part wasn’t all that abridged (sorry).

Back in the early Summer I placed an order for new grinder supplies, including new stones. Lars has been working on a new stone compound for several years now, and the first “final” production of the new “blue” stones was finally in the works. I had tested the new stone compound previously, and have been eager to get ahold of the new materials for use in developing finer and colder structures. So, we agreed that we would wait for the new stones to be ready for shipment, which meant cutting it close for delivery – probably receiving the materials in late September. Well, it’s now late October, and due to a series of unfortunate occurrences and the vagaries of the international shipping industy, I still don’t have the new stones.

What that means is that we’ve been slow making final structure, because it’s more difficult to do good work on the old stone. We’ve finished about 130 pairs that we really needed to get done, and we’ve finished them to a very high standard. But we’ve held most of the work for the arrival of the new stones. So we’ve now got a huge backlog of flattened and polished skis eagerly awaiting final structure. Later this week Wayne Johansson is bringing his stone down from Gatineau Nordique Sport in the Ottawa area to help me crank out a whole bunch of skis. Thanks Wayne! To the left you can see some of the pending batch. I can’t get it all in one picture. That photo there is about 300 pairs of skis. OK – that part was also unabridged (sorry).

Work has been going well. It’s a small operation – a family business – so everybody has to do everything. That means that Amy handles all the accounting, billing, bill-paying, data entry, ordering, phone answering, binding mounting, wax scraping, etc. Since I’m really busy, she’s also running the grinder for flattening and polishing. It’s a pretty good system.

New Skis
One of the tricks to restarting an old business is figuring out who your customers are, and how much business you’re going to do. This isn’t a big deal with service, because the overhead is fixed and there isn’t much in the way of inventory (some service wax, grinder supplies, etc). However, new skis are a big deal! When we were working in Vermont previously, we would take orders, and then go select the skis to fill the orders from the manufacturer’s US distribution warehouse. Our last year in Vermont I spent 14 days in the Fall picking skis in the Fischer warehouse in new Hampshire. The model has changed significantly since then. Now, instead of picking skis using a flex tester, I use my hands and eyes. I’ve gotten better at spotting what I want, and the manufacturers have gotten better at pairing skis. So more time is spent identifying good skis, and less time is spent identifying matched pairs.

I also travel to Europe to visit factories and talk to the racing department guys who work with the skis all the time. This helps us understand what those guys are trying to do, which makes it easier to recognize when they do it well! I pick inventory from some companies when I visit the racing departments in Europe. The long and short of it is, we have to start the season with our inventory in-hand, and we don’t go pick skis to order in the Fall. All of this adds up to a considerable risk in ski inventory. We have a lot of astonishingly good skis, but it’s still a lot of skis that need to be paid for. So this time of year always produces anxiety. Do we have enough skis? Do we have too many skis? So far sales have been quite good, but we’ll keep pushing that end of things as snow season gets firmly established. About half of our profits come from service, and about half come from new skis. So you’ll hear more about this!

OK – back to work!