Rossignol With a New President

Rossignol’s Tim Petrick is replacing François Goulet as the company’s North American president effective at the end of the year.

Petrick, who has served as the company’s senior vice president of global sales and marketing, will be tasked with continuing to grow the brands under Rossignol’s name: Rossignol, Dynastar, Lange, Look, Risport and Kerma. Rossignol will be hiring for Petrick’s former position as senior vice president of global sales and marketing.

In addition to Petrick’s promotion, a handful of other moves are being made at Rossignol’s headquarters in France.

E-Commerce Overtaking Retail Shops

There is often a competitive mentality between online retailers and those who operate out of a brink-and-mortar shop. The brick-and-mortar shops offer face-to-face customer service for those who have questions about products, while the online stores offer a large selection, often at a lower price. Whether customer's prefer ordering gear online of buying it in a local shop, there is no question that the Internet still has a large role to play in shaping the ski industry.


A recent article written on SkiingBusiness.com tackled this topic, interviewing some people who own businesses have seen success in the e-commerce side of the ski retail industry. The main consensus was 'It takes time and effort to see a significant return, so don't rush an e-commerce site'.


SEO:

Amy Dannwolf, vice president of Powder7, an online ski retailer based in Golden, Colo., helped develop the Powder7 website from the ground up. She says effective search engine optimization, or SEO, should be an e-tailer’s first priority when building a website. Good SEO practices are what propel a website to the top of a results page when an online shopper enters a query in a search engine such as Google or Yahoo. But achieving optimal SEO takes time.

“It requires real know-how,” Dannwolf says. “There are a lot of key components.”

These components that she mentioned range from writing clean code, to using the right key words in page headers.

There’s even a fine line between having too much content on an e-commerce site and not having enough, says Steve Kopitz, owner of Michigan-based Summit Sports Inc., which owns 16 e-commerce sites, including Skis.com, and five brick-and-mortar stores. Skis.com, for instance, appeared closer to the top of certain ski-specific searches once Kopitz’s team removed the inline skate products from the site in order to make it less cluttered.

While many retailers won’t venture into writing their own code-and they shouldn’t unless they truly know how-most legit developers will be able to walk a business through the optimization steps. If a developer claims he can get a business ranked near the top of a search in just a few days or months, he’s probably lying, Dannwolf says.

For those who feel developing an e-commerce site internally is just not possible; hiring a group of people to develop a site in a struggling economy for an industry that suffers heavily during economic lows like this is something that most retails just simply cannot do. For situations like this companies such as Google and Yahoo offer platform development services that can help retailers get starter for a much lower price.


The Yahoo program, Yahoo Merchant Solutions, is easy to setup and maintain. Yahoo offers numerous development templates, with a price range of $40 to $300 a month as well as a small transaction fee (.75% - 1.5%) on sales. The retailer also has access to Yahoo technical support, setup assistance, and other services. 


Yahoo's, Google's or any other company's platform will mold the e-commerce environment for the seller and buyer. The programs determine how products are sorted/displayed, how orders are processed, how the shopping cart systems works, among other things. 

In With The Old, Out With The New?

As I mentioned in an earlier post, "When is Enough, Enough?", most of the time there is not much change from year-to-year with ski models other than graphics on the top sheet and bottom sheet. This is not to say that someone should never buy a new model ski because the only change is in the looks, because there are many companies that update and modify the technology in their models from each year, but I would do my homework before spending full price on a ski that might only look different from last years model, or even the model from two years back.

"In the customer’s mind there are typically two schools of thought," says Lars Perner, a clinical marketing assistant professor at the University of Southern California at Marshall. "They can either go with the lower-priced ski, even though they know it wasn’t popular enough to sell out the year before, or they can go with the new one, which is 'less risky' because it might have game-changing next-generation technology that has already rendered last year’s ski obsolete."

--SkiingBusiness.com

That new ski in fact may not be any less risky, but most customers think if they buy a new product, it will be better than an old product-even if there is little change.

Because of these two potential ways of thinking it is important for ski retailer's to know what the customer values the most

“The sales person often will have considerable impact because skis are relatively high-ticket items,” Perner says.

Some customers, like the majority of people who buy skis from Sturtevant’s, a ski shop in Bellevue, Wash., don’t fret too much about the price tag.

“People want the newest and latest-and-greatest,” says Tracy Gibbons, the ski shop’s co-owner.

Sturtevant’s, like the majority of ski shops throughout the country, has inventory at the end of each season. But the retailer also has four stores to leverage.

“For us, that’s a huge part,” Gibbons says.

One store sells mostly current-model skis; another store sells mostly previous-model skis; the third store is about 30-percent new skis and 70-percent old; and the last store is 70-percent old and 30-percent new.

Customers know which store to visit to buy what they want, and Sturtevant’s POS system is tied together so they can easily transfer skis among stores if needed.

And the store breakdown works in Sturtevant’s favor, she says.

Other store owners do not have multiple stores to adopt a system similar to Sturtevant's so they must use other methods.

 Brad Nelson, president of Hi Tempo Inc., a ski retailer in White Bear Lake, Minn., has a different method to sell current and prior-year skis alongside each other.

“We almost sell against this year’s product,” Nelson says. “You definitely need to be in the market to buy more stuff in December because that’s when manufacturers start selling closeout,” he says.

Nelson's theory is that if he can buy the skis from the company at a discounted price, he can sell them at a discounted price. This is a strategy that would work well if the customers that his store sells too are more concerned with price than they are having a new graphic or slightly updated technology. In this economy it is hard to convince a customer to buy a more expensive product that simply has an updated graphic.