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.