Armada tell Rossignol to Cease and Desist

Armada has sent cease and desist letters to a number of small and large ski companies claiming their models infringe upon Armada's patented geometry. One of those companies is Rossignol. Armada has poked a sharp stick into the 800 pound gorilla in the neighborhood and ...Well...Rossignol fired back their own counter-complaint against Armada claiming Armada's patent has no validity based on Rossignol's prior art. The sleeping players at this point are DPS and K2 which (in theory) may also have patent claims to certain designs.

The actual complaint by Rossignol against Armada can be found below (PDF):

Rossignol Complaint Against Armada (October 10, 2010 - Filed in UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF UTAH )

For those interested in the patents themselves, Links below (PDF):

Rossignol U.S. Patent (January 17, 2006)

Armada U.S. Patent (April 6, 2010)


Essentially, Armada sent letters to several companies demanding they:

* cease sales of certain models believed to be covered by their patent,
* account for all sales of such models to potentially assess damages due to Armada

Armada stated to the companies they are willing to discuss amicable settlements to this matter.

This drama is not going away anytime soon.

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.

Environmental Impact Rating

The Outdoor Industry Association (OIA) is creating a new program that will allow brands to use a consistent system to rate the environmental impact of their products and hundreds of companies are betting they can use this tool to make their businesses better by making their products better.

The Outdoor Industry Eco Index, which was announced to the outdoor industry at this summer’s OutDoor show in Friedrichshafen, Germany and the Outdoor Retailer show in Salt Lake City, Utah, is an environmental assessment  tool that examines and quantifies the environmental impacts of specific products to allow manufacturers to benchmark current levels and set standards for improvement. The index looks at products from cradle to grave, focusing on six key stages of their life cycles: Materials; Packaging; Product Manufacturing and Assembly; Transport and Distribution; Use and Service; and End of Life.

While the Index, which has been in the works since 2007, is still in the “stakeholder review period” and not scheduled to be officially released until early 2011, over 80 companies including Patagonia, The North Face, Timberland, REI, and Quiksilver have signed up to test a “Beta Phase 1” version and help fine tune the final system before its official release.

-SkiingBusiness.com

Social Media & Networking, Is There an R.O.I.?

It’s been an argument since businesses starting venturing into the area called social media/networking. How, if at all, does a business measure social media’s return on investment?

Some say it’s not important to measure because social media usage is invaluable-and mandatory-to build your brand, and is a cost of doing business in today’s modern marketplace. Others say calculating ROI is important in every aspect of a well-run business. Others say it’s less about return on investment and more about return on customer engagement.

Retailers across the country vary in social media use-whether it’s Facebook, Twitter or any other site-but most agree that it’s red hot.

Amaya Chalker, whose family owns Alpine Sports, a ski retailer in Santa Fe, N.M., says she doesn’t utilize the store’s Facebook account to its fullest.

“I don’t have enough time in the day to sit down and do it,” Chalker says.

With between five and 10 employees depending on the season, Alpine Sports’ staff is focused elsewhere-but Chalker says she plans to use the seldom-updated page more often when Alpine Sports launches a redesigned website in October.

“We’re just trying to keep up-to-date with the whole Internet (phenom),” she says.

But social media sites are still among the cheapest ways to market a business, and the “return on engagement” potential is huge.

Social media is a way to leverage small staffs and limited resources. Seth Haber, owner of Trek Light Gear, a company that sells lightweight hammocks primarily online from its headquarters in Boulder, Colo., has a small staff. He’s it. Harber says a good portion of his business comes from social media use.

“The more you get the name out there the more things come to you,” Haber says.

For Haber, social media use takes time and dedication. Followers and fans won’t come overnight. Interactions may be few-and-far between in the beginning. And it won’t necessarily entice customers to walk through the door or click on a link to buy products.

“It took a little time to grow,” says Mike Tracy, Seattle Ski and Snowboard’s store manager.

- SkiingBusiness.com

Even though Seattle Ski and Snowboard didn’t start using Facebook until a year ago because of the time involved, he says setting up the page and consistently posting to it is worth the effort.

“Putting anything on Facebook is a reminder about Seattle Ski,” he says.

Like Tracy, Sepp Kober, co-owner of Freestyle, a ski retailer in Charlottesville, Va., wants people to think of his shop when they think of Virginia ski retailers. And social media is a way to keep the shop visible.

“It is by far, in my opinion, one of the best ways to reach a certain segment of your consumer base,” Kober says.

If it gets someone in the door-even if the customer doesn’t initially buy anything-Kober views it as a success because hopefully the customer will return to make a purchase.

But many social media gurus say the customer engagement is crucial when developing an online reputation. People want to interact.

“The most important aspect of the whole medium itself is that it has to be a two-way conversation,” Haber says.

-SkiingBusiness.com

When is Enough, Enough?

The number of available models is going up, ski shops are struggling to make ends meet, and not just because of the economy. Hardgoods and softgoods prices, as well as the cost of lift tickets, continue to climb. This begs the question of whether of not the ski industry is in a downward spiral, following the same path as the windsurfing industry not too long ago.

Karen Marriott, president of the Florida-based US Windsurfing Association, says the windsurfing industry focused too much on high-end consumers, which priced recreational enthusiasts out of the sport.

And Marriott, who recently ran her family’s ski shop in Wheat Ridge, Colo., thinks it’s happening in the ski industry.

Much as windsurfing manufacturers did, ski makers often primarily market gear for hardcore skiers, which can push costs too high for recreational skiers who can be confused or discouraged by too many technical features and jargon. (Ski technology and marketing also play a role in increasing costs.) 

- SkiingBusiness.com

Some companies in the windsurfing industry, in an attempt to save itself from dying all together, adopted a two year production life cycle to reduce the number of products that companies were putting out compared to the amount that were actually being sold. The attempt to focus on the recreational wind surfer seems to be too little, too late, and the industry is still now trying to get back on its feet.

The skiing industry is doing much the same thing that got the windsurfing in its current situation.

Geoff Curtis, Marker-Völkl USA’s marketing vice president, says technologies typically don’t change drastically year-to-year, but colors and graphics do. Völkl, for instance, often keeps a line of skis, like its Unlimited series, available for a few years, while changing graphics and colors.

Updating aesthetics, Curtis says, helps the consumer know whether the ski is a current or past model-something skiers expect. And with ever-changing trends, a graphic and color can often determine a ski’s success in the market. Even for established models, new graphics tend to indicate that the model has been upgraded, which is better received by consumers than no change at all.

As for changing ski model names, Curtis says there’s an interesting dichotomy there. Some ski names, such as Völkl’s Mantra, enjoy a strong reputation, so it would be detrimental for a company to change it. Others don’t have that status, so there is less risk involved.

- SkiingBusiness.com

It seems that the skiing industry does something similar to what the windsurfing industry has with its two year production cycle, but the skiing companies simply change graphics to make the products appear to have been upgraded from year-to-year. Many skiers, myself included, have caught on to this trend and buy models from previous years when it comes time to upgrade our personal equipment.

Another suggestion to retain skiers and attract new ones made by Ken Jacques, co-owner of Ski Depot in Jay, Maine says, “We need to stop promoting ourselves to ourselves, we [skiers] already know it's fun."


What Jacques is suggesting here is that companies in the ski industry need to focus their marketing spending on kids and people who have just started skiing. Advertising to someone who has been skiing for 20+ years is pretty pointless. By that point most people have certain brands that they like, know what they are looking for in a ski/boot/binding, and will not be swayed to change their mind based on advertising. If the money spent on promoting skiing to the already hardcore skier was instead used to promote to children or people who are just starting the sport, companies could get much more out of their advertising than they currently are.