I just returned Sunday night from the first combined SIA/OR show and I’m still processing all that transpired. In my little corner of the world, the show couldn’t have been any better, but then, trade shows are almost always fertile ground for journalists. But it’s the “trade” part of any trade show that matters, not the noise we in the media generate about it.
I’m sure the final announced attendance will be so mind-bending it will put the “numb” in numbers. While no doubt a good deal of paper passed hands, my guess would be that the usual pattern of which brands have the clout and incentives to insist on order writing and those who don’t hasn’t changed a great deal. Of course I don’t know how much ski business was written compared to prior years so allow me move on to other impressions.
Scenes from the recently concluded SIA/OR show in Denver.
(Photos courtesy of SIA/OR.)
The sheer mass of humanity that descended on Denver last week induced several consequences that were as inevitable as they were undesirable. (This is the Cranky Curmudgeon Paragraph, if you couldn’t tell.) Room rates skyrocketed to help make the stay more memorable. Inside the Convention Center, food service that included seating was scarce, so any section of stairs near a sustenance source was littered with lunchers, oddly arrayed in clothing choices intended for dining in the wild. The lanes between the multitude of showrooms were as clogged with foot traffic as a sidewalk in Mumbai.
I’m sure there were advantages to some snowsports brands to having so many potential customers in such close proximity. But the enormity of the OR host contingent compared to the size of the SIA members’ footprint reminded me of a parallel one could draw with the Olympic Games versus the World Championships. At the Worlds, skiing is on center stage; it’s all skiing, all the time. At the Olympics, skiing is on briefly then cedes the stage to ice arenas and sequins. In televised coverage, for every five ski racers shown, it seems twenty skaters are trotted out. But I digress.
Whether the ski business community is better off convening alone or in concert with OR is less of an issue than the announced dates of next year’s winter OR events which move the dates of this show closer to the start of January instead of the end. I’m no business savant, but I know hard goods buyers are generally happier if they have more time to consider their buy rather than less.
But enough of tawdry commerce. “What about the stuff?” I hear you cry. “What’s the skinny on the new skis?”
Those of you familiar with my methods on Realskiers.com know that I’m not going to name a ski of the year before the year has even started. It’s not my role to influence buyer behavior, but for any buyers among you looking for tips, lean in a little closer and I’ll whisper my sage advice: everybody’s new models look really good. Buy some.
I’m comfortable making this tongue-in-cheek claim because, in comparison to past years, there are far fewer new models from major brands. While this may sound like a disheartening trend, it’s more likely an indicator of communal sanity; the recent pace of model turnover was unsustainable and unnecessary when viewed from the customers’ perspective.
One indication of the growing importance of the women’s market is that percentage-wise there are more new models targeting women than men (38% to 31% in Realskiers’ field). The off-the-charts success of Blizzard’s Black Pearl demonstrated that investments in this arena can yield stunning results, a message lost on no one.
Since such generalities are unlikely to sate your appetite for a chewable detail or two, I’ll share a few more specific tidbits. Atomic’s all-mountain Vantage series didn’t just get a facelift but a significant redesign that fits right in with the Lighter Is Better (And Better Yet if It Improves Performance) trend. Völkl made a superior Mantra in its fifth iteration, an unalloyed expert’s delight with a sister ski, the Secret, that won’t be one for long.
Among other men’s models in the hotly competitive All-Mountain West genre where the Mantra M5 will compete, Head’s Kore 99 is an expected line extension from the hottest model series of the current season. Kästle acolytes will tingle with anticipation to try the MX99. Rossignol has made their franchise Experience series, for both men and women, better in every iteration. Salomon souped up its core QST models by boosting the flax quotient in their C/FX fiber braids.
This is by no means a comprehensive list of all that’s new, even from the brands so briefly referenced. Before blathering on about what’s new for 2019, it behooves me to allow the 58 shops in the Realskiers/Masterfit coterie of specialty shops to sally forth and test every model they can step into.
I’ll leave you with a final nugget to savor. The Lighter Is Better (As Long As It Doesn’t Hurt Performance) global market trend is infiltrating the Alpine boot market. Alpine boot makers have been trying to shed excess mass for decades, with notable success in the Alpine Touring segment and less notable success elsewhere. It will be interesting to see if the latest examples of LIB footwear can succeed where prior generations – using different materials – failed.