by: Wes Allen, Guest Contributor
If you made a list of the products you’d expect to see in a local outdoor store based on the most admired or talked-about names in the industry echo chamber, you’d probably be way off.
There are plenty of brands I respect deeply that we don’t carry at our shop. It’s not because they aren’t good. It’s because we have to stock what actually sells to the people who walk through our door.
If you judged a brand’s salability based solely on its advertisements or the conversation at the last trade show, you might think outdoor gear is all about a company’s values, who makes it, or how it was designed - rather than how it’s priced or what colors it comes in.
You’d be wrong.
One of the most frustrating parts of making your living in outdoor retail is the glaring gap between the gear you love and the gear you actually sell. Occasionally, you’ll find overlap (at my store, NEMO products are both beloved by staff and profitable), but that’s often more the exception than the rule. At least if you want to stay in business.
It turns out even highly engaged outdoor customers often don’t care about the things that dominate trade show panels or brand mission statements. They aren’t drinking the Kool-Aid every day like we do. They don’t know Mocha Mousse is the next “it” color or what PFAS even is, generally. And If you work in the industry, you’re probably at a large disadvantage at picking what most people will buy versus someone who just shops one of our stores. I know because my team, my friends in outdoor retail, and I have all bought plenty of things that didn’t sell. We have learned some hard lessons.
So there are brands - and products - that we would love to carry, but we don’t. Last November, every member of our buying team spent too much time lingering in the Norrøna booth. If you haven’t seen that brand in person, you should. The product is stunning; beautifully built, thoughtfully designed, and produced as responsibly (evidently) as possible. We would love to be able to sell it, but after a lot of consideration, we didn’t place an order.
Why? Because the Sunlight Sports customers generally fall into one of two camps: savvy, local outdoor veterans who shop both our store and the local Sierra (most of our business), or the outdoorsy general public on their way to Yellowstone. Both are great groups - but not demographics likely to drop $650 on a shell, no matter how functionally beautiful it is.
Even the way I described Norrøna just now highlights my biases. I’ve been in outdoor retail a long time, and that experience has had one major effect I have to own up to: I, like most people who work in the industry, am not the average outdoor consumer.
Take footwear. I’m a sucker for a clean, durable trail shoe - simple lines, minimal seams, full-grain leather without a waterproof membrane, a supportive midsole, and a resolable outsole. I’d prefer it be made by a family-owned company that isn’t publicly traded and prioritizes sustainability.
That describes less than five percent of Sunlight Sports’ footwear selection. The other 95% is very different.
Most outdoorsy people shopping in a physical store want something else. They like different materials than I do, different cushioning, and they don’t care if a shoe can be resoled. Plus, they don’t have a wholesale discount, so price matters a lot.
They just want light blue hikers for under a hundred bucks.
They probably don’t care about the durometer of the midsole or whether the liner is made from mostly recycled nylon. Don’t get me wrong - if those aqua-colored shoes happen to have a little “sustainable” sticker on the box, they’ll get a small boost of good feelings. But that’s not why they buy them. They pick the light blue hikers that fit well and are priced right.
Retailers who survive understand this. When you walk into a financially stable outdoor store, you’ll probably see a lot of the same products you saw last time. Why? Because what our customers actually buy is what we stock - not necessarily what we wish we could sell.
And BTW - check out Norrøna. Some of our friends do have the customers to sell it to - and it’s awesome.
Wes Allen is the Principal at Sunlight Sports in Cody, WY. Follow him on LinkedIn for more insights into the outdoor specialty retail world.