Just about every company in the business is hurting. Just about every company but Never Summer, that is.
"Overall, the snowboard category is taking a serious hit this season and most brands' sales are down," Davis says. Tracking the industry's trends is her full-time job, and she's been fielding some tough phone calls from reporters with gloom-and-doom story assignments this week. But she brightens at the mention of Tim and Tracey Canaday.
Sarah Austin
Never summer team rider Lakota Sage at the Riot Rail.
Tony Gallagher
Never Summer boards fly the Colorado flag.
Details
Related Content
More About
"Never Summer's season-to-date sales through November were up 33 percent in units and 41 percent in dollars sold through November," Davis says. "We expect to see at least 20 percent growth for Never Summer boards through the 2009-2010 season. They are going to beat the rest of the category in percentage growth by a mile if their growth rate holds."
Never Summer is having its best year ever — the third in a string of best years ever, each outpacing the previous year by as much as 20 percent. It's now one of the ten best-selling snowboard manufacturers in the country, according to Davis, growing at a rate that's the mirror opposite of the industry's overall decline. Last year the Canadays moved 13,000 snowboards.
"In a tough economy, you really need to have something unique to sell," Tracey says. "Retailers are buying conservatively, and consumers aren't going to shell out for something new unless you're offering something that is going to transform the way they snowboard and make snowboarding a whole lot more fun. We hit it right on the head with our new rocker-camber designs, and the timing couldn't have been better."
Sparks are flying inside the Never Summer factory on Colorado Boulevard, just north of I-70, where the Canadays and their crew of forty workers are sharpening edges and putting finishing touches on show boards from the 2010-2011 line to take to SIA. The trade show is where buyers will get their first glimpse of next season's product, and for the third year in a row, Never Summer plans to have exactly what the buyers are looking for: a fresh take on the rocker-camber hybrids that have shaken up the industry.
The terms "rocker" and "camber" refer to the curve down the length of a snowboard's profile. In the simplest terms, a rocker is a smiling snowboard and a cambered board is a frowning one. And that about sums up how the market has responded to the new designs: Rocker is the rock star, and camber is old news.
The snowboard industry moves fast, and its core consumers stay up on the latest trends, so retailers who gambled wrong at previous SIA shows may have been left with a lot of unsold boards. Last year, even the new rockers weren't such a sure thing, with aggressive riders complaining that they felt "dead" despite all the hype. So this season's savvy shoppers aren't buying frowns or smiles, opting instead for hybrid designs like Never Summer's (patent pending) R.C. Technology, sort of a squiggly Charlie Brown grimace.
Never Summer's R.C. Technology boards have a rocker area between the bindings for the smooth, effortless ride snowboarders call "buttering," and camber areas out toward the tips to stabilize the boards at high speed, to help them spring in and out of turns and to give the boards extra pop for freestyle maneuvers and terrain park tricks. The design also helps beginning riders avoid catching an edge and doing a face plant beneath the chairlift. That means Never Summer can reach both ends of the market with the same boards, and they've been selling like hot cocoa at the base lodge on a cold winter morning.
Never Summer sells exclusively to snow sports specialty shops, with 18 international dealers and 362 accounts in the U.S. (81 in Colorado alone), and the retailers can't keep the boards in stock. Shops that sold out their Never Summer boards early in the season have been trying to order more to meet demand, but there aren't any more to be had: The Canadays sold out their entire production run for 2009-2010 and are now busy making next season's boards.
Tim and Tracey saw the rocker-camber hybrid trend coming: They got a heads-up from their team riders and local shop representatives, and also studied the feedback from their regular on-snow demos at local ski areas. They were able to respond quickly because they control every aspect of production at their Denver factory.
"It looks good on paper to get stuff done on the cheap in China, but it comes back to bite you in the ass when you realize you've given up control and you've given up the ability to change anything on the fly," Tim says. "I can take a new prototype from the drawing board to the snow in less than a week, get the new designs out to our team riders the next day for R&D, and then adjust accordingly. We're snowboarders, after all: When we see something coming up, we just lean into our edge and turn. In this case, it gave us a tremendous advantage. When we realized the new rocker-camber boards were going to blow everything else away, we halted production and switched our entire line over to the new design."
