Retail adventures up

In what has been a short week with lots of travel up and down the eastern seaboard, I managed yesterday – between meetings – to walk stores in one of our capital cities. And I experienced improvements in a channel close to my own heart – and hip pocket – the ‘adventure’ retail channel.

I walked a shiny new CBD mall with the latest store format offerings, including a number of manufacturer branded retail outlets. While I was impressed with the bigger footprint Smiggle and JB HiFi, still my happiest shopper experience was within the new adventure/outdoor leisure Anaconda store.

Now, I freely admit to having a vested interest in the adventure retail market, with my weekend pursuits including paddles through four metre swells in Jervis Bay (last weekend) and my crossing of Bass Strait just a few months back in a sea kayak – with all the right comms and safety equipment I should add! It’s no surprise that I watch this space, primarily as a shopper.

I also wrote earlier this year that the “adventure/outdoor leisure” space was growing at a phenomenal rate worldwide, including in Australia. Could it be that we shoppers have realised that we have only so many summers left before our growing families leave the nest or before we’re too old to get out amongst it? Backed up by stats, I can say that a contributing factor in Australia is also the recent increase in youth memberships in the scouting movement and adult memberships of hiking, climbing and paddling clubs.

We’ve seen a significant new increase in shopper spend in the adventure retail channel and this has also been assisted by new, large format destination stores coming alive. These formats make shopping easier, cheaper and more enjoyable for us.

In the US the Outdoor World Bass Pro stores are truly a thing of wonder. The one I visited last month during my motorcycling tour across the US last month was awe-inspiring. Nestled into – no, towering above – Interstate Highway I10 in Louisiana, it is a retailing lighthouse to all who truly love – or merely want a casual relationship with – the great outdoors. It’s a destination shoppers will drive up to an hour each way to visit, and they’ll spend two to three hours inside. They can because every single thing they could ever need in order to walk, paddle, boat, shoot, fish, camp or climb is there, in one huge space. They can stay too because even when they get tired or hungry, there is a 200-seat restaurant and bar on site.

Good retailing is theatre. It’s entertaining. We know that when shoppers trial products they buy much more of them because they are comfortable with their decision, never more so than with more expensive durable items.

In a Bass Pro retail outlet in the US you can try the fishing rods in an indoor pond or an outdoor lake. You can try pistols and rifles in one of the two indoor shooting ranges (only single shot, so no Rambo stuff!).

My point is that really good retailing woos shoppers into spending more money on stuff we didn’t know about before we walked into that store. Importantly, most of this stuff has been manufactured for many years. We as shoppers just haven’t been able to see it in its best light, as it’s been hidden within a pokey, small store format before now. It’s natural then that the growth of theses big-box retail models grows the manufacturer’s revenue. As the revenues grow, the prices drop, new innovations can be funded and the sector feeds its own growth again.

This is exactly what happened in the big box home hardware space in the past decade and in Australia as recently as a few years. It’s now happening all over again in the adventure channel.

So back to Anaconda.

As I walked into this very large CBD basement store, the shopper experience started 10 meters in front of the door, with heaps of mountain bikes on display, then past the live climbing tower where you could try climbing gear, I was welcomed with a shouted “G’day mate, How can I help you?” This was from a young bloke who evidently loved his job and why wouldn’t he? If you love the outdoors and being active, there couldn’t be a better place to work. The whole layout – and remember this is in a large format store downsized slightly due to its CBD location – was open, bright and functional. Swags on sale for $139! That’s a huge drop in price over the past four years as volumes have increased and the swag is no longer just the bed of the drover.

These new store formats will continue to drive growth in this sector in Australia, and lower prices.

The key issue for everybody else in the space, from Paddy Palin to Kathmandu, is what to do to compete? What new formats do we need to adopt to improve our long-term and loyal shoppers’ experience in our stores? It’s a serious challenge and one I will be watching with interest.

In his role as CEO of CROSSMARK, Kevin Moore looks at the world of retailing from grocery to pharmacy, bottle shops to car dealers, corner store to department stores. In this insightful blog, Kevin covers retail news, ideas, companies and emerging opportunities in Australia, NZ, the US and Europe. His international career in sales and marketing has seen him responsible for business in over 40 countries, which has earned him grey hair and a wealth of expertise in international retailers and brands. CROSSMARK Asia Pacific is Australasia’s largest provider of retail marketing services, consulting to and servicing some of Australasia’s biggest retailers and manufacturers.