BoardsportSource Issue #120 May 2024

The Weather is the key!

I know us English are famous for talking about the weather, but climate change is now beginning to really impact on our sports, and businesses will need to learn new tricks of the trade, to deal with the irregularity weather is bringing with increased regularity. Both winter and summer products have been impacted, and not just to the confines of Europe, with both North America and Japan experiencing bad winter seasons as well. So, the geographic tripod business model that has underpinned the winter business for years was no longer able to properly function as no region was able to offset the other regions. This is the first time this has happened.

So, what of spring? In Europe as I write this editorial, the North is drowning under record breaking amounts of spring rain and the South is getting close to a water shortage crisis. For shops and brands alike, everyone is praying for spring to properly start and consumers to get out outdoors and start buying summer goods. With inflation dropping the industry is hopeful this spring will be better than last, as consumers feel less squeezed and with stocks slowly falling to manageable levels, reducing the need for serial discounting. But the weather needs to start working for us quickly so that shops can sell product thereby improving their cashflow and most importantly kickstart the prebook for s/s 2025.

In this issue we will cover ten product categories in our s/s 2025 retail buyers’ guides, helping make the case for retailers to place their prebook orders with the last impacts of Covid hopefully behind us and ordering patterns returning to some kind of new normal. Our bigwig Nicholas Lartizien has been in the industry since 1985 so has seen it all, and as he says at the end of his interview “Respect and protect Nature, Mother Earth offers us such an incredible playground during our small living time, so make sure we pass it on to our kids in the best condition,” and he finishes with a quote from French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery “We do not inherit the Earth from our parents, we borrow it from our children.”

Wow I am back full circle talking about mother nature’s weather again, time to sharpen the pencil and figure out that new business model!

Always sideways weather permitting.

Clive Ripley

Publisher