Back on land from an ocean of gear
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010So I spent last Wednesday through Sunday at the Outdoor Retailer Winter Market 2010 trade show. There’s really only one reason for Winter Market: for buyers at retail outlets to decide what to put on their shelves next fall. If they make the right calls, they have a happy Christmas (wrong calls could put them out of business). The show’s planners also allow “working media” to cover the show in the hope of generating buzz/hype/interest for new products. Working media are hopelessly addicted to novelty, so it works for everybody (except the lowly gear buyer, who has to wait six months for this cool stuff to start showing up in stores).
I was there at the behest of Trailspace.com, which paid for my flights, meals and motel room, so everything I experienced there is their property and I’m obliged to devote my OR-related energies to content for our site, whose readers might actually click on a few links and buy some stuff that pays our salaries.
However, I’m totally free to flog the content we produced last week. Alicia (my boss) and I devoted five consecutive 18-hour days to Winter Market. Bill Straka, one of our fans, devoted almost that much time totally on his own; he picked up some free gear that he will happily run through the wringer (Bill’s hiked on every continent, as near as I can tell, and he’s also an accomplished climber in addition to being a retired astronomer.)
This page on our site has links to all we’ve posted to date (and there’s more to come as we post some wrap-ups). These are my posts:
- Klymit NobleTek: Company producing insulating layers via thin web of “noble gas” bubbles. Note the second guy in the video bears an uncanny resemblance to a young Keanu Reeves.
- Snowshoe trends: Slow economy and attention from outdoor athletes is driving snowshoe sales.
- Coghlan’s and Industrial Revolution: Cool gadgets that don’t cost much.
- Ready for their close-ups: Just a bunch of pictures from the first day of the show.
- Snowshoes in action: They turned me loose with their brand new shoes. Fools.
- Snowshoe preview: What’s in the pipeline for winter 2010/11.
- Nite Ize KnotBones: Video shoes an adjustable bungee cord system that caught my eye.
- Yet more pictures: Best I could do indoors with a cheap digi-cam.
We’ll have several more posts as we try to make sense of what happened last week. Then we get to start gearing up for Summer Market ‘10, which is even more fun because it’s about doing stuff during the fun seasons when bone-chilling cold is out of the picture.





Tarp, bivy and tent footprint