Shopping Season more Meh than Merry for Outdoor Retailers
Demand for bikes and other outdoor gear isn't bad, some store owners say. But sales of these items, as well as overall visitation, is down from the historic, pandemic-driven peak of 2021.
BREVARD — At first glance, Chris Haddock seemed like a good candidate to boost Transylvania County’s outdoor recreation economy.
A resident of Greenville, in eastern North Carolina, he visits Brevard “every year about this time,” he said.
Though he’s more of a hunter when he’s home in the flatlands, he and his wife come to the mountains to hike, take in waterfalls and shop.
“We like to go into all the stores and see what we can find,” said Haddock, 55, who on Monday afternoon stood a few feet from the colorful displays of sleeping bags and backpacks on the second floor of DD Bullwinkel's Outdoors on East Main Street.
So, is there any gear he’s looking to buy, any Christmas gifts for nature-loving friends and family members?
“No,” he said. “We’re just looking around. If we can find a deal we might buy something.”
Such a lukewarm resolve to spend is a common theme in the industry this year.
“Sales this holiday season are likely to be flat compared to last year,” according to the national Outdoor Industry Association’s fall 2022 report.
It’s a prediction that’s playing out locally, and some bike and outdoor-gear shops are reporting falling demand for products. Visitation to the county — largely powered by outdoor enthusiasts and measured by bed-tax proceeds — started to level off at the end of last winter, Clark Lovelace, executive director of the Transylvania County Tourism Development Authority, wrote in an email.
And compared to the same period in 2021, he wrote, “occupancy revenue is down 5 percent from March through September of this year.”
Fortunately, said Nicole Bentley, executive director of the Heart of Brevard nonprofit, these impacts have not spread to businesses that don’t directly target outdoor enthusiasts.
Such stores have benefited from the support of local shoppers, and the organization has counted $13 million in public and private investment in the downtown district over the past two fiscal years, including the openings of 24 businesses and the upgrades to 27 buildings.
“By and large, folks here have had a very strong holiday season,” Bentley said. “Some folks had the best Black Friday and Small Business Saturday they’ve ever had.”
Importantly, Lovelace added, any downturn in outdoor-related visitation and shopping comes from a historically high starting point. The Covid-19 pandemic, which left escape to nature as one of few available travel options, prompted soaring visitation to the county in 2021 and, nationally, created a vast pool of potential customers.
“Outdoor recreation hit a record high in 2021, with 164 million participants, roughly 54% of the U.S. population,” the Industry Association report said.
“The pandemic saw such a high peak in visitation that this slight reduction still puts us at a very high level,” Lovelace wrote in an email, adding that it might even be a better level for some people in the industry — and definitely for the managers of nearby public lands.
“The number one issue I hear from tourism businesses isn’t ‘I need more customers,’ ” he wrote. “It’s ‘I can’t find staff and I’m having a hard time meeting demand.’ ”
Christmas Revenue is Key
That may be true of the more labor-intensive food and beverage business, said Bullwinkel’s owner, Dee Dee Perkins, who also owns Rocky’s Grill and Soda Shop on South Broad Street.
“The restaurant continues to be a challenge for us, with finding enough employees,” she said.
But retailers need to take in as much revenue during the Christmas shopping season as possible to tide them over — and allow them to stay fully staffed — through the upcoming “shoulder season,” she said.
“We have January, February and March right on our heels.”
It was hard to see evidence of slowdown on Monday. Nearly a dozen customers could be seen eyeing fleeces, sweaters and hiking shoes on the first floor as Perkins spoke.
But as visitation hit record levels in 2021, so did business at both Bullwinkel's and Rocky’s. And from that high level, she said, “this November and December are, so far, slower than last year.”
It might be slower still, she said, if not for Heart of Brevard’s Think Local campaign, which promoted area businesses and nonprofits on social media.
“Accolades go to Heart of Brevard,” she said.
The New Bike Store in Town
Michael Vaughan, service manager at Earth Mountain Bicycle, said changes in the market are harder to track at his store because they came as the business has been expanding and establishing itself in the community.
The family of one of the store’s owners, Caitlin Walters, has long operated a bike store in Myrtle Beach, SC. She, her husband Leroy, and two other partners — after looking for a location in the mountains — opened the store in a 400 square-foot space just west of Bullwinkel’s in May of 2021, he said.
Though they had moved to the store’s current 5000 square-foot location on 66 E. Main Street shortly before the start of last holiday season, he said, they were still working to fully utilize the space.
“At first nobody wanted to go to the back of the store,” he said. Among other added features, he said, “we now have a coffee and beer bar back there and it’s gravitated more people to the rear of the shop.”
Earth Mountain has also worked to establish a niche in a crowded bike market by catering to a wide range of cyclists.
“We’re trying to promote all bikes,” he said. “We’re not just mountain, not just road. We have hybrids and kids’ bikes. We even have casual cruisers.”
It also stocks e-bikes with an eye on a potentially expanding market if the long-delayed multi-use Ecusta Trail is eventually completed to link Brevard and Hendersonville.
“We’re hoping the Ecusta Trail makes it here sometime in the next century,” he said.
With steady expansion of the store, “numerically, we’re doing better than last year,” he said.
But the recent rainy weather has discouraged riders from visiting the area and “the Christmas season has been up and down for us,” he said. “You can definitely see a little bit of a lull or a flattening, which to my thought is (the market for bicycles) going back to the way it was before Covid.”
. . . and the Established Store with a New Owner
Sycamore Cycles, with locations in Pisgah Forest as well as Hendersonville, has also seen big changes this year, said manager Art Odell.
Wes Dickson, who founded the shop in downtown Brevard in 2000, sold the business to industry giant Specialized Bicycles in August.
But by then Odell had started to see the fading of the pandemic peak in bike sales, he said. And, as Lovelace said was true at other area businesses, this trend suited the size of his staff.
Dickson, as well as the store’s buyer and marketing manager, left the store in the wake of the sale, and two mechanics transferred, said Odell, who has worked at Sycamore for 12 years.
“We were out five employees and honestly, at that time, I was very disappointed because all five of those employees were great,” he said.
But this allowed the shop to avoid the lay-offs that might have otherwise been necessary as sales slowed, Odell said.
The boom had especially benefited Sycamore, he said, because Dickson’s long history as a Specialized dealer allowed the store to maintain its inventory as other shops struggled to keep bikes in stock during the pandemic.
They now sell that brand almost exclusively, and the absence of other names such as Giant and Yeti is probably the biggest change that most customers will notice, Odell said. Otherwise, the shop is still focused on selling, servicing and renting bikes, still advising visitors on the routes to best enjoy them.
“In the store, it’s business as usual,” he said.
Except customers also might see fewer new bikes going out the door, he said.
“It’s not that business is bad, it’s just not booming,” he said. “ We just aren’t getting people coming in and saying, ‘I’ll take it.’ We’re having to work harder for sales.”
But he also added this fits in with the usual, seasonal pattern in the industry: slowing sales as the weather turns cold, a rebound in the spring.
“Call me back in late March,” he said.
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