By Jill Nazeer, Atlas Snow-Shoe Marketing Specialist
This past week, Atlas Snow-Shoe exhibited at Outdoor Retailer, one of the largest tradeshows in our industry. It’s the time to showcase what’s new next season, meet with retail buyers, and engage the media with your product. For me, as the marketing contact, it’s also a time to check in with our non-profits, our advertising reps, and meet with potential new partners. It’s almost like a mix of a family reunion and a final exam; how has all of that work paid off this past year? What do we need to do better? Who’s gotten taller or had a baby or moved into a new house?
There’s been a lot of political chatter around the OR show. I won’t get deep in the weeds about it, but if you search “politics+OR show” you could read about a million articles about what’s gone on in the past year.
With the show in its first year in Denver, as well as it combining with the Snowsports Industry America (SIA) show, there seemed to be a renewed excitement surrounding this “reunion”. I found a noticeable shift from prior years and sat in on a lot of meetings surrounding an interesting notion:
What can we all do, as one industry, to make our world better?
That might seem dramatic, but it’s not exaggerated. It was exciting to be in a large convention center, surrounded by competing brands, and the question was no longer “what’s that guy doing better than me?”. It was “how can we work together to make sure all people will be able to play outside for decades to come?”. It almost felt like it was no longer a tradeshow, but instead a conference on our future.
At the show, I attended a Camber Outdoor Thought Leader Keynote with our (noted: female) Sales Manager and Product Line Manager. Camber Outdoors, formerly the Outdoor Industries Women’s Coalition, has a goal of encouraging equality for women in the Outdoor industry. Since Atlas has a history of building women’s specific product, and employing female engineers, sales representatives, and marketing managers, we’ve been a proud supporter of Camber, even partnering with them on Elektra messaging and giveaways.
The audience, as well as the panel, were a mix of men and women from different brands, different parts of the outdoor industry, different ages and experience levels. The message: What can we do to make this community as diverse, and representative of our world, as possible? Despite Camber’s former namesake, it was not just about women in the workforce. It was about making sure everyone feels welcome and represented in this industry. If you’d like to watch the keynote, it’s linked here.
Snowshoeing might be a small portion of the outdoor industry, but we like to think our sport is one of the most accessible activities in snowsports; financially, geographically, and physically. Atlas Snow-Shoe Company has always been a supporter of building the snowshoe community, not just our brand. This tradeshow only encouraged our commitment to getting more people out on snowshoes, outside in the winter, enjoying snow, and staying healthy.
Please follow our social media pages, and this blog, as we continue to grow with our partners and hopefully engage some new ones. Our non-profit partners, such as the Outdoors Empowered Network and the Winter Wildlands Alliance, are dedicated to growing the snowsports community and we encourage you to get involved in your local area. Share your stories with us as well! We want to see what you do to get outside this winter. Thank you for being the supportive, and frankly awesome, community that you are.
Signing off,
Jill (your friendly neighborhood snowshoe promoter)