Outdoor Retailer 2007

Outdoor Retailer is an industry tradeshow for all the manufacturers and dealers to connect and purchase product for the upcoming season. Twice a year (summer & winter) the entire outdoor industry descends upon Salt Lake City, UT for the largest tradeshow on earth. Everything you could ever think of buying for the outdoor sporting world is represented here – and not on a small scale. You’ll have to take my word for it that with over 1,000 exhibitors in a 430,000 square foot facility, it is a truly unique experience. This event is the Disneyland of tradeshows.

The first two days of the tradeshow are an open air demo (for the paddlesport group only), which allows dealers to get out and paddle every kayak available, before they put it in their stores for you. It’s smoking hot out on this beach 100 degree plus! (A big change for us folks from Canada, LOL). We tried, but it seems like every event we go to we bring more boats than the last one, and it never seems to be enough… we still had line ups to go for a paddle. But once they paddled it, we were quickly forgiven. :)

The following four days are inside the Salt Place for a more traditional show. We moved locations this year and to a larger 20 x 30, 2 storey booth (thanks Druid). Because there’s a lot of prototypes and such at this event, they prohibit cameras, so while I’d love to show you what this amazing show looks like from the inside, I can’t. Here are a couple of quick snaps from our booth.

Our team worked incredibly hard to get the booth ready to go, but once the doors opened – they worked even harder! This might have been the only rest Dray (our US Sales Manager) had for the entire show.

We ran a contest to see who could assembly the TRAK boat fastest. Rock climber, Philip Swiney, claims the winning time. The mountain guide from Las Vegas, Nevada assembled the 16-foot kayak in an amazing 4:59! Which is not only the fastest time for the show, but the fastest time EVER, even by the TRAK team.

We also had our good friend Ken Whiting out to do a couple demos in the paddle tank, which was always a blast. You'll have to take my word for this that it's him in the boat... who was in charge of the camera???

The booth was full of enthusiastic dealers from all over the US and around the world. (We bring on new dealers everyday, so if you don't have a local dealer, you likely will soon).

I know this is just teasing, but we have a VERY exciting project that we are launching on September 1. I can't tell you what it is quite yet, but it's very fun, stay tuned....