Is the slide in snowboarding participation over?
How many snowboarders are there? Read on.
Transworld Business has the latest on the SnowSports Industries America 2009 SIA Intelligence Report.
Among the points that Mike Lewis found in the report.
More and more sales are taking place online. That’s no surprise, given that the market skews younger than the general population. Sales (by units, not dollars) grew 23% online, but fell 4% in specialty shops, and plummeted 13% in chain stores. There similar numbers if you look at dollars: Up 23% online, down 6% in specialty shops, down 20% in chain stores. About 17% of all sales are now online. (If you’re looking for a new board, I’d recommend looking for a never-used last-year’s model at a specialty shop. You’ll increase your chances of finding someone who might actually help you find the right board for your interests and abilities.)
Women-specific boards are a significant part of the market, coming in at 20%. As long as it’s not a pink and flowery version of a standard unisex board, some women may find a women’s specific board useful, though the key is probably finding the right combination of stiffness, flex, length, width, and so forth, something that can be done with unisex boards. Still, from strictly a marketing point of view, the growth of women-specific boards is a good trend.
The average rider was on the snow 8 days last season. That’s not a lot. With a busy “real life” schedule last year, I got in 5 full “resort” days and perhaps 7 to 10 partial days at a local ski area.
In what may be another sign of the youthful skew in the snowboarding population, 60% of riders said they rode at least once “outside of resort areas.” This could mean slipping briefly beyond the out-of-bounds limit of a resort, full-blown back-country riding, or “a simple rail in the school yard,” which actually be the largest category within that 60 percent. (This is where I say that youth comes into play. I suspect that rail riders, even more than snowboarders in general, skew younger.) Come to think of it, I fall into that 60%, too, having taken my board to a small hill at a city park to give someone a very basic lesson.
One-third of all resort visitors were on a snowboard. Does this mean that one-third of all snow “riders” are snowboarders? Not necessarily. It could be that skiers outnumber snowboarders by a ratio of 4 to 1, but that snowboarders visit the slopes more frequently. There are numbers out there on this;I have to check that out.
The decline in the number of riders may have stopped. A few years ago, the number peaked at 6.5 million. It dropped three years in a row, to 5 million in 2007-08. During 08-09, 5.8 million people went snowboarding at least twice once, the first “up” season in four years.
What I don’t find in the quick treatment of the report is the number of riders who are 35 year old and up. I’ve long thought it was somewhere around 500,000, but it’s been a while since I have seen new statistics.
(Corrected to indicate “twice” instead of “once” as the threshold for determining the number of snowboarders in a season.)