Like all national trade shows, Outdoor Retailer attracts tens of thousands of attendees and more than 1,000 exhibitors showcasing their wares, from powder skis to waterproof fabrics to novelty koozies. The main activities on the floor involve relationships between the supplier-buyer and the marketing-media — that’s where we fit in — with lots of other informal business happening: athletes meeting with sponsors; entrepreneurs trading ideas for future projects; people sneaking in to pinpoint free swag; dogs mingling with other dogs; and just generally industry folks who attend twice a year getting together to trade ideas and talk about the state of all things outdoor, before putting in some time on the snow at the local resorts around Salt Lake City, which hosts OR.
Rather than just bring you the usual “best products of OR” story that we’ve done in the past, this year we decided to focus instead on the general trends in the industry and point to some important examples from our favorite brands. If you want the five-word overview of Winter Market 2016, it’s “ski touring and fabric innovation.” If you’re in the market for something deeper, read on — and if you were at the show and think we missed something mission-critical, please let us know at [email protected].
Additional reporting by AJ Powell and Zach Mader.
Learning About the Great Outdoors, Indoors
And Shaking More Hands Than Trump, Clinton and Sanders, Combined
Snacks Consumed: If you try to see that many individual brands over the course of three days it leaves very little time for a civilized lunch, and since the food vendors at the Salt Palace Convention Center serve a menu of hot food roughly on par with 7-Eleven, you’ve got to pack in whatever you want to eat. Between the three of us we ate six bags of The New Primal grass-fed jerky (paying $42 for dried beef stings, incidentally) and nine of their spicy beef sticks, which we lifted from their booth (thank you!), a bag of apples, nine energy bars of assorted provenance, one pound of mixed nuts and, okay, a fairly decadent sushi lunch at The Naked Fish.
An Editor’s Game Plan: The convention center has 515,000 square feet of exhibit space and 164,000 square feet of meeting space — more in the summer, when the convention opens up to include three outdoor pavilions — which amounts to a place that you can walk across in about five minutes if you hustle and know your route, which is a lot more manageable now that OR has an app that maps your way from booth to booth. Some editors and writers will try to schedule their meetings in just one section of the convention center at a time, but walking the floor a lot allows you to bump into old friends and colleagues, which is what OR is about, at the end of the day.
When Can I Get This Stuff? Although there’s plenty of gear on display at OR that is currently available, most of what we’re looking at is for the Fall 2016 season, which means you can start looking out for the gear at the end of summer.
One Last Thing Before We Get Started on the Gear: Like all trade shows, OR is as much about the ancillary recreation as it is what happens inside the Salt Palace. For media, this all falls into roughly three buckets: 1) events and dinners; 2) skiing and snowboarding at Brighton, Solitude, Deer Valley, Snowbird, Alta, Park City, etc.; and 3) cruising Tinder, where most of the profiles during the show either say LDS or OR, two very different prospects indeed. We checked the first and second boxes, with the undisputed highlight being a party bus of a journalists in which one person, who will remain unnamed, danced on the stripper pole with his shirt open wearing a motorcycle helmet.
Main Trends of the Show You Should Care About
Want to Know Everything Ever about this Big Gear Convention?
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New growlers outnumbered attractive dogs at OR this year, though there were also notable dogs, including a massive St. Bernard named Daisy, and a Newfoundland that always seemed to be hustling from one meeting to the next and rarely stopped to receive affection. Yeti, Avex, Hydroflask and Miir all catered to craft beer nerds, with double-walled insulation designed to keep your beer cold far longer than glass. Stanley, meanwhile, released a mug that looks like a beer stein. But beer wasn’t the only thing getting housed in fancy and functional packaging: food and drink vessels in general continued to be important products at OR. One of our favorites is Miir’s food canister, which comes in a great-looking powder-coat white finish.
Almost every brand at OR this year had something to say about environmentally friendly fabrics or practices: less water used in dye, more recyclable materials, down alternatives. Especially down, which makes sense because between French cuisine and outdoor apparel, geese have drawn an unfortunate lot indeed. Allied Feather & Down is one of the leaders in the industry for tracking the entire life cycle of down insulation used in products by brands like The North Face, Helly Hansen, Eddie Bauer, Feathered Friends and Outdoor Research, among others. Patagonia and Fjällräven have their own programs for tracking the provenance of the down they use. And of course lots of companies are using the “green” conversation to their advantage in marketing campaigns, and it can sometimes be hard to tell what’s for real and what’s just fluff.
It goes without saying that more sophisticated (and sometimes unnecessary) technology is making its way into a greater variety of outdoor gear. In the “cool and useful” category, gloves with built-in heaters continue to grow with new designs from Black Diamond and Outdoor Research, among others, while Petzl has released the Nao+ headlamp, which can be controlled from your smartphone to, for example, ensure the amount and longevity of illumination before taking off four an evening trail run.
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Shackets are everywhere, with the best from Smartwool, Woolrich, Cotopaxi, Icebreaker, Toad & Co., The North Face and Sierra Designs — at least from what we saw. Urban styling, technical features, awesome.
Conrad Anker’s mountaineering socks for Smartwool are out, and as you know we follow closely what Conrad is doing.
There’s always a handful of high profile outdoor athletes on hand at OR. An incomplete list includes Anker, Kevin Jorgeson, Jeremy Jones, Jimmy Chin and Glen Plake.
Salomon’s new S-Lab XA Alpine trail runner features a built-in gaiter to keep out water, dirt and grime. It also features a premium WET Traction Contagrip outsole that is sticky, even on wet ice.
Black Diamond released a featherweight completely carbon ski pole, which doesn’t even have a grip. In testing, they found that while using a glove, grip differences were minimal while using only carbon vs. a rubber grip.
Building on the success of the Nano Air, Patagonia designed the new Stretch Nano Storm — which features their Full Range Insulation along with a stretch version of their H2No waterproof shell.
Filson elevated things with the style of their bags — also fitting into the trend of catering to urban consumers — by releasing an all-leather line of bags that included a standout backpack and weekender.
And in case you haven’t heard, this year is the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service, and brands are getting in on the centennial bash with products, including a standout collection from Pendleton.
