The early back-to-school season appears to be more of the same for the outdoor footwear business after an early review of retail point-of-sale data shows the business down more than 10 percent for the first three weeks of the back-to-school (BTS) selling season. The trend in outdoor footwear is in sharp contrast to the 5 percent growth in the athletic footwear categories for the same period.
According to weekly retail point-of-sale data compiled by SportScanInfo for OIA VantagePoint, sales in the Outdoor Specific Footwear segment fell more than 15 percent in the Specialty Retailer channels for the three-week early BTS season. According to the OIA VantagePoint data, the Outdoor Running category was the primary driver of the decline in the channel segment along with Outdoor Casual Footwear. Trail Shoes were up 2 percent for the period-to-date, while Outdoor Athletic silhouettes, a category that showed a lot more muscle at the recent shows, saw sales jump more than 40 percent off of a small year-ago base.
Outdoor Sandals sales were down nearly 12 percent in the broader market measured by SportScanInfo and OIA VantagePoint, but the percentage declines in the Specialty Retailer segment were half that of the overall market.
The conversation around outdoor apparel is quite different as the business here jumped more than 17 percent for the three-week period, according to the OIA VantagePoint data. The Specialty Retailer segment outpaced the overall market for the period, posting growth of nearly 19 percent for the three-week period ended August 10. The only categories posting declines for the period were in the active tops and bottoms categories such as T-shirts, Women’s Sport Tops and Active Bottoms.
Not surprising given the weather, Outdoor Raingear sales were up more than 16 percent in the Specialty Retailer segment for the last three weeks. Sales of Hoodies Sweatshirts from outdoor brands nearly doubled for the period as it starts to feel like fall a little earlier in many parts of the country.
On the hardgoods side, All Daypacks were up in the mid-single-digits for the three-week early BTS period ended August 10. Excluding Laptop Bags and Messenger Bags, the Basic Daypack business was up nearly 15 percent across the broader market measured by SportScanInfo and OIA VantagePoint. Technical Daypacks (non-hunting) saw sales jump nearly 20 percent for the three-week period.
Looks like a nice start to the fall season. Boots will have to wait for that first hint of snow.
OIAVantagePoint.com recently went live with a greatly expanded online
reporting platform that added the broadest number of new reporting
options since the commencement of SportScanInfo's weekly reporting nearly 15 years ago.
The new options include more channel and regional reporting across all
reporting segments — Category Reports, Brand Reports and Product
Reports — as well as a new archive retrieval system that enable users
to pull data from any period over the last four years, including custom
timeframes and channel selections. For more information, go to www.OIAVantagePoint.com or email to OIAVantagePoint@SportsOneSource.com.
The
SportsOneSource Group has released new, more comprehensive Weekly
Trend Reports for OIA VantagePoint subscribers and reporting retail
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