While many of our gentle readers were lounging at home, top pants button undone, sated with the Holiday repast, Sports Executive Weekly was out pounding the tile in search of key indicators for this critical holiday season. Due to the realities of geography, we limited our store visits to stores in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic markets.

Two major themes emerged from our excursions.  The first is good news for the industry; the second is clearly sounding a alarm bell. 

First, for the most part, the tenor and magnitude of the promoting was clearly down from previous seasons.  The across-the-board cuts and deep discounts, so much a part of prior year’s advertising, simply were not in evidence.  Only TSA and Foot Locker were aggressive in their pricing strategy.  The Finish Line exhibited a more clever approach to creating traffic.

Still, we did not see the levels of pricing that created the often dangerous feeding frenzy at some of the discounters.

The Sports Authority was as hard line as ever.  Not only were most shoes on BOGO (the only place we saw this by the way), but they offered 40% off all replica jerseys. Then they topped it off with 25% coupon off anything in the store (with the usual restrictions).  There were newspaper reports from across the country about early crowds at TSA, but by the time SEW got there, things had quieted down considerably.

Dick’s focused their efforts on mostly private label products for shoppers that hit the store before 2pm on Friday. Most were Buy One Get One or 40% off deals.
Foot Locker had most of the wall on 2/$89 or some other cut price.  Most of Timberland and K-Swiss shoes were on some kind of cut pricing.  In addition, all replica jerseys were on BOGO as they have been since the end of BTS. 

The Finish Line offered a “free” $25 coupon (to be used on a future $50 purchase) for each sale of more than $100 that included two items or more.  Essentially it is a $25 discount on a $150+ purchase and gets the customer into the store twice.  Smaller discount and two visits is a pretty clever promotion, but maybe too clever, as SEW overheard several conservations as store managers tried to explain the deal to customers. 

The second and more destructive trend was exhibited at the mall retailers intent on killing the current golden goose as most resorted to rampant discounting on licensed apparel.  Licensed is the one legitimate fashion trend apparent in out space this year. 

The department store tactic of promoting the hot trend seems counter intuitive to us.  The sporting goods industry has a nasty habit of killing trends before they can fully develop.

Discounting licensed apparel is a loser’s game.  All three mall players were on promotion, Foot Locker in BOGO, Finish Line at $49, off of $65, and FootAction at 30% off on a very limited assortment. TSA was 40% off and Dick’s was 20-30%.  We would have thought that, with only one vendor controlling this space, that the discounting would have been better controlled. Fortunately, we didn’t see anyone attempting to kill the other golden goose, Under Armour.

All sporting goods chains had great presentations of Under Armour (and almost entirely at full price).  Galyan’s did the best job here by far, followed by Dick’s, who also had a strong presentation of Nike Pro.  There was little evidence of Reebok’s NFL Equipment. Of the mall boys, only Finish line has begun to carry this white hot category.  Getting the jump on the others could end up to be quite an advantage.

The usual seasonal suspects were on sale as well:  Fitness equipment, table games and outerwear, with no significant change from prior years.  New Balance was clearly the most discounted footwear brand, followed closely by adidas. All retailers had some Timbs on sale, with Modell’s the most aggressive at 25% off the entire collection, excluding #10061.