Seriously.  Is nothing sacred?  When I was shopping for a new flat screen TV I came across this odd electronics store....in Montana....of all places with a really good eCommerce site, sound marketing and very competitive pricing ( compared to Amazon).  Who are these guys?

Whether you know them or not you should.  After building up an empire in the electronics industry, on Oct 10th the competitive and LOCAL landscape of outdoor brands in Montana changed forever.  Here is the News:

Vann’s expanding to outdoors recreation market as online store

Gosh.  Bigskycountry.com.  They even secured a decent URL.   It's going to be very very interesting to learn about some of the brands who plan on taking advantage of this grand Montana style idea. 

So wait a minute.  We have REI, EMS, Altrec, Backcountry.com.....and on and on and on.  What in the world is going on where anyone thinks that taking the couple of dozen "quality high touch point last mile independent retailers" in Montana and throwing them to bulk pricing, online customer experience and most of all, the commercialization of outdoor spirit is a good thing to do? The press on this is amazing, yet as we know anything BIG that is done in the outdoor space tends to attract a lot of drama. Small retailers versus the evil empire.

So is it really about scale?  Is is about ramping up volume?  I am fine with it, really.  But what I am most concerned about is the movement many outdoor brands are taking.  Increased online sales come at the cost of lowering your product in asset class.  And when you do this, you as a brand lose class.  Your customers lose class.  And if you are losing so much, and fail to make it up on volume, there goes your brand.  Does anyone remember what happened to North Face back in the day with that horrible move into outlets?

Hyper Local folks.  This is where its at.  Montana today....who knows what is brewing out there in the under belly of say New Jersey or Texas or even Idaho.  Promotion needs to take place at the local level, getting into the heads of the consumers that support your brand.  By reaching consumers at a local level, you turn them into clients.  And this increases margin.  It increases R&D for bigger and better things. 

In later posts, since we've beat this online branding idea to death already, I am going to show you how you can help grow sales and keep the small shops in business at the same time.  The last mile of what every brand wants.  You may not know this, but large scale branding from REI / KEEN / North Face and to some extent Columbia is totally missing the mark on this. 

It is the nimble small brand that can shake the status quo.  Yeah I'm full of ideas today.  I'm concerned about this trend.