At SIA, I had a chance to check out the snowboard company, Airblaster. Started by a crew of three snowboarders, the brand has steadily picked up steam over the last decade. Its fun yet functional products like the Ninja Suit are popular with younger riders.
Jesse Grandkoski, Travis Parker and Paul Miller got the idea to start a company while skateboarding. The goal was to bring fun back into snowboarding.
The Airblaster booth at SIABelow, Jesse tells us about the company’s growth, its products, and some new retailer programs to boost sales and sell through of the Ninja Suit.
How is Airblaster financed? How many employees? Where are you based?
We are privately financed. The ownership is made up of 100% of snowboarders, ages 30 to 36 years old.
We have six and ½ fulltime, in-house employees, all based in southeast Portland, Oregon. If you include all of our riders, reps, distributors, and other partners, that puts us closer to 50 employees.
How big is the brand?
We are in about 300 doors in North America. The last few years have been hard for snow in general, but we’re thankful to continue on a strong growth pattern.
What categories do you sell?
Airblaster rep Clayton McCune and Jesse GrandkoskiOuterwear and Ninja Suits (base layer) are the vast majority of our sales by dollar. The ratio of Men’s to Women’s (in outerwear) is about 3 to 1, but Women’s sales have been growing faster for the last few years.
What are your most popular products?
Our most popular product by far is the Ninja Suit. Outerwear is our biggest category, but we have a lot of diversity in this category, so the numbers are spread out over a lot of product styles. Everything we make is in the OFP category: Original Fun Product.
What is the Ninja Suit? How have retailers and customers responded?
The Ninja Suit is a one-piece hooded long underwear suit with a “potty hatch” that allows you to go to the bathroom without taking it off.
The response has been amazing from retailers and consumers. There is always a little activation energy that we have to overcome to get a shop or customer to try the Ninja Suit, because it is just different than the singles base layer that we all grew up with.
To make it easier for retailers to get on board, we’ve created an entire merch/restock program that offers 100% guaranteed buy back at end of season.
Many first year retailers who participate in the Ninja Suit program are seeing over $900/square foot revenue. Keep in mind that this is in only five months (Nov 1st – March 1st). Basically, we’ve created a risk-free dispenser for the Ninja Suit, and it’s paying the bills for us right now.
See Page 2 for details about biggest accounts, the international business
Who are your biggest retail partners in the U.S.?
Our biggest brick-and-mortar partners are Milosport, Tactics, and Eternal. Darkside holds it down in the East. Our strongest online partner is Backcountry.com / Dogfunk.com.
Northstar and Copper Mountain are kicking butt for resort business.
How big is the brand internationally? Where else do you do the best business outside of the U.S.?
Airblaster’s light-hearted vibe applies to its other products as well
We’re about 70/30 split between North America and the rest of the world. Japan, Russia, Korea, and Germany are our biggest international countries. Canada, especially Western Canada, has really been growing strong in North America.
What’s your growth been like in the last few years?
In the last five years, we’ve been growing worldwide at an average rate of 35%. These are numbers that most snow companies would kill for in the last five years. But it’s a lot easier to post good numbers when you start off really small, with nothing but room to grow.
And just like everyone else, our U.S. growth over the last few seasons has cooled with the lack of good snow and the excess inventory that has been pushed into the market.
Our strategy is to focus on what works, drop or tweak what doesn’t, and basically to find and create new opportunities.
Anything else?
Thanks to everyone who has supported Airblaster and to everyone who will. Thanks to everyone who works hard to make this industry go round.
And whoever thought up snowboarding, thanks so much for that.
