Storm Skiing Crested Butte - and an Inside Look at an Industry Demo Day

The Glade team made our way down to Crested Butte for the Blister Summit, and we scored some killer skiing while we were there!
Welcome to a bit of a different episode this week. We are here at the Blister Summit in Crested Butte. This is going to be a bit of a behind the scenes of what it's like to do a typical industry event. We do a number of these a year. This particular event, the Blister Summit, is put on by Blister Gear Review. And we've got a number of different ski vendors who are here. And the purpose of the event is to allow people to come in and demo really as many skis as they want over a three day period. So you have the opportunity to test, I think there's probably eight or nine brands here. And we were lucky enough to actually get about eight or nine inches of snow last night. So for this particular event, it's a really great opportunity for people to try out skis that they otherwise would not have access to. There's a lot of sort of specialty boutique brands here, and there's people like us who are here that are demoing goggles. So for us, what's really killer about events like this is that we get to display our whole product line to a whole group of new skiers and get them to go out and test our gear on the mountain, come back. If they're a fan of the gear, they can come and purchase a pair.
What's great about this for us is that because we are oriented as sort of an online brand, it's hard for people to test out our gear before buying. So we love doing events like this. We love putting our gear on skiers, giving the opportunity to go test it out in conditions like this when it's low light and they might not have the appropriate goggle. It's also a great time for us to debut new equipment that we're coming out with in subsequent seasons. So this is a bit sneak preview. I don't know if our head of product is going to like that I'm showing you guys this, but this is a helmet that we are coming out with next year. We're letting some people ski around with it, getting some feedback on it, as well as with the goggles. So we really like doing events like this. This particular one is consumer facing. A lot of these tend to be more B2B or sort of focused around shops and retail, but events like this where there's actual ski consumers here are really great for us.
So if you've never been to a demo day like this, or you haven't been to industry events, it's a really killer opportunity to get on skis that you otherwise would not be able to get on. All these skis that you can see behind me all have demo bindings on, so they'll fit them to your feet. You can try them out in different conditions. You can try them out ... a day like today, it's snowing pretty hard. So you can say, "Hey, I want to try a new powder ski I haven't had an opportunity to try," or what a lot of people like to do is sort of lap the same run over and over again on different skis so you can more or less A/B test them and say, "Okay, I just went on this run with this pair of skis. I want to see what it feels like on a pair of Castles or a pair of Atomics," or something like that. These guys all have everything completely dialed. So they'll set your [inaudible 00:02:56], they'll set it to your booth sole length. You can try out a number of skis during the day. You can try out outerwear, backpacks, goggles, obviously in our case. There's a guy here selling guidebooks. So there's a lot of opportunity to try out a bunch of different stuff.
We're at the base of Crested Butte right now. So what a lot of people are doing is coming through the event and then basically walking up to lift right there. So it's really convenient if you're trying to try out a few different pairs of skis in a single day. There's also a group of people that are meeting here sort of on the hour to go out and ski with groups and sort of get to know other attendees, which is really a great way to get to know fellow skiers that are as into ski gear as you might be. There's also back country tours that are leaving in the morning and in the afternoon. So if you're looking to try an alpine setup, as well as a back country setup, this is an event where you can do that as well. So a lot of these vendors have both downhill, as well as AT bindings on their skis. So you don't just have to ski your AT setup in a resort setting. You can actually do it in the environment that was meant for.