The business of active outdoor sports (hiking, camping, fishing, running, skiing, surfing, skateboarding and related sports) is relatively stagnant. There’s some growth, more in some sports than others, but even the sports that are growing have low growth. However, it now appears that active outdoor sports may have a new constituency that could provide substantial growth for the future: women. There is some evidence that women are playing a more active role in initiating outdoor activity and that is a vast change from what has come before.
According to Camber Outdoors, a non-profit with a mission to expand the role of women in active outdoor sports and since expanded to serve all minority groups, the active outdoor sports market has historically been driven by men. When women participate, Camber Outdoors claims they've come along primarily because they were invited by men or accompanied by men who have initiated the activity. The market for women’s active outdoor products is often described by the derogatory aphorism: “shrink it and pink it.” It refers to products for women that aren’t created for women, they’re men’s products that are cut to a smaller size and embellished or recolored to be more appealing to women.
Certain consumer behavior of women is hard to suss out of the available data. For example, when a woman buys a man’s shirt for herself and wears it, it shows up in the data as the sale of a men’s product. In fact, there’s an entire style of jeans for women called “boyfriend jeans” that arose out of women wearing jeans made for men. Some behavior is obscured and you have to use inference, common sense and some guesswork to understand what’s going on. The data about women’s increasing role in active outdoor sports is one of those things: the data don’t clearly support it yet but there are indications that it’s at a turning point.
Here are my facts (from NPD):
For the first time ever, a woman’s ski was the best-selling ski in America. It’s the Blizzard Black Pearl 88, WMS. Overall, women’s ski sales were up 21% in the most recent selling season, far outpacing men’s sales growth. In the same selling season, men’s snowboard equipment sales were up 15% and women’s rose by 20%.
Overall, men’s apparel and footwear in outdoor industry products was flat in the most recent year. Women’s was up 2%.
In the most recent selling season in the outdoor specialty store market (the period ending either September, October or November 2018):
Men’s backpacks were up 0%, women’s were up 15%.
Men’s hiking footwear was up 1%, women’s was up 13%.
Men’s sweatshirts up 8%, women’s up 17%.
Part of these changes is attributable to the growth of athleisure so it’s hard to know which trend is affecting the sales of which products. That’s the noise in the data.
Matt Powell, Senior Industry Advisor for NPD and all-around sports industry expert, presented most of the above data at the Outdoor Retailer trade show recently. When I told him I thought it indicated a change happening in women’s in outdoor active sports, he agreed and said, “I think that’s right. I hope you write about it. I think it’s important.”
The changes are not just about cold weather sports but all sports where women can compete as equals. Greg Weisman, an advisor to numerous warm weather active sports companies and a partner at the law firm of Ritholz Levy Fields LLP, said recently at a CIT-sponsored event at the MAGIC apparel industry trade show, “When the first women’s performance board short came out and the brands Roxy and GirlStar were launched…it was the…first time the surf industry embraced the idea of…women in something other than a bikini and foresaw a time when women would be treated as equal participants in the [sport].”
Last year, Camber Outdoors’ competition for women-led startups gave recognition to a startup called Bold Betties. According to its website, “Bold Betties began as a Colorado meetup group of women exploring the outdoors together.” Now they have 50 thousand members in 39 cities and help women get “outside that comfort zone with a variety of experiences.” Bold Betties has introduced 20 thousand women to a new outdoor sport they've never done before. Niki Koubourlis, the founder of Bold Betties told me, "women are in pursuit of a more adventurous life...of tackling things we have been historically been 'told'... are not for us, that are for men. When we tackle these things, we build confidence and self-sufficiency."
Jill Layfield, CEO and Co-Founder of Tamara Mellon footwear, was until recently a director of Camber Outdoors. She told me, “I think your lens on this is spot on…[this is about] women owning their health and taking care of themselves… it’s a shift in how women are living their lives and taking control of their lives and it’s a tailwind for what you’re seeing.”
When I put all these thoughts and data together it tells me something is happening in outdoor sports that’s new. I believe these are the indicators that are telling us major trends and changes are starting to happen. There is an opportunity now to bring a new group of enthusiasts and evangelists into the outdoor sports industry. For an industry that’s been running flat for a long time, that’s an opportunity not to be squandered.
