OR Summer 2018 Trend Note – Declining Gear Sales & Experiences Over Stuff

Sounds like a positive thing to me. When I think back on all aspects of my backcountry travels, from pre-planning all the way through execution, the trip itself offers the lasting satisfaction compared to the short ‘high’ of receiving a new and cutting-edge piece of kit. Now some may argue that the new kit made the satisfying trip even better, but that’s just weak-beer rationalizing. If millennials truly have figured out that experiences bring more personal satisfaction than acquiring material possessions, then more power to them. I have a sneaking suspicion however, that it’s the hyper-competitive signaling of ‘look how much fun I’m having’ on social media that is driving the focus on “experience” more than some lofty On Walden Pond ethos. Hopefully I’m just being cynical in my suspicions.

Philip, to your point, recent anthropological research shows that because everyday people have been able to acquire stuff that was previously inaccessible, through easier credit, brands offering lower price tiers, etc.,  people, especially the wealthy, are increasingly signaling through experiences that are harder for many to acquire easily – expensive vacations, high cost education, etc. That said, I believe there are millennials and members of other generations who have learned to value experiences over stuff, but a trip to any major consumer store or a look at the massive growth of the personal storage industry is evidence that most people are locked into stuff.

Also to your point, while I’ve sometimes have had pieces of kit that did increase my comfort and enjoyment in the outdoors, many great experiences I’ve had in the outdoors have been shaped by limitations rather than having the perfect piece of kit, from challenging weather conditions to missing certain gear.

Years ago I did a long, solo sea kayak circumnavigation of Prince William Sound here in Alaska. It rained a lot. The book I brought with me was Travels in Alaska by John Muir. I recall one particularly soggy evening on Knight Island, sheltering in my expensive and new-fangled tent, wearing expensive and new-fangled clothing, reading a passage in the book where Muir had left his Tlingit guides and their dugout canoe to climb some random mountain above the Inside Passage. He spent the night in a storm huddled in his tweed jacket under a scrap of oil cloth, eating his hardtack and marveling at the violence and severity of the weather. He was ebullient with the experience. I was ashamed by my relative comfort and yet mopey attitude. He was joyously reeling with the heady rush of the adventure, and all I could focus on was being perpetually damp and not seeing anything above the persistent 200′ cloud ceiling. Hmmm…

The experience is what you will remember for as long as your brain cells will allow. Not the gear you brought. But the experience is shaped by attitude. If manufacturers could somehow package positive attitude then they would make bank, and I’d say they would deserve every penny. Sometimes adversity brings a sense of self-empowering overcoming. Sometimes it just results in a sense of perseverance. Attitude makes the difference.

Maybe [distant] future Outdoor Retailer shows will just be a bunch of VR (virtual reality) booths selling “experiences”?

As a millennial, seeing this ‘evolution’ of gear companies product portfolio from specialized/niche to broader audiences as well as monetizing ‘experiences’ is a poor marketing decision in the long run.

The whole Idea that we value experiences more than anyone else is just a meh general statement at best. Everyone does every hobby for the experience, not just this generation of 20-year-olds. I agree with Ethan that it’s a poor buzzword. They (companies) are just trying to create a want from our generation who really can see through the #wanderlust bs. Social media is really skewing how our generation is viewed; romanticizing certain aspects while ignoring the reality and nuances of life.

As for the broader product portfolios, there’s a lot of crap to weed through to get to good products to invest in. There’s a growing number of ‘outdoor’ or what I call car-camping gear that’s really not good in quality. As a whole, we’re a generation struggling to make large purchases, so we seek out best bang-for-the-buck. Every brand is seemingly trying to take their own piece of the pie in every market, but are forgetting that we can google. If we can find a product with the same features and quality for cheaper, we’ll buy it; we don’t have brand loyalty.

Nothing that got coverage from OR this year was all that great. Sure there is new shiny stuff, but nothing that made me say, “Wow, that’s revolutionary. I need that.” It was just excess stuff.

” If manufacturers could somehow package positive attitude then they would make bank, and I’d say they would deserve every penny.”

The company Rekall, from the movie Total Recall (1990), comes to mind.

I think it is possible that the only reason we aren’t seeing an overall decline in outdoor activity is because young people are taking it up in large numbers. Many of those people are drawn to it because unlike a lot of activities, it isn’t really expensive. You don’t really need great gear to enjoy the outdoors. I know when I was young and broke, I got by with lots of cheap stuff. As I got older, got into it more and got a bit of money, I started buying more gear. Now I feel like I could afford more gear, but just don’t bother much of the time. I am aware of all the trade-offs, and just can’t easily bring myself to get something new to save a couple ounces (e. g. I’ve already bought two versions of the NeoAir). I have my system pretty much dialed in — it works really well for me.

It wouldn’t surprise me if we see a big surge in a couple years as some of the people who were just “checking out” hiking and backpacking make it a permanent part of their lifestyle and get a bit more money. If you day hike every sunny weekend go out on a handful of backpack trips each year, eventually you want better gear. Things like windshirts and trekking poles start appealing to you while a heavy backpack does not.

That’s just a theory, of course. Who knows how they determine whether something is an “outdoor gear” item or not. So many of the products out there are multiple use. I would imagine stand alone GPS receivers are down because folks load GPS apps onto their phones. A wicking shirt worn for soccer is just fine for hiking. People have switched from heavy boots to “trail runners”, but often trail runners are sold as just running shoes.

It is also possible that we saw a big surge in purchases a couple years ago, but now things have calmed down. If you are car camping and buy a big tent, you aren’t going to buy another one soon. I would really have to look at the details (and the long term numbers) so see if there really is a trend. From what I can tell, more people than ever are hiking and backpacking, so if I made high quality outdoor gear I wouldn’t be worried at all.

> The whole Idea that we value experiences more than anyone else is just a meh general statement at best.

I suspect that Justin is right on the money.  A lot of the language surrounding Millennials’ likes/preferences seems to be overly fraught and dramatic.  They’re just today’s young people, not some new species!

Perhaps factors in declining NEW gear sales include:

(a) A thriving used gear “black” market, esp. via social media; and to a lesser extent (b) a shift to lesser-known domestic or foreign brands (the internet brings the world to you!).

Re: used gear — Yes, there were always a few places to buy/sell used gear (BPL, Whiteblaze, HammockForums, GearTrade, etc.), but the sudden mushrooming of gear groups on Facebook in the past 12-18 months has been stunning!  I can’t believe how the numbers have soared, and I’m only a member of two such groups.  Between February and early May, I sold off tons of gear at reasonable prices (high quality like WM, OR, etc. and cottage companies) that I had accumulated over the previous few years.

On the women’s used gear groups, it was virtually a “feeding frenzy”.  Most of my stuff sold within hours (or a few days at most), and despite offering everything at a deep discount, I was able to net enough money to buy $$$$$ gear that I wouldn’t have bought otherwise (hello, ZPacks Duplex).

I think Millennials are FAR more in tune with these trends, and know how to get what they want via less obvious channels than just going to the (online or brick & mortar) store.  And, as Justin also observed, they can google.

I think Millennials are also quicker to use “me too” gear (think AliExpress) to get what they want for less money.  When you’re underemployed, or just starting out, you don’t have endless money to throw around, and yup, they can google!

A lot of the language surrounding Millennials’ likes/preferences seems to be overly fraught and dramatic.

You can get a Chrome browser extension that automatically changes “Millennials” to “Snake People.” I suspect some people who write trend pieces have a word processor that goes the other way.

Beware all broad generalizations about so-called generations. Supposedly all Boomers were pot-smoking, free-loving, draft-dodging, long-haired hippies in the 1960s – especially those born in 1964. Makes about as much sense to say that all Scorpios value experiences over stuff.

Or maybe, just maybe, people are tired of buying and storing stuff.

— Rex

What a great clip!😂😂😂

lightweight backpacking is the ironic discipline of acquiring more stuff so you can have the least about of stuff.

i mainly like the experience of choosing the gear. then I go on the trip to justify it.

Nobody ever really cared about us GenXers.

I should watch that George Carlin clip every day!

I just took some gear to the local sports recycler – great memories attached to it but haven’t used it in 10+ years.  I can no longer justify keeping an 80-liter pack around, classic design or not.  Perhaps someone else can enjoy it, and I need to make room for the stuff that is still being used.

I just read about all the new gear that Yeti is going to be marketing next year.  It is all a bit draining, especially since none of does anything better or differently than hundreds of products that already exist.  I can’t help but wonder if someday in the future, people will look back on all of the stuff that our current civilization produced from non-renewable resources and wonder what the devil was wrong with us.

I wonder what the hell is wrong with us every single time I see a $400 Ice Blue Yeti cooler Jenny.

I think it’s always been about the experience, at least it has been for me. My approach to gear purchases is reasonably disciplined and before buying new stuff it has to pass a justification filter – do I really need it, is it really that much better than what I have now, and will I use it enough to justify the price tag?

When I was transitioning to lightweight backpacking (never made it to UL… cuben stuff is way too expensive) I had my share of purchases and sell-offs as I figured out what mix of kit worked for me, but for the last 4-5 years the justification filter has been pretty effective. I walked the entire OR Summer show last month and for me nothing really stood out as a must-have. All nice and shiny and new and full of potential of course, but with everything I looked at the utility, or performance gains, or weight savings just weren’t enough to push me off the fence.

I think that once you have a proven set of kit everything else becomes incremental. When the gear I was buying added up to pounds saved the decisions were easy. Ounces? Those are a tougher sell. But again, I’m a “light and comfy” backpacker, not a UL achiever.

Maybe, like me, the current universe of outdoor consumers is simply satisfied with what they have.

Does the price of the cooler really matter. What difference that than than dozens of styrofoam of cheap plastic coolers that end up in the landfill after a handful of uses? I’d much rather spend money on something that lasts than something designed to be thrown away.

I’m not trying to rattle Yeti owners, I see it as more of a metaphor, just another silly way we like to signal.  Not saying I’m above it either, but simply calling some BS on this little game that we play.  The goods that grace the booths of Outdoor Retailer are as much (if not more in some cases) about signaling what kind of outdoorsperson you are as they are a means to an end.  Like how Realtree Xtra camouflage is now so out-of-vogue because you can get the stuff at Walmart.  It’s Louis Vuitton vs. Prada battling it out in the mountains.

Experiences over stuff….but we use the stuff to signal our “experiences”.

. I SHOULD HAVE BOUGHT MORE CRAP .

Perhaps factors in declining NEW gear sales include:

How about less disposable income?  If the young person has trouble paying the rent, and her/his mobile phone bill, they will be very careful about buying stuff.

From Forbes.com, Jan 14, 2017

“With a median household income of $40,581, millennials earn 20 percent less than boomers did at the same stage of life, despite being better educated, according to a new analysis of Federal Reserve data by the advocacy group Young Invincibles.”

As Bruce mentions, many millennials are just scrapping by and the ones who have a comfortable income (tech, medicine, law, etc) probably aren’t working the 9-5, 40-hours/week job that was middle class 40 years ago.

I’ve noticed among many nationalities, that if you work physically hard for your living, you are less likely to want to hike 20 miles a day on Saturday and Sunday.  That certainly was the case when I was doing construction.  And if your parents did hard physical labor, you might aspire to be a couch potato and a mall rat.  It seems to take a generation or two of office jobs for backpacking, cycling, and other recreational sweating to have much appeal.  The US is barely at replacement level for millennials and that’s only because of hispanic immigration – many of whom had very physically hard-working parents.

In short, a shrinking middle class means fewer backpackers.

My $30 big box store budget coleman cooler has lasted for 20 years so far.  It holds 60L, it even has wheels, a pull handle, and…..  wait for it….  FOUR CUP HOLDERS.  It has never been attacked by a bear.  It makes it 2 days with ice in the back of a blazing hot car (despite claims of 5 days).  And it is an awesome foot rest.  To get a similar capacity in a yeti/rtic/pelican/etc, I would have to pay upwards of $300 and I wouldn’t get the wheels and cup holders.

Granted, I am not an ultra-cooler enthusiast.  I bought what I needed, and am still very happy with it.  Sometimes I look with envy at those with ultra-coolers, and while it would be nice to get a week out of my ice, or be able to tell all about how my ultra-cooler could stand up to a wild rhino attack, I’m happy knowing that my cooler is a jack of all trades and can get me through almost every situation I need it for.

All this to say, there is a lot of great outdoor gear at the big box budget stores.  $10 fleece pullovers that function very similar to a $180 ultra-fleece.  $30 sleeping bags that keep you just as warm as $400 ultra-bags, they just weigh more.  $50 rain jackets that work pretty much the same way as $300 ultra-shells.  Yes, there are use cases for expensive ultra-gear.  Yes, there are tradeoffs for going with budget gear.  But budget gear gets you outdoors.  The OR Show lets us see the best, newest, and shiniest ultra-gear before it lands at REI.  And I admit, I am wowed by some of it.  But most can get by with the budget gear from costco and walmart.  Maybe they will never hike 25 mile days.  Maybe they will never hike the Wind River High Route.  But they get what they want out of the outdoors, just like I get what I want out of my budget cooler.

And while I don’t own an ultra-cooler, I do own some pretty awesome ultra-gear for the pursuits I am an enthusiast of.  And maybe that is why the market segment is shrinking.  Maybe people are getting increasingly technical gear from the big box stores that meets their requirements for the pursuits they enjoy, thus robbing “BIG OUTDOORS” (lol) of some of their potential customers.

Perhaps I do need a new cooler though.  But instead of a yeti, I think I’ll go with one of these.

(after watching that, stick around for his cat deterrent video.  It wins the internet every time I watch it.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIbkLjjlMV8)

Lastly, this is not a slam on yeti coolers, or those who love them.  They are fantastic pieces of kit.  But I cannot think of a use case for me that allows me to justify buying one.  Just as many look at the gear at REI and giggle at $500 tents and wonder who would ever buy them…..

Great points by Valerie and David.

Just popping in to share my subjective experience of millennials. This is based on my observations of the graduates of the design school I spent the last 16 years teaching at so my perceptions are shaped by that demographic.

Compared to my own Generation X cohort, my millennial graduates tend to live modestly in terms of cars, housing, clothing and possessions. They do, however, seem to travel far (Iceand, Peru, Croatia, keep popping up) and near (Joshua Tree, Tucson, Flagstaff) more than Gen X’ers. They also seem to spend more on coffee, alcohol and food. The trends regarding valuing experiences over possessions seem to ring true. They seem quite adept at making purchases through non-retail sources and research their choices carefully.

I think David’s point about the declining middle class is very important in this discussion and what does remain of the middle class is probably more low-end white-collar like teachers, designers and IT personnel and less blue-collar than the middle class twenty or forty years ago.

Nearly all the millennials I see are graduate students. I don’t know what the normal ones are like. But certainly graduate school stipends haven’t grown as fast as rent has around here.