Perry Klebahn
Founder, Atlas Snowshoes
The last talk of the conference was Perry Klebahn’s account of his experience founding Atlas Snowshoes. Perry was a student in the Stanford Mechanical Engineering program in the early 90s, and for a final project he invented a much better snowshoe. It was a revolutionary improvement: lighter, more comfortable, easier to use, fully assembled and without need for service.
He decide to commercialize it after graduating… and then discovered that snowshoes were in fact a dead category. Outdoors stores didn’t sell them, no one was interested in buying them, and very few people ever snowshoed. Even though he had a brilliant product, Perry realized he would have to manufacture a trend! Although it was not obvious to him from the start, with hindsight he realized that he achieved success through three actions: enable, evangelize and legitimize.
To enable snowshoeing, he organized on-snow demos, but this wasn’t nearly effective enough, as only a few dozen people would try the new product over a day of efforts. What worked better was to associate himself with other interesting events and venues, for example a Ben and Jerry’s moonlight snowshoe walk.
As far as evangelizing the product went, Perry realized that you had to win the sales staff. In order to do this, he offered all salespeople incredibly good pro deal… but never free products. If someone pays for something, even just a symbolic sum, they are much more likely to recommend it because it involved an actual decision. Furthermore, he organized events with NOLs courses and Outward Bound.
Perry tried to legitimize the product through all possible channels. He first tried creating a snowshoe handbook, a guide wih instructions and trails. Unfortunately, no one knew about Atlas Snowshoes, and so the guides had little credibility. Magazines were a much better source; despite what might be the common opinion on the internet, the printed word still carries more credibility and popular magazines have extremely high circulation. He managed to organize a couple of events with Burton – while the events themselves were small, he could then use the Burton name on his brochures. He started a number of large scale winter fitness events and snowshoeing competitions. He expanded his product line with a mountaineering model, which although it had practically no sales reinforced the image of snowshoeing as something fun and intense to be doing.
His real breakthrough however was the opening of the McCoy SnowShoe Park in Vail in 1994. Vail was expanding quickly and wanted the reputation of accommodating all winter sports, even the most obscure. They created a beautiful set of trails at the top of the mountain that really demonstrated the pleasure of snowshoeing. But most importantly, they added an element of safety and security that Atals would have had a hard time creating on their own: if Vail endorsed the sport, it must be okay. An added bonus was that tickets were cheap (less than $10) and a new pair of snow shoes came with free passes.
All in all, Perry’s talk was extremely enjoyable. It demonstrated that sometimes a great product won’t be successful if the market isn’t ready for it, but also that low market recognition isn’t necessarily the end of it. Through perseverance and creative marketing, Perry managed to create a new and fun category of winter sport that is still growing fast!
