Outdoor Retailer - Summer 2017 - 13

Courtesy Western Bike Works

sets to more closely target their own stock
and customers. "We have so many SKUs, so
many types of retailers. If we run a campaign
around hiking and you're a running shop,
it doesn't help," says Anderson. The idea of
funding retailers versus funding a more generic campaign was so popular at Promboxx,
the company will now enable brands beyond
Smartwool to follow suit, so any brand can
create store wallets that bank ad money for
stores to use as they see fit.
Even brands with smaller budgets, like
Osprey, use Promoboxx to custom create
marketing for their stores. Kami York-Feirn,
Osprey's social media specialist, says some of
their most popular pushes aren't calls to purchase. "We've learned that our lifestyle blog
campaign called 'Dear Osprey,' where readers write diary entries about how Osprey has
changed their relationship to nature, really
works as a softer ad campaign we can push to
retailers," she says. York-Feirn says that while
Osprey doesn't have the ad budget to push a
$10,000 ad campaign through to its stores,
they can still run marketing around 10 great
hikes in a given region, or pack reviews, and
micro-target those campaigns to their retailers. "It's such a great tool because it's free content and it really increases engagement."
As with Amazon or other locally-targeted
e-tailer campaigns, these testimonials are
backed by actual data, says Kelly Kressner,
Promoboxx's director of marketing. "We can
see both retailer engagement-who signed up
to use the content-and we can see what campaigns drive customer contact," Kressner says.
That lets Promoboxx help brands tweak campaigns midstream, so they get stronger.
York-Feirn says Osprey already does its own
A/B testing, to make sure campaigns drive engagement. Phil Young at Fleet Feet Sports has
already seen the impact, saying New Balance's
Fresh Foam campaign last year drove a tremendous sales spike, but he also says it taught
him how social media lets him grow beyond
his traditional reach. He says, "When New
Balance says, 'Here's 100 bucks,' I can use that
to push to a market 20 minutes away, so yeah,
it's to sell that shoe, but it's also a great way to
grow my business." O.R.

VALUE ADDED
This digital price
tag keeps
up-to-date with
prices on the
web.

DIGITAL PRICE TAGS

It's time to E-ink your store.
NOPE, WE'RE NOT TALKING ABOUT TATTOOS.
E-ink labels, or digital price tags, have already
hit mass retail chains like Kohls. They are the
same size, roughly, as paper price tags and
mostly monochrome (think Casio watch
LCD resolution)-but they update instantly. And they're trickling down to all sorts of
non-chain outlets because they massively
cut labor costs, increase accuracy, and allow
retailers to match prices with their competition every night after closing.
Wayne Perry, co-owner of Dallas, Texasbased MarginMate, which works with stores

THE POWER
OF E-INK

Digital pricing is
an incredibly competitive industry
with multiple vendors. Depending
on your needs you
can find:

Displays that show
both the store price
and the Amazon or
other competitor
price. This also lets
a retailer show what
customers save by
factoring in shipping.

Labels with NFC
or BLE beacons.
These can "tap"
someone standing in
front of a display with
a hush-hush discount
on their phones that
show them a yet
lower price.

Inventory management. A company
called Altierre offers
price tags that store
employees can use
to see live inventory, checking, for
instance, if the shop
has another color or

ranging from 800 square feet to large chains,
says that while up-front costs for a small store
might run $5,000, that also includes tech
support and implementation. He advises
that anyone considering E-ink labels should
weigh the costs against the price of labor a
store would save in the long run, not having to
manually update paper labels. Jay Torborg,
who owns the Velotech bike shop in Portland,
Oregon, as well as biketiresdirect.com, says he
installed E-ink to be sure that his in-store pricing always matched his online pricing. "We
have 12,000 SKUs so it's hard to keep up. We
didn't want customers seeing different prices
in the store from what they could see on our
website on their phones standing in the store."
Torborg says since his website has to respond to competitors online by adjusting
pricing constantly, it only made sense to have
labeling in the store dovetailing those price
matches. It also means that his brick-andmortar store is far more competitive with any
price his customers can find online.
And digital price tags even let him alter instore pricing for special events. "We'll close the
store at night for members of our bike club to
come and shop at a discount and can readjust
pricing in an instant," Torborg says. "You just
can't do that with paper labels." -M.F.

size in stock directly
from the E-ink label
via smartphone app.
Pairing. Altierre
CEO Sunit Saxena
says increasingly
stores are using the
dynamism of E-ink to
sell slower-moving
inventory via pairing.
If a customer pauses
in front of the label for
an MSR stove, say,
that tag reads the
customer's presence
and can change to
show them the price
of the stove, plus a

gas canister, and
a set of pots and
utensils, bundled
together with a total
price discount.
Live Pricing. E-Ink
increasingly enables
stores to "relabel"
prices that are most
sensitive to online
changes on the
fly. MarginMate's
Perry says his team
helps stores price
more dynamically,
so they're not easily
undercut by e-tailer
sites. -M.F.

Summer 2017 / OUTDOOR RETAILER 13

http://www.biketiresdirect.com

Outdoor Retailer - Summer 2017

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