BOULDER, CO (BRAIN)—Leisure Trends Group, a full service market research company, hopes to fill a major gap in bicycle industry retail sales data.
The Boulder, Colorado-based company is working toward building a retail panel of independent bicycle dealers who will provide monthly sales data from their point-of-sale systems. It hopes to release its first reports at the end of the year.
“We’ve been looking at the bicycle industry for a long time,” said Jason Gee, director of retail sales tracking for Leisure Trends. “The reason we’re moving in this direction is requests from manufacturers as well as from retailers.”
Leisure Trends collects retail sales data for a variety of industries including snow sports, outdoor, paddle sports, running specialty stores, athletic apparel and scuba diving. More than 2,000 retailers send their data once a month for the various industries, Gee said.
“Our services are an ideal fit to help manufacturers understand what’s selling at retail as well as to help retailers better manage inventory,” Gee added.
Gee said Leisure Trends is in talks with manufacturers and trade organizations regarding funding for the research. It also has approached the National Bicycle Dealers Association to form a partnership. The NBDA would help Leisure Trends recruit retailers.
“Clearly we believe this program would be good for our industry or else we would not have done it ourselves years ago,” said Fred Clements, NBDA’s executive director. The NBDA tracked retail sales of bikes from 1995 to 2004, but its program eventually ended due to cost.
Leisure Trends is still in the preliminary stages and hasn’t started soliciting retail participation. About 100 retailers that already report their sales sell bicycles, even though they may not be a bicycle-only shop.
“Our goal is to at least capture one-third of all bicycle sales in our raw data so we can very accurately represent the industry,” Gee said.
Independent bicycle dealers who participate will gain access to Leisure Trends’ reports at no cost. Gee said individual store sales data is kept confidential.
Leisure Trends would track the sale of every bike by brand, model and price and could eventually expand to include parts and accessories. It would also show how much inventory is still on the shelves.
Retailers interested in participating can contact Gee at jgee@leisuretrends.com. Suppliers should reach Julia Day at jday@leisure trends.com.
—Lynette Carpiet
