Editor’s note: A bicycleretailer.com story posted June 18 incorrectly stated that The NPD Group’s Sports and Leisure business would begin reporting expanded cycling sales data outside the specialty retail channel, including big-box and online retailers, starting in September. While such reporting is on NPD’s radar, the timing for that has not been set. We regret the error and any confusion it may have caused. A corrected version of the story appears below.
BOULDER, Colo. (BRAIN) — The NPD Group in September will begin reporting integrated data from its purchase of Leisure Trends Group as the combined company takes a more product category-focused approach to reporting retail sales than the industry-focused approach historically practiced by Leisure Trends.
Market research company NPD acquired Leisure Trends last year, and June sales figures reported at the end of July will mark the last time the two report data independently, Jim Kelley, president of NPD’s Sports and Leisure Trends business, said during a webinar and call Wednesday about the companies’ integration.
“What we’re going to be doing is taking the industry-focused data from Leisure Trends and turning it on its side to put it in NPD’s product category structure,” he said. “So we’ll now be looking at the data from a product category perspective. What this means is if we’re looking at a specific category within apparel, we’ll be able to look at it in outdoor specialty, in run specialty, in the big-box stores, in department stores—really to give us that whole picture of what’s going on in a given category.”
The new product focus means certain items will be removed from the cycling tracking service, such as car racks, hydration and apparel except for cycling shoes. “Car racks serve a variety of purposes. Hydration is coming out of that because hydration serves a variety of purposes,” Kelley explained to BRAIN.
Cycling sales will continue to be tracked through the specialty retail channel, as Leisure Trends has previously done, but the combined company now has access to more than 26,000 stores across the retail landscape, including sporting goods chains, department stores, mass merchants and e-commerce operations. During Wednesday’s call, Kelley singled out cycling as an area that could benefit from expanding tracking beyond specialty retail.
“In the cycling channel right now we track sales in the IBD channel, the specialty stores for the bike business. But there is a lot of additional volume happening in the bike business across a variety of stores, from the sporting goods channels to the mass retailers to toy merchants such as Toys R Us. A lot of that data we’re already getting in house right now, so we have the opportunity to expand that to provide a much larger picture of categories that we’re currently tracking across additional channels,” he said.
Kelley also noted that the merger has helped with retailer recruitment efforts at the combined company, which recently brought aboard outdoor chains Cabela’s and Eastern Mountain Sports.
