Aight. Things are starting to shake out, the word is starting to leak out. And I am reminded of the purported (but highly doubtful) Chinese curse, May you live in interesting times. If "interesting" is synonymous with unpredictable or chaotic then things are definitely getting interesting. All this coming week VFTD will have (probably) daily items of interest, mostly industry-related to report.
The only positive spin I can put on much of what's coming is that opportunity exists in periods of change.
To get y'all started I'm going with one of the more positive items. As was rumored some time ago Walmart chose to discontinue carrying JT Sports paintball stuff including the subsidiary brand like Viewloader and WGP. The related word at that time was that Walmart sales accounted for anywhere from 40 - 50% of all JT sales but paintball sales in all the box stores as declined in recent years and is losing shelf space everywhere.
However, the latest is that Draxxus has picked up the Walmart account JT lost. It's a temporary reprieve at best for Draxxus--which is producing more paint than ever and still struggling--because Walmart still intends to phase out paintball gear sales. The deal should (hopefully) help Draxxus over the next year or so anyway.
Saturday, December 19, 2009
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6 comments:
Way off subject here,but I just read the Jeff stein interview over at pro paintball and although the top of the interview and you yourself said at in a previous post that this is not the end of the hurricanes as a brand and this isn't the end of Jeff stein's involvement in paintball, I don't hear anything new. Can you give any update on that?
Can I? Yes. Will I? Sorry, no. I expect lots of folks are curious and I expect Jeff will make any announcements he wants to when he's ready.
Did not Draxxus sell/lease the Xball brand to Wallmart some time ago?
"Aight"? What is that? Baca, in the paintball world you are considered an old Geezer (just like me). Quit trying to be "hip"
Looking forward to more intresting news. I'm not really surprised with WalMart's decision to drop paintball from their product line.
Peter
Couldn't tell you as I don't remember. As I understand this is different. Teh good stuff is coming, starting Monday.
Reiner
If I do it, it's hip--by definition. ;)
If it's a niche product, Walmart wants products that can sell themselves.
Paintball isn't selling itself anymore to the public, so it's no wonder people aren't buying it at Walmart anymore. And most of the people who started buying at Walmart got converted to the local store or online as they upgraded/got more serious.
Walmart isn't going to pay to launch a big ad campaign on paintball. Too bad we didn't have any visionaries in the companies that worked closely with Walmart to try and do more aggressive co-operative advertising at the general public-- "last chance.... gone!".
I worry this will be like the ESPN fiasco years back...once someone made the decision to have paintball off ESPN it was hard to get it back on.
(if any of this paintball being dropped from Walmart stuff is true anyway... source?)
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