Shop it to me: MissBoarder.com

We’ve been catching up with the people behind the new breed of online snowboard stores catering specifically for us female types. First up we met Adrian Palmer at California-based MissBoarder.com.

What's your name and what's your role with MissBoarder?

Adrian Palmer, President. I do all the web programming and generally annoy everyone who works for me.

How did MissBoarder start? Why was it started and who by?

We have three girls who ride in our family and finding a decent selection of gear for them was nearly impossible. Most specialty shops only had a small corner of gear dedicated to girls and we found that very often the people working in those shops were very condescending towards girls and didn't take girls seriously as riders.

Where are you based?

Originally, we were an online-only operation run out of Charlotte, NC. On October 13th, 2008 we opened our first brick and mortar location in Truckee, California and now run pretty much the whole operation from there.

Why did you decide to open the Truckee store?

Opening shops was part of our original plan. Brick and mortars of our kind just don't exist and we feel that they should. Would could have stayed online only but a lot of women want to be able to touch and feel what they are buying and just won't purchase over the internet. We wanted to give girls as many buying options as guys have and that mean opening physical stores.

How's the store going?

The shop itself is awesome. We were really pleased with the way it turned out. We get positive feedback from nearly every girl who walks in there.  Business wise, being a new shop in the area, plus the double-whammy of the recession and lack of snow in the Lake Tahoe area have made for a relatively slow season so far. Fortunately, our web sales have more than doubled compared to last year and helped carry us through these tough times.

What skills do you think it takes to run a successful online snowboard store?

Any acquired or innate business skills and/or experience will help. Also, having someone that can actually write web code and or administer a website is also very important, otherwise every time you want to update a banner on your site you have to pay for it.

Yet, there are so many established online snowboard shops out there that I believe it is equally, if not more, important to bring something to the table that is different from everyone else, something to sets your website apart from all the rest.

In our case, we had the obvious difference of being for women only but we felt we had to go beyond just "selling stuff". That's why we created all the  other features on MissBoarder.com; message boards, tutorials, news and lifestyle articles, user submitted videos and everything else... All specifically geared to give girls at least one spot in this mostly bro-oriented world of snowboarding to call their own.

Do you think women go about their snowboard and related gear shopping any differently from guys?

Yes. Dudes are a bit more brand-loyal and seem to believe that their brand is the best no matter what. Occasionally an outside influence will come along and pry them away from that brand but that's not too frequent.

Women are certainly capable of brand loyalty but they are not necessarily married to a specific brand. They might come in to our shop looking for a Burton jacket and walk out with a Betty Rides based on looks and features.

Men are also more in to hearing about statistics and numbers regarding product features. While women don't want to hear about the numbers, they want know how this product will help them enjoy their experience on the hill more than the other product.

All that being said; I don't care how awesome a product is, if it isn't stylish enough and doesn't look great most men and women won't give it a second glance.

How do you go about finding brands to stock?

For most products we aim for brands that are women's specific, like Betty Rides and Nikita, or offer women's specific lines that are more than just smaller, lighter, versions of the guys products presented in pastel colors.

How do you pick which items to stock? Do you pick everything based on what you like or do you keep different kinds of customers in mind?

We try to stock as much viable variety as we can. Being a small and relatively new company we can't take too many chances on "fringe" products and we have to be as pragmatic about product purchasing as we can. There's tons of cool stuff we'd love to get but it HAS to move, otherwise, it's just money that is sitting on the shelf depreciating.

What are your bestsellers so far this season?

For outerwear pants the hot item has to be the Betty Rides Siouxsie Pants. Betty Rides has really tapped in to what many women are looking for style-wise in pants. A lot of brands just offer guys pants in girl's colors. Betty Rides make street-styled outerwear specifically cut to let girls be (and look like) girls.

Our best selling outerwear jacket this year was probably the Nikita Airbag. Nikita is another women's specific brand that knows how women want to look on the hill. Their products are always stylish and very technical. It's hard to go wrong there.

Flux Distortion and Team Bindings are REALLY hot right now. Flux is just blowing up.

As for boards, the magne-traction boards like the Roxy Ally and the  banana-traction boards like the Roxy Eminence and the GNU B-PRO are off the chain right now and are hard to keep in stock. Also, the Technine boards have really been moving well for us too.

Are you noticing the effects of the global credit crisis at all on people's shopping habits?

Yes, things are tough all over. I think a lot of people are putting off that new jacket or board purchase until next year. We're really just trying to ride it out...

What are the most challenging aspects of your job?

Loading each new season's inventory in to the web system has got to be the most challenging; it literally takes weeks because there is absolutely no consistency on how vendors provide their product. In a perfect world, vendors would all provide their product descriptions in a standard format excel file that we could just import in to our database. Unfortunately that is not the case and most of the products you see on the web are entered by hand. Nor do all vendors provide images for every style and color so we have to shoot many of the images you see on the web ourselves. I'm not complaining (yes I am) but it's just tedious and I can't wait until we get big enough to pay a bunch of people OTHER than me to do it.

What are the best things about it?

I absolutely LOVE snowboarding, and I think that snowboarding gear is TOTALLY cool. So I kind of feel like a kid who owns a candy store. Having a legit business reason to go to cool snowboarding locales is pretty killer too.

Are you involved in events to promote women's snowboarding or do you sponsor riders?

Both, we sponsor riders through what's called the MissBoarder Patrol, which is a group of female riders who either compete or write articles for MissBoarder.com. As for events, yeah, we sponsor clinics and competitions all season.

Here is our event schedule:

2/20/2009    Boreal    Expression Session
2/21/2009    SugarBowl    B4BC
3/6/2009    Boreal    Expression Session
3/6/2009    SugarBowl    Women's Clinic
3/7/2009    SugarBowl    Women's Clinic
3/20/2009    Boreal    Expression Session
4/3 or 4/4/2009    SugarBowl     "Butter Your Muffin" Rail Jam
4/18/2009    SugarBowl    High Fives Invitational

How would you like to see the MissBoarder empire developing in the future?

You know, the typical plan; first we take over the country, then the world. Seriously, we are looking to open MissBoarder shops in key snowboarding locations across the country and eventually expand across the globe. All the shops will be tied together into a single community by our website with unique offerings like free board tunings for the life of your MissBoarder  purchased board, product exchanges at any MissBoarder location and other programs that will be disclosed at a later date. Yeah ... so any interested investors out there; check us out and drop me an email.

Visit www.missboarder.com to find out more and check out the goods.