"Much like Blackberry, KSWC pioneered a new technology. And like Blackberry, KSWC is stubbornly hanging onto its original blueprint."

If you ever have the good fortune to grace the fabled Kelly Slater wavepool in Lemoore, California, you will be awed by its size, the shore where the right extinguishes itself after one minute of riding barely able to be seen, even with squinted eyes.

I rode the joint in 2017, nine waves lassoed, and have yet to sight or command a wave, even close to as good.

Therefore, a terrific surprise this morning when a wavepool expert slammed the Kelly Slater Wave Co pool as “obsolete the day it was unveiled.”

Skip Taylor, a Partner of Surf Park Management told wavepool mag, the reason there hadn’t been another Slater tank built since it’s unveiling in December 2015 was that,

“What happens time after time is once people start to dig into the financial feasibility and see the limited capacity, the large footprint of the venue, the scale of civil construction, and the awkwardness of the pool shape to build around, KSWC quickly gets dismissed in most cases.”

Meanwhile, Wavegarden, Perfect Surf and Endless Surf, smaller, modular tech, dominate the market.

When the developers of that wild housing estate built around a pool near São Paulo, Praia da Grama and Boa Vista Village, looked at the various techs, they dug the Kelly pool but came to the same conclusion as everyone else, it don’t have the commercial potential of its rivals.

And that wild little double shot air combo? No way the Slater pool touches that. Surfers are already calling it the most high-performance wave on earth.

Author of the comprehensive story, Evan Quarnstrom, posits,

I liken the position of Slater’s pool to the Blackberry cell phone circa 2010.

Blackberry was a pioneer in the cell phone space and even the preferred option of then US president Barack Obama. They had an industry-leading 43% of the market share in the US at their peak.

Then came the iPhone with its touchscreen technology.

Blackberry insisted on sticking with a keyboard. Their complacency spelled the beginning of the end. After an initial aversion to transition with the market trends and a far-too-late attempt to enter the smartphone market, the Blackberry cell phone finally sputtered to an inevitable death with its final model in 2018.

Much like Blackberry, KSWC pioneered a new technology – in this case a wave that could mimic the power of the ocean. And like Blackberry, KSWC is stubbornly hanging onto its original blueprint. As markets demand a smaller pool with a higher wave rate, KSWC is sticking to its guns.

Read more here!

From the post-truth department!

While doing some work-related research on market trends, I came across this interview with Ted Post, president of the National Candle Group, the leading industry coalition that generates candle standards; and that tracks retail trends for the candle industry. 

It’s buried behind the paywall of The Wall Street Journal, so I can’t provide the link. 

However, key content is pasted here for the edification of BG readers:

According to Post, there has been both an unprecedented and unpredicted increase of candle sales in the United States over the last 5 weeks. 

When contacted by The Wall Street Journal, Post explained,

“This has caught our industry totally by surprise. Both suppliers, distributors, and retailers are perplexed, as we have tracked an increase of 280% of sales compared to the same time horizon of the 2021 retail year. This is exciting, but of course alarming, in a good way, as more sales of quality produced candles is our goal. Candles make every social gathering more memorable. However, in this compressed retail environment with ‘just-in-time’ sales trends dominating the retail ecosystem, many retailers are stressed to keep up with this unfound rise in demand.  

When asked why there has been this unpredictable increase, and what it says about consumers, Post responded,

“Well, there are certain retail times of year where we know candles will sell: the holidays, especially Hanukkah and Christmas; Passover; Halloween/Day of the Dead; and Valentine’s Day. Those are dependable retail clusters where we expect 1,000% increases, and our suppliers and retailers work hard at those times to provide quality to our customers. So this sales trend caught us totally unawares, which of course on many levels is a good thing to have happened.

We did our due diligence and sent out a survey to retailers in the US. This was also mirrored with our networks in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. It turns out sales are being driven entirely by a single demographic: white men in their 50s and 60s, often about 30 to 50 lbs overweight, who wear “thongs” and cargo shorts, and a tight surf-brand tee shirt that shows too tight on their beer bellies. Never in our wildest dreams did we imagine such a demographic–how does one predict and thus prepare marketing campaigns for this demographic? It turns out this demographic trend holds in all US coastal states, and the same in our international markets. Then, weirdly, there was an increase of candle sales by a factor of 300% in Oklahoma, of all places. That one is even harder for us to figure out.”

Post was asked why he thinks these precise demographic of customers are flocking to get candles in these specific locations:

“That’s weird, too. The #1 response for why the purchase, at a rate that statistically dwarfs any other response, was ‘I’m hoping for Kelly to get Gisele.’ That’s basically been the overwhelming reason given. Really, the only reason given. Then, oddly, after saying this, the male will put on sunglasses and make some esoteric hand signal where they extend their thumb and pinky while closing the three middle fingers, and walk away, content with their new purchase.”

Post concludes by saying, “This has me stumped. I’ve been in the candle industry for 25+ years. I live, eat, and breathe candles. Candles have put my kids through college. Never would I have predicted that a bunch of over-50 year old men in coastal towns, would care about lesbian relationships.”

BG has learned two things over the last couple of days: Chas relishes beating dead horses to oblivion; resuscitating said dead horse; and then beating it to death again. 

The second is that Chas can singlehandedly skew whole retail markets. 

More as consumer trends emerge…

#WeAreBeachgrit