One shop interviewed abides by the mantra, “Stack it high, and watch’em buy,” a plan that has worked great with hard bow cases and tubs of deer mineral. It works great with cube-type targets as well.
Few things are as satisfying to an avid bowhunter as wandering into a favorite pro shop and finding a new piece of must-have gear. Whatever the time of year, promising, great-looking new gear can bring us back, instantly, to our precious times on stand — and thoughts of increased bowhunting success. Talk about wallet-opening inspiration.
Does your shop stock that type of “gotta-have-it” gear? Well of course it does, but will every customer who enters your shop know it? Or does it get lost in a jumbled sea of sameness? Most shops struggle with effective gear displays, and pay for it by moving far less gear than they could. Here are some thoughts from shops that are on the right path to gear-display success.
Andy Larson runs Bwana Archery in St. Paul, Minnesota, a third-generation pro shop that’s been around since 1974, but has recently undergone a facelift renovation that has revamped displays, spurred sales, and helped the shop operate more efficiently than ever.
According to Larson, Bwana is an “average”-sized shop featuring 20 shooting lanes and retail space that was re-imagined during the recent Covid-pandemic years, mostly because there was time to do so during a nearly 2-month shutdown. Larson said it was one of the most-productive things the shop could have done.
“What we did, basically, is we moved some key items from the shop interior, mainly bows, to the exterior shop walls,” Larson explained. “So now the outer shop walls are mostly bows, and inside are gondolas. It made the shop look a lot bigger, it spread everything out, and greatly improved access to foot traffic. So now it’s a lot less daunting, and it seems much more modern. A typical ‘older’ shop is packed with gear from floor to ceiling, but if you check out more-modern shops — including modern big-box stores — mostly everything is displayed at chest level and down.”
So Why the Focus to Renovate?
“Past management would say, change is not their forte, so this was the first renovation in 20-some years,” Larson said. “And going forward, I will try to do at least some type of ‘facelift’ every 5 years.
“For us, part of the mindset with this change was making everything a little more accessible, so now you can pick up all the bows, handle them. The ability to handle products, that’s always been a big one for me. I talk all day at work, so when I’m out shopping on my own I’m hesitant to ask someone for help, so accessibility has always been big for me. And good lighting is also big.
“If something is in the shadows, it just gets overlooked. Making sure your displays can catch the right light. If everything is packed too high, it just kills your lighting.”
Dan Ellyson is the co-owner and general manager of A-1 Archery in Hudson, Wisconsin, which recently went through a facelift of its own that has positively impacted gear display and shop efficiency. The shop moved to a new location back in 2014, moving out of the city limits into the township. The move resulted in upgrading to 10,500 square feet of retail/indoor range space that is a third larger than its previous location. Another bonus is the new location also features an attached, fenced-in 80-yard outdoor range.
“Our new location is actually an old boat dealership that I bought on foreclosure,” Ellyson explained. “They had a boat showroom, and a large back area for boat maintenance, with big high open ceilings that is ideal for our indoor range, and they had 2.5 acres, half is fencing with barbed wire that was perfect to build an outdoor archery range.
“When it comes to consistently effective gear displays, I would say that over the years we’ve 100 percent struggled with it. But really, if I were to break it down, it isn’t so much that you struggle with display, but where do you store all the product you’re buying? If you’re buying in quantity, in order to get the best terms and hit free freight, you might have to buy, say, 70 hard bow cases, but where do you put them? Those are large items. Many times, shops can’t bring in a lot because they have no place to store those quantities.
“So my answer was, I recently bought a house on several acres with 20,000 square feet of storage on the property, with four outbuildings. In the past, I rented storage lockers — I rented a 20x10-foot storage locker, for $150 per month for excess inventory. So when I was looking for a new home, I wanted to take advantage of the good deals that would be available for larger quantities. So that’s what I did, and it’s worked out great.”
To further increase shop efficiency, Ellyson has purchased several trailers that he uses to shuttle gear back to the shop as needed, as well as a skid steer to load and offload gear-packed pallets.
Create Some Buzz
“As far as in-store displays, I typically try to abide by the mantras, ‘Stack it high, and watch’em buy,’ and ‘Stack it low and it’s going to go slow,’ Ellyson said. “And in my experience, those are 100 percent true. If I build a huge stack of hard bow cases and put a sign on them saying, ‘Plano bow cases $69.99,’ I’ll rotate through those so fast it’ll blow your mind. But if you start to run low and forget to restock it, those last few cases will just sit there. It’s crazy. Stack them up again and they’ll sell like crazy again. The more inventory I have, the more I sell; the higher the pile, the more interest it draws.
“We also sell a lot of Lucky Buck mineral. It’s the same thing as with bow cases. I buy 50 buckets at a time, then stack them up. Guys see that and will buy two to five at a time. The moment it gets down to two or three buckets, I won’t sell another for weeks.”
Still another example of the efficiency of A-1’s current shop and inventory system is its dealings with a popular e-bike company. Ellyson said the bikes ship in very large boxes, measuring 6 feet by 4 feet, with six to a pallet.
“They want you to buy six bikes at a time to hit free freight, but it works out good,” he said. “So now I stock ‘one to show’ in the shop, and ‘one to go’ when sold, and every time I need one I simply bring one in from storage. Buying in quantities to hit free freight just makes good sense, because freight on lower quantities of large items like treestands or bow cases might be $300 to $400.”
See It, Feel It, Try It
Ellyson says effectively displaying smaller items starts with the right type of interactive display.
“I think the best thing you can do is build a display that allows customers to engage with the product, and/or it gives your employee an opportunity to engage a customer with it. A big one for us is high-end crossbow scopes. We deal with TenPoint, Mission and Ravin, and one thing they have in common is they like to put relatively low-quality scopes on them. So we built a display with high-quality Hawke scopes mounted on plain crossbow stocks. As you’re engaging a customer on crossbows, or maybe while you’re working on his, you can mention their scope looks a little blurry, and ask them, ‘Have you ever seen a really good one?’ Then hand them the stock with scope and let them see for themselves. Inevitably they will say, ‘Holy cow, this is nice.’ Now, if I simply stacked some boxes of those same scopes on the counter, they probably wouldn’t even get a second glance.
“Another good example: I brought in a lot of rattle bags this year. I had a wall display, and I took one out of the package and hung it there. If somebody came over and tried rattling it, they were buying it. It’s $10. But if I had them just sitting there in boxes, I probably wouldn’t have sold any. Because that approach doesn’t engage the customer.
“Now, past that, I’ll take advantage of any displays that manufacturers will offer. A lot of times, if you buy a certain (larger) quantity, they will ship you a display with it. I will always take their displays. We’ve also built a few of our own displays. I once had a $6,000 arrow display built because I wanted the best arrow display in the country. It’s about 20 feet long, has multiple tubes, it looks unbelievable, and it’s been worth every cent. It encourages interaction, and it’s so much better than displaying a six-pack of arrows in a box on a wall.
Is There a Magic Display Formula?
“For us our displays and placement are primarily about creating good foot traffic flow,” Larson said. “We try to get people to walk past some of the impulse-type stuff, with good examples being rangefinders and binoculars, and other small hunting accessory odds and ends such as heating products. We keep the staples, including rests, sights and releases, right in the middle of the showroom, because those tend to be popular items. But on a yearly basis, moving, say, broadheads around, or traditional archery stuff around, that does OK for us.
“Having enough of a selection to spread everything out is also critical. A lot of guys like to browse and see the new stuff, and you have to have enough options to keep them looking long enough to hopefully buy something.
“Another critical issue is cleanliness. Keeping dust off products and displays goes a long way. We also try to be as frugal as we can. We repurpose a lot of old peg board, and our glass counters are actually the vintage makeup counters out of the old Herberger's department store chain that closed down (in the Twin Cities area) a while back. We scarfed up the display units at a good price, instead of buying them new; they can be very expensive.”
“I think the biggest thing, once you have your inventory, you try to drill down on what’s really going to sell,” Ellyson explained. “Trophy Ridge makes some very nice sights, with great innovation, and they might offer 20 models, but we might carry six that make sense. And once you find everything you want to stock, it comes down to keeping the wall full of product. I think displays are important, because they will express, instantly, how serious your shop is. If someone walks in with a special product in mind, and they see a bunch of sub-par, poorly stocked displays, they will likely think, ‘Can this shop even help me?’ To me, the quality of your displays and selection tell the customer how serious you are.”
Sidebar: Handling ‘New to the Shop’ Gear
“I have a real special place for new gear, and it’s called Facebook,” said Dan Ellyso of A-1 Archery in Hudson, Wisconsin. “That’s your ‘display’ for new stuff. You can let 1,000 people know about it before it even enters your shop. And it works. Customers come in asking, ‘Where is it?’
“I hired a company to do Facebook posting for me, and we have posts every day. If it’s not a video about a new product, it’s a photo of something that we offer, or do. For that we pay about $20,000 per year. And is it worth it? My answer is “Yes!” with an exclamation point.
“To give you an example of the effectiveness of Facebook, just this morning — 48 minutes ago to be exact — we posted a video that shows off the new-for-2024 Hoyt Alpha bow, that so far, has 280 views,” Ellyson said in early November 2023. “There isn’t a display I can make pretty enough to have that kind of power. And yesterday, 21 hours ago, we had a video of someone talking about the new-for-2024 Hoyt RX8 bow, which now has 2,100 views. We do one post per day, and you want to talk about instant feedback. You would be amazed at the power of it. And It’s much better than loading gear up on eBay and paying fees. And I know we could be doing even more on social media, but that’s life in the 21st century, that’s where we‘re at. You’ve got to be better than the next shop.”
Photos by Mark Melotik
