Dan Abrams talks to Backcountry Magazine's Adam Howard about the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the outdoor industry.
A chat about the state of the industry with Thor Verdonk, Alpine Technical Product Director for Lange, Rossignol and Dynastar; Jason Levinthal, founder of Line and J-Skis; and Dan Abrams, cofounder of Flylow.
Last April, soon after the COVID-19 shutdown, Backcountry Magazine's Adam Howard hosted a podcast episode on the impact of the early days of the pandemic on the ski industry. He talked to Flylow cofounder Dan Abrams, as well as Thor Verdonk from Rossignol and Jason Levinthal, founder of Line and J-Skis, about everything from delays in manufacturing to stores cutting orders to what their anticipated concerns were for the virus' impacts on the ski economy. It was the most listened to episode of the Backcountry Podcast.
So, in February, Howie called up the same trio again for another podcast episode—a follow-up to the original call—to see how those early predictions and issues are panning out now, nearly a year into the pandemic.
As the pandemic has gone on, participation in outdoor recreation has been on the rise, and it turns out, the outdoor industry is actually seeing a spike. So the episode, it turns out, isn't entirely a lament after all. "Things were kind of dire. We looked at reducing our inventory for fall," Abrams says in the episode. "And then, outdoor sports started to go off. Mountain bike sales started going crazy. It put all of our brands on the bright side of it ... We started to see this shift in the company happen."