Specialty retail is an ever-evolving space where customers expect seamless shopping experiences both online and in-person. To better understand how retailers are navigating this landscape, we hosted a roundtable with store owners, merchandise managers and buyers from outdoor & action sport stores across the country. The goal? To gain deeper insights into their needs related to ecommerce assets and data management.

Specialty Retailers Are Navigating a Unique Landscape

In today’s market, consumers increasingly shop across multiple channels, splitting their purchases between local specialty stores, big box retailers, and ecommerce and brick & mortar visits. This puts specialty retailers in a challenging position where they must not only deliver a unique in-store experience but also compete with DTC offerings from the brands they carry. Our roundtable discussion reinforced the idea that specialty retailers need to differentiate themselves, all while managing the complexities of ecommerce and staying true to their brand.

What We Heard

1. The Challenge of Curating Visual Assets and Product Data

One of the most common struggles we discussed was the difficulty in gathering and curating consistent visual assets and product data from brand partners. Specialty retailers often find themselves juggling incomplete or outdated information, which makes it harder for them to represent the brands effectively across their own digital platforms. Because each manufacturing brand creates, manages and shares content differently, retailers want a standardized method for accessing this information for use in their own ecommerce, marketing and POS systems.

2. Streamlining Tools and Saving Resources is Key

Retail partners stressed the importance of tools and processes that can help streamline asset management and manipulation, saving both time and resources. They shared how inefficiencies in this area can slow down their operations and prevent them from focusing on creative marketing and customer engagement. When presented with ShowLabs’ variant creation engine, SHYFT, they were excited about the potential to reduce steps in their ecommerce publishing process, with market-ready assets shared directly from their brand partners. Each retailer stressed that any solution that simplifies this process and saves valuable resources, provides immense value.

3. Balancing Brand-Provided Assets with Custom Content

Another major takeaway from the roundtable was the retailers’ need to strike a balance between using brand-provided visual assets and creating their own content. While they appreciate having access to high-quality assets from their brand partners, they still spend time creating unique content that helps them stand out from both other retailers and the brands’ own DTC channels. Finding ways to customize and personalize content for their local markets is a key area of focus.

Why It All Matters

These insights are invaluable as we continue to support brands in their omnichannel content creation. By understanding the challenges for just one key endpoint—specialty retailers—we can develop tools and processes that better serve both sides of the commerce equation. We’re committed to helping our partners streamline their asset creation and management, all while giving retailers the tools they need to create engaging content for their market.

What Brands Can Do To Better Support Their Retail Partners

• Provide complete and consistent product information, in the form of both visual assets (for ecomm and marketing) and product-specific data like tech specs, SKU or UPCs and naming conventions.
• Create an easy way for wholesale partners to access the visual content and product data. This alleviates the headache of having to track down incomplete information, season after season.
• Provide the visual assets and product information as soon as possible. This way retailers can focus resources on creating market-specific and unique content, rather than having to rush to market come sell-through season.

Special thanks to our friends at Al’s Sporting Goods, Alpine Shop, Milo Snow & Skate, Ski Town All-Stars, Summit Hut and Paragon Sports for taking the time to share their valuable insights!