Elevated Surfcraft Snowboards 2024/25 Preview
Retail Buyers Guide: Snowboards FW24/25 Retail Buyer’s Guide
Brand: Elevated Surfcraft
Interviewee: Aaron Sababba Owner/Shaper
How would you describe the current state of the snowboard market? What big developments, changes, challenges, and/or opportunities are you seeing and how is your brand navigating them?
We continue to see exploration and progression into directional shapes, and more and more surfers traveling to the mountains to expand their riding season. There is a larger and larger demographic of maturing riders, as well as female riders and the grom are looking for thr new cool to get into.
Following overall price increase, any positive developments with regards to manufacturing, sourcing, or logistics and the changes you’ve made? Are there any examples you can share of how your business pivoted effectively? What developments are you seeing with regards to product pricing?
we continue to develop the range of our quiver and aim our pricing to fit with the niche and specialty style market. Implementing techniques like payment plans and communicating the longer lifespan of our product seems to allow for slightly higher than normal pricing.
Is e-commerce sales still strong since most brands have been put a lot of effort in physical retail?
We find that marketing and selling online allows us the greatest reach to our specific demographic, but having boards in shop, available to hold flex and examine the quality, along with try, and a demo before buying is still a highly valuable and viable way of the market.
Past last winter and the lack of snow in Europe, what’s your overall sales and production/inventory strategy for 24/25?
I Boards are designed for carryover as it’s not our goal to update the graphics every year and make a quality product that facilitates customers to buy more shapes rather than by the same shape in a new color each year.
SNOWBOARD SPECIFIC
What trends or developments are you seeing with regards to board construction, shapes, and general innovation? How is this shaping your 24/25 range?
Over our years of development, we are really impressed with the polyurethane sidewalls, and have dialed in our core materials and the flexes they provide. We continue to refine her shapes with feedback from our customers and a few small tweaks an important areas seem to make a big difference
Any new design or pattern approaches in your 24/25 gear? Any collabs on the line?
We are currently working on an entry-level board to facilitate a lower price point as well as easily accessible rental shapes.
Are you planning to focus on a special product range or type of customers? What’s your newest range?
This year we are fully lunch in a 5’5 Egg – a midlength board for the midlife rider, and the 5’3 Salmon- a Boards pacifically designed