Hangloose Snowboard and Surf Shop

Shop Name: Hangloose Snowboard & Surf Shop

Location: Vienna

Age of Shop (years trading): 19

Brands Stocked: Ripcurl, Reef, ION, Hurley, Volcom, Globe, Nikita, North Sails, Fanatic, North Kiteboarding, Liquid Force, Ronix, CTRL, Slingshot, Sailloft Hamburg, Zimtstern, Burton, Elan, 32, Capita, Union, Ride, Etc,,,, 

Website/Social media platform: www.hangloose.com / facebook.com/hanglooseWien

Hangloose is a Snow and Surf shop in Vienna that is fully equipped both in store and online. They specialise in quality and not quantity to best satisfy their customers.

How do you use social media to you advantage to promote your store? We only use Facebook to promote our sales or events. We also share links concerning the sports and lifestyle we sell and try to promote in our store.

What particular product has been the best seller? What’s working and what isn’t?

 There’s no particular product that’s not working at all, but definitely watersports is growing the most.

What is your best selling accessory category?

Sunglasses are our best selling accessories this year, we already sold them pretty well during our winter season.

What percentage of your sales are from online business (from your website)compared to your in-store sales?

Our online shop is very much related to the weather of the season itself, if it’s a good winter or summer, we sell a lot more hardware via our homepage. Our sales should be around 15% compared to in-store sales.

What are the benefits of having a physical shop over simply having an online store?

Promoting the sports and products is a lot more effective and personal in-store, than just having an online business. We can tell our customers about our own experiences and give them much more suitable and more personal advices.

What makes your store different and in what ways does your store excel beyond your competition?

For us quality is always more important than quantity, for example if you take our snowboards, we only sell boards and skis that are produced in the EU or America. We really want our customers to be satisfied with our products, so we only order stuff we believe in.

What trends do you see upcoming?

We hope the wakeboarding-boom will go on and we think that many more companies will try to produce more eco-friendly products (hardware and softgoods)

What kind of advice can you give other independent retailers who are trying to compete against the big megastores?

Try to focus on every single customer, not only to sell as much as you can. A satisfied customer will come back and maybe tell friends and family about your business.

Which up and coming brands do you hope to stock in the future?

We really like “rhythm” of our softgoods, “slingshot” in wakeboarding and “Sailloft Hamburg” in our windsurfing department.

What are you doing to pull people into your store?

We are promoting on facebook, we have our own newsletter every few weeks and we all do the sports we sell at our shop, like wakeboarding, windsurfing, snowboarding, skiing or kiteboarding.

What have been the best three selling categories for you in the last 12 months?

Skis, Wakeboards and of course clothing

Please tell us of any upcoming initiatives your shop has planned? (events, signings, re-vamps etc…)

We are not planning anything special at the moment, but there will be a Hangloose-party in Vienna soon.