WEST LEBANON — Conventional wisdom says traditional brick-and-mortar retailing is on the decline, slowly dying as people shift their buying habits online.
As evidence, doomsayers point out, look at the vacant storefronts that dot the shopping plazas in West Lebanon or how not a month goes by without another legacy family business in the area closing.
Yet a handful of store owners in the core towns of the Upper Valley have — so far — seemingly defied the odds while other retailers around them have succumbed to supposedly inexorable economic forces.
Perhaps the Upper Valley business that has most successfully navigated the recent retail turbulence is Golf & Ski Warehouse, which opened 30 years ago along Route 12A in West Lebanon, before the arrival of many neighboring big box stores and five years before Amazon sold its first book and rewrote the rules of retailing.
Golf & Ski Warehouse has its own set of rules. The management keeps a laser focus on what they do well. As other stores try to do more, they stick to their niche, even if it means forgoing what would seem a logical next step.
The most pointed example happened when Golf & Ski Warehouse did the unthinkable in 2017: It abandoned its online business after two years and returned to selling golf and ski equipment and apparel only in its stores.
“We perceived (web retail) to be low risk, high return, and it turned out to be high risk, low return,” said Ned Waters, chief operating officer and partner in the four-store company. “It was far more expensive and with less revenue than we ever anticipated.”
Founded in 1989 by Scott Peters, his brother Mike Peters and Scott’s Hanover High School buddy Brad Hastings — and later joined by Scott’s wife, Amy Peters, and Waters — Golf & Ski Warehouse today has stores in Greenland, N.H.; Hudson, N.H.; and Scarborough, Maine, and it’s grown from five employees to 95.
And those employees stick around, too. Twenty-five percent have been with the company for at least 15 years, a rarity in the chain retail world.
Long history is a theme at Golf & Ski. The principals have deep roots in the Upper Valley sports community — Scott Peters was captain of the Hanover High Marauders hockey team, and the Peterses’ father was Seaver Peters, the athletic director at Dartmouth College while Hastings, who has been director of winter sports since the store’s founding, is the brother of former Olympic ski jumpers Jeff and Chris Hastings.
That history has helped the business connect with area customers, despite the predominance of big box stores and revolution in online shopping. Scott Peters and Waters said Golf & Ski Warehouse has managed to thrive because of the service customers have come to expect from the floor staff.
“I started going there as soon as I could drive,” said Bill Wilkinson, an avid golfer who grew up in Hartford and says he still pops into the store every few weeks during the summer. “If you’re buying golf equipment, you need to get fitted and get clubs that match your swing. … They know me. You can’t get that online.”
Although Peters acknowledges selling golf and ski equipment benefits from the “touch and feel” that only an in-store experience can provide, he touts the personal connection the store builds with clients.
“I preach from day one that it’s all about relationships,” he said. “The goal is not to sell something today. The goal is to develop a long-term relationship and develop the repeat customer.”
That connection extends to their distributors, too.
“Golf & Ski Warehouse breaks the mold as far as what’s happening in today’s marketplace,” said Dave Tobin, New England regional sales manager for golf equipment manufacturer Ping Golf. “There are not too many guys as knowledgeable about the business as they are.”
Indeed, by that measure, Golf & Ski Warehouse exceeds the industry norms.
Peters and Waters declined to disclose revenue for the company but said each store — West Lebanon sells the most in ski products and Hudson does the most in golf — has annual sales in the seven figures.
There are only a couple other sports stores across the country that cater exclusively to the golf and ski markets, and even though ski equipment accounts for only 20% of the stores’ business “it is invaluable,” Waters said.
The two sides of the business complement each other because the seasonality of each sport helps to carry the stores through the respective off-seasons.
“The marriage of golf and ski makes us look a lot smarter than we really are,” Peters said.
Oh sure, they’ve landed in the rough a couple times. Golf & Ski Warehouse ran the sport shops from 2010 to 2012 at the Balsams in New Hampshire before the resort ran into financial difficulties. And there was the foray into e-commerce that didn’t pan out as hoped.
“There’s a long list of things we’ve tried and failed at that remind us of who we are,” said Waters, who joined the business as a weekend sales associate on the floor when he was a student at Dartmouth College and became the fifth partner in 1990.
Given the northern New England location, wouldn’t it make sense to expand into hockey? Perhaps, Peters and Ned said, but there is already a nearby store, Stateline Sports, with its own history serving the hockey community.
“We tried hockey for one season,” Waters said.
“That was a big mistake,” Peters said with a laugh.
“People have asked about tennis since day one,” Waters added. “But we haven’t the expertise.”
“We sell golf and ski stuff. That’s who we are,” Peters explained. “We know golf. We know skiing. We don’t want to water ourselves down. When the train leaves the station, we seem to struggle.”
But, according to Steve Conley, Northeast regional sales manager for Callaway Golf who has worked with the Golf & Ski Warehouse since 1994, “one of the reasons Golf & Ski have been successful is that they were really early to the game of custom fitting.”
Conley noted that “at the time when they started a lot of people just bought clubs off the rack, but being able to be seen by an experienced fitter that built really good customer loyalty … when people bought something from them, they found they played better.”
Key to that have been the stores’ easy access to driving ranges to test drive clubs — in the case of the West Lebanon store, Golf & Ski Warehouse has had a relationship with the Johnson family’s Fore-U-Golf Center since the day it opened.
Peter Harris, Fore-U-Golf’s on-site pro, provides complimentary club evaluations and fittings for Golf & Ski Warehouse customers, which keeps him busy during the spring, summer and fall as golfers cross the Home Depot parking lot to access the driving range.
The stores have also just finished upgrading their simulation equipment with the purchase of five new state-of-the-art TrackMan 4 and six new Foresight GCHawk simulators, an investment that ran well into the six figures. When they pulled the plug on their online sales business in 2017, Peters and Waters took the money they saved and spent it reorganizing and upgrading the displays and lighting in the stores.
“A lot of retailers are stuck in the 1990s,” Peters said. “We’ve evolved our business and are constantly trying to make ourselves better.”
Many retailers did not survive the Great Recession, but Peters said those that did emerged stronger.
“If you survived that time period, you came out in a better place,” he said.
Being more a David and not a Goliath even helped them, Peters and Waters said, as they’ve avoided the fates national mega-chains like Olympia Sports, Sports Authority, Eastern Mountain Sports and others that filed for bankruptcy in the wake of the recession.
Call it Yankee conservatism — or Yankee ingenuity. For Golf & Ski Warehouse, business, like sports, has more to do with grace and conditioning than brute force and size.
“It’s never been about being the biggest. It’s never been about being No. 1,” Peters said. “One of the reasons we’ve never went into a market outside of Northern New England is because that’s never been a priority. … Every time people have tried to get too big, they’ve gone out of business.”
John Lippman can be reached at jlippman@vnews.com.
Correction
Brad Hastings is one of the founding principals of Golf & Ski Warehouse. His first name was incorrectly reported in an earlier version of this story.
