Product Launches

Launching a new product is an odd thing sometimes. It seems the Outdoor Industry has backed away from attempting to keep everything a secret until the day it actually hits the shelves. Now there is an absurd amount of buzz coming out of OR every year and people already know what's going to be new a full 6 months before it even makes it out of the factory.

On top of that some companies are doing an even earlier launch to beat out some of their competitors and to make sure there aren't any leaks. It's honestly kinda nice to see and now it's really only a matter of time before someone launches a new product and then ships it a month or two later. I'm excited to see that it's the direction many companies are making.

Last year Petzl did a large early launch with the GriGri 2. It was hugely successful and at the OR trade show the Petzl booth was absolutely going OFF! It was incredible to see everyone trying to pile into the booth to play with the new toy.

One of the reasons Petzl did such an early launch was the Friedrichshafen tradeshow in Germany. It's the first show for many companies and after that, a lot of the info is already out so it was a nice way to beat that by a little bit. The put the info up literally the day before that show started.

Fast forward to yesterday and I saw a note on Mountain Project that Black Diamond had a "Major New Climbing Product Announcement". They said they'd tell everyone on the 13th, coincidentally, the day before the Friedrichshafen show starts.

And they posted this earlier today:



I'll be honest and say that, personally, I was a little let down. See I figured they bought someone, had an autolocking belay device or had some sort of crazy new product that would change climbing as we know it. Instead we get two new lockers.

Even if reactions are decidedly mixed currently they're getting a lot of buzz and getting people psyched. So that's good.