RETAILING continued
tank, a backpack, and a wetsuit; the real business was teaching and repair, with Oregon's coastal spearfishing competitions helping drive sales. The 1970s brought buoyancy compensators and a full-time service department; the late 1990s brought dive travel, travel-friendly gear, and higher-margin training, like enriched air nitrox.
else pulling at a customer's time and money. It’s the jet-ski dealer, the paddleboard shop, the rafting outfitter, the mountain bike store. Outdoor recreation has exploded, and all of it drains from the same pool. People simply don’t have time to fully commit to all these activities. So he doesn’t poach customers and he welcomes anyone
Hollingshead’s instinct throughout has been to change carefully rather than chase the latest trend. He keeps an active online presence – website, email newslet- ter, Facebook – but won't sell gear online; the in-person approach, he argues, lets the shop educate customers rather than just sell to them. The one piece of passive marketing he swears by is the T-shirt
who walks in from another shop. He swaps notes with owners in Seattle and Portland, because the way he sees it, the industry is small and the real threat to the business is online stores. Brick-and- mortar stores survive only if shops help customers understand their value. “Us dive shops have to work together to get people into the mindset of supporting
divers earn for finishing their Open Water course, declaring them proudly certified in the Pacific Northwest. Students love to wear it, and the shop's logo sits front and center. Run lean. The one time the store came closest to not making it was during the pandemic. “It was the hardest time of my life as far as the business goes,” Hollingshead says. Eugene shut down. The pools closed for nearly a year, and even some areas of the local lakes where they trained were closed. Though a lot of hard decisions had to be made, Hollingshead kept every employee on. He gave employees time off without reducing their pay and took advantage of PPP loans and any other programs available to him. But the bigger change was strategic. Years of saying “yes” to dive gear manufacturers had left the shop carrying too many brands, too much inventory, and thus too much pressure from manufacturers to buy into programs to protect margins. Hollingshead finally cut back to the lines he genuinely believed in and made real money on. That helped a lot. But the part he still gets emotional about is the support the shop got from customers. It was the regulars – longtime cus- tomers who came in during the worst of it and quietly bought a regulator, dive computer, or gift certificate, often purchasing something they did not need, and told him plainly they wanted to make sure the shop survived. Sure enough, it survived at a time when many other dive shops did not. “It’s still emotional when I think of it,” Hollingshead says, tearing up. The competition is not the shop down the road. Ask Hollingshead who he's up against and he won't name another dive store. “Quit looking at other dive shops as ene- mies.” The real competition, the way he sees it, is everything
their local business. We have to earn their trust. We have to make them want to do business with us. We have to make them want to see us survive.” People you don't have to replace. Another part of the secret sauce is the staff. ESDS barely turns anyone over. John, the Assistant Manager, gave the
SCUBA DIVING INDUSTRY 27
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