Camping Accessories
In idea #075 I talked about tents and marquees, which is not what this business idea is about, although it is related. For every camping trip, caravan holiday, hike, or climbing trip there are a whole bunch of accessories such as pocket knives, carabiners, portable stoves, and sleeping bags. Take a look at sites like www.campingandleisure.co.uk to see the variety of goods available.
You can choose to sell one kind of accessory and specialise or to become an aggregator. If you can find drop shippers who will put together the orders and deliver for you then you can focus on the marketing, but you will make less money this way. Being a specialist allows you to focus on finding one or two good suppliers and keep most of the mark up. You can always expand into other lines later on. One strategy might be to sell something like camping stoves, and then sell gas canisters as an add-on, but mark them up. If the stoves are good value you may be able to make more profit on the canisters than the stove itself. If you recommend two canisters at the time of purchase most customers will go along with it.
In terms of marketing you can try the following: -
Camp shops
Ebay
Website
Other people’s websites
Boy Scouts
Clubs and organisations
Most camp shops carry some basic equipment, but it is still worth asking whether they are interested in carrying additional items on a sale or return basis. They may also want to replace their existing suppliers if you can beat the prices that they are being quoted, or if you have a service element that makes sense to them such as 24 hour delivery on out of stock items. The advantage of camp shops is that they have constant traffic of very targeted customers i.e. people who are camping.
Ebay has thousands of items listed under camping but only a dozen under camping accessories (a further 20 Ebay stores). Camping stove has 265 listings and pocket knife has 5960. I think I would list under accessories!
Building your own website is relatively easy and more cost effective than say printing catalogues. If you promote the website through adverts, business cards, word of mouth and other cost effective means you should attract sufficient browsers without trying to battle the 7.8 million results for “camping accessories” on Google.
Other people’s websites are also a possible source of business. A search for camping clubs found me http://camping.about.com/od/campingclubs/Camping_Clubs.htm which is a great site, recommends gifts and other products but doesn’t sell anything per-se. I am sure an approach including a share of profits to their webmasters would lead to a change in approach. Equally you could sign camping bloggers up as affiliates and ask them to promote your products.
The first thing I think of when I think of camping is the Boy Scouts. I imagine that every other person who has thought about the camping business has the same thought. If however you can offer some kind of discount, or a unique product or service to them as an organisation they may well consider working with you. It may be smartest to arrange to meet their PR people first and see if you can understand what kind of offers might be sympathetically received.
Clubs and organisations in general are a good place to start. “About:camping” (listed above) has a list of camping clubs in America. You can also find them in your area simply by searching online for say “camping club Arizona”. Make a similar approach to the one suggested for the boy scouts above. Say a free bar of “Kendal Mint cake” for something of similar low value to every member who visits your site. This will quickly build you an e-mail and snail mail addresses (you have to send the gift somewhere) list of customers that you can market to again later.
www.alibaba.com has 4700 product listings under a search for “camping”.
www.Shopoutdoors.com will drop-ship for a 3% fee if you want to go down the aggregation route. This would be by far the simplest way to sell a range of products, simply copy product information to your own website and run all the orders from your website back through www.shopoutdoors.com who will deliver to your customers. The only problem with this is that they will probably include return contact details; and you are giving them your customers’ addresses.
You had better be a camper, climber, caravaner or similar outdoors type before you try and bluff your way around this product range.