Year in
review
As we wave goodbye to 2005
and say hello to a new year we have decided to take a look
at what the past year has brought.
Market
growth
Well folks, it's become a
lot less of a debate. As of the last half of 2005 the sport
of slacklining is going main stream. Each quarter
our sales grew tremendously and it hasn't shown any signs of
slowing down. We now have thousands of slacklines out there,
at least a few in every state and hundreds in various
countries across the world. We have slacklines in places
like the upper Yukon, Thailand and all the way to military
bases in Afghanistan and Iraq. More and more non-climbers
are joining the sport and they seem to be having a blast.
We also have now increased
our staff significantly and we had to hustle like crazy to
make hundreds of slacklines to meet the Christmas rush.
Trends look good so we're expecting 2006 to be a major year
for the sport of slacklining. I expect more slackline
competitions, slackline clubs at universities and simply
more slackers out there. To sum it all up, we're psyched
about how fast the sport is growing and we're looking
forward to the new year.
New gear
2005 was a year of
polishing up our designs and for fostering a maturity in the
sport. We released all sorts of new designs and tweaked
existing product lines into a entire new level of
performance.
Primo kit released
Our
primo slackline kit is our
new pride and joy. After continually working on our designs
we found a way of eliminating all need for carabiners, knots
and any nylon-on-nylon contact. We utilized a new sling
design that brought all system weight as close to the line
end as possible and even allowed for quick and easy removal
of the tensioning system. The tensioning widget* includes a
reset-able throw system which can tighten any length of
slackline even easier than our previous super tensioning
add-on pack. The widget also allows for nearly instant
removal of the ratchet allowing for minimal weight in the
slackline during use. Not only is it just that slick, once
we got the design finalized we were even able to
produce the slackline kit for far less than we originally
planned. We utilized the same designed slings on our
Intro kit and upgraded our 100 foot
slackline kit to a 100 foot primo kit.
Padding
While we always knew it was
important to pad our slacklines, we never were convinced we
had found the perfect solution for padding. While nothing in
lift is perfect we improved the process greatly when we
began using segments of 2" tubular webbing to create a heavy
duty sheath around the anchoring webbing to increase the
abrasion resistance of the kit and to help protect trees
from being damaged. Refer to our online community for a more
in depth
discussion on padding slacklines.
Do-It-Yourself
For those looking to build
their own custom slacklines we've been supplying those hard
to find components. We've improved our array of hardware a
bit, added a few new sewn items as well. We also added a few
highline specific items to our product line up too. Without
saying too much, we do have some major plans for new items
in this area.
Web site changes
Thanks to upgrades in our
web hosting plan we were finally able to bring back our
Slackline Community. While it is
still rather fledgling, we hope that it will allow us to
foster an even higher level of information interchange among
the slackline community.
Looking
back
This year we had a blast
road tripping cross country (a shout out to Laguna!), made a lot of
friends, spread the sport as best we could, made a lot of
people happy and even learned a lot. I know all of us here
at Slackline Express wouldn't have traded this last year for
anything. We can only hope to continue to be as successful
at serving our customers and furthering the sport we love so
much.
Sincerely,
Joe Kuster (Slackline Joe)
2004 Year in Review
