Luck can help create a market leader, but intuition may be equally important. The owners of Fat Cat sensed a market need, then proceeded to capture the hearts and minds of cat lovers, earning healthy profits in the process. 1987 Tubbs Snowshoes illustrates the way a fading product can be revived. Under new leader Ed Kiniry, a classic company gave a nearly obsolete form of outdoor recreation a new form and functionality, and since then has managed to weather the inevitable competition that followed. And that tennis racquet, known as the T2000, was the beginning of the tennis explosion which essentially created a market that went from 14 million to 450 million dollars.
Readers can probably guess what happened next.
Coming to Tubbs in 1987, after it was split off from Tubbs Furniture and under new ownership moved from Wallingford to Stowe, Kiniry saw and seized an opportunity to develop lightweight but strong metal snowshoes. Kiniry's vision went further, however, to the four basic principles that he believes underlie all recreational product cycles. In the past few years, Tubbs has sponsored university research into the fitness aspects of the sport-oxygen intake, calories burned, and so on. The way you continue to maintain your market share is to outmanage your competitors, but also to outproduce them in terms of product enhancements, things that work better. Proprietary technology is a very important aspect of not only price, but product margin.