Industry ready for Haydays kickoff event

WPS to exhibit FLY for first time

Ron Bentzinger is anxious to show off the annual snowmobile extravaganza known as Haydays. Bentzinger, the snowmobile product manager for Western Power Sports, has attended the Minnesota event known as the annual kickoff to the snowmobile season every year since 1995.

This year, he’ll finally be overseeing a booth at Haydays, as WPS will be situated in a 35-by-70-foot spot. Ten WPS staffers, including president and CEO Craig Shoemaker, will be in attendance.

“We’ll primarily have the FLY brand, and we’ll also be presenting our Sedona tires for ATVs and UTVs, along with Triple 9 goggles,” Bentziner told Powersports Business during the company’s annual show for snowmobile reps and dealers in Minneapolis. “Haydays is the premier event of the powersports industry. Everybody that’s anybody in the snowmobile industry is at Haydays.”

And Bentzinger remembers being able to scour the show and still be able to add products that he found to the WPS snow catalog. Now, that same catalog is already out, some 1,232 pages thick. With the snowmobile market coming off a 2013-14 season that went gangbusters, consumers interested in products in that catalog will get to see plenty.

“I’m learning from our reps at this meeting that dealers are frustrated with the soft sales all summer and they’re pushing forward because everyone’s excited after last winter for this coming snow season,” Bentzinger said. “The dealer inventories are low and the economy is strong. I’ve never seen such a positive combination of factors going into a snow season as we’ve got now.”

Bentzinger is high on the FLY snowmobile apparel lineup, now in its fourth season.

“It’s a real solid offering,” he said. “From a technical balaclava with a windstopper around the face to all different kinds of gloves to outerwear that keeps getting more refined, we’re excited about what we have to offer. You’ve got to walk before you can run, and some of our first generation of product wasn’t that exciting, but we’re really excited about what we have to share this year.”

Looking deeper into the season when hopefully the white stuff and appropriate temperatures will be plentiful, FLY has teamed up with Divas SnowGear to sponsor the AMSOIL World Championship Snowmobile Derby in Eagle River, Wis.

“We don’t have any women’s outerwear with FLY, so it was a natural for us to be a joint sponsor with Divas and be the official apparel supplier for the World Championships.”

Ideal winter for Woody’s

“Whenever you can ride from home to work and you don’t have to put guys in a car for two days to ride, it makes a difference.” That’s how Larry Tiede, Woody’s manufacturer representative for research and development, described the company’s 2013-14 winter season. “It allows you to measure and test and make quick changes in carbide positioning right away, so on the same day and in the same conditions, you know what happened. By being able to do that kind of testing at home, it was an exciting year.”

Tiede also described the welcomed snowfall as “one big white blur. It was the winter we’ve been waiting for. It allowed dealers to sell product they had on their shelves, and it allowed us to get a lot of testing done and develop new products.”

One of those that will be at Haydays is the Ace bar, the tallest bar in the industry that is ideal for groomed snow on trails, Tiede said. “With the rider-forward sleds, shorter keels and more off-trail riding, we needed to build something that was more aggressive.”

Tiede expects the annual Haydays affair to be another step forward for the industry.

“The manufacturers are up, the distributors are up. The dealers sold snow product through April, then rain came so they didn’t sell a lot of motorcycle stuff,” he said. “They’re already thinking about snow, which they haven’t done in many, many years at this point in the year. It’s exciting. And no dealers are sitting on anything. They’re keeping money in their pocket, waiting for fall to hit. Haydays is going to be exciting this year, with products already arriving in the dealerships. It’s the first positive vibe we’ve had in a lot of years.” psb