1990 Perception Dancer.
Suggested retail price: $900. Coolest move? Front surfing.
ting progressively more expensive, peaking last year when, if you bought a Wave Sport Ace at the suggested $1,688 retail price, you would have paid a $596 premium over the Dancer—a 50-per- cent increase in real cost. You can’t argue that designs haven’t
improved, however. New boats are easier and more fun to paddle. Whitewater paddlers have seen a number of revolutionary developments over the years, most notably the introduction of the plastic boat in 1973 and Perception’s intro- duction of the roto-moulder to mass-produce kayaks in 1978. Some years later, Corran Addison, in his pre-Riot days, appeared on the scene with a boat having a flat planing hull and radically sharp edges. Since then there have been continuous tweaks and changes in hull design and outfitting. The design and boat lifecy- cle has accelerated to the point that almost every manufacturer launches a new model annually or risks being left behind. All this development hasn’t come cheap. At
Montreal’s Voodoo Kayaks, makers of Riot Kayaks, co-owner Jeff Rivest explains: “The R&D associated with each boat that ultimately makes its way to the public is exhaustive. Most boats typically undergo five prototype stages, and each
stage sees the production of 15 to 20 boats that are tested and evaluated for invaluable feed- back. There’s also an opportunity cost associated with this process. In order to produce prototypes, production must be halted. This has resulted in reduced sales at times when Riot was sold out.” Sharon Riddle, marketing manager at
Watermark Sports (Dagger and Perception kayaks) said, “the cost of plastic raw materials, notably resins, and improved outfitting are par- tially responsible for the price increases seen in recent years.” Furthermore, the expensive marketing onslaught of videos, magazine adverts, endorse- ments, and development of the Wave Sport “wave box” are hard to miss. Costly marketing, however, may also be a sign of increased competition between boat companies, which Riddle claims is keeping costs in line. Even when many manufac- turers were approaching the $1,700 ceiling last year, Liquidlogic and others maintained a $1,500 plateau. It now appears that prices overreached themselves last year and are returning to Earth for 2003. This year’s new Riot Air and Wave Sport Transformer are both listed at a more palatable $1,495.
When contacted late last summer, Kelley
Woolsey, Confluence’s senior VP of marketing, foreshadowed this year’s price cuts. “Designs are being launched very quickly, forcing too much product on the market,” he told Rapid. “There is so much development that after three years a boat is outdated. Combined with all the used boats on the market paddlers start to question the $1,100 [US] price of a new boat when some- thing can be had for half that price. “Demand growth has been good over the past years, but is now insufficient, resulting in the cre- ation of an oversupply situation. This is reflected in the amount of used boats that are available and the fact that even last year’s boat is dis- counted by 25 percent in order to compete with newer models.” Yes, paddlers are paying more for boats than they used to, but this year prices seem to be under control. The EZ, for example, is newly priced at $1,275—less than $200 more than the price of a Dancer in today’s dollars, for a boat that was priced at $1,545 just two years ago. Most important, paddlers are getting a more durable and better-performing product that opens a whole new realm of freestyle moves.
—Derek Folmer
2003 Early Summer 11
Waikiki Waves, Ottawa River, ON. photo Rob Faubert.
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