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Fusion.com Acquires Kingpin Brand Name
7/16/99
SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 16, 1999--Cold Fusion
Sports, owner of fusion.com, has finalized the purchase of the Kingpin
brand name from Chicago-based Kingpin, Inc. this week.
Kingpin has been a familiar micro-brand in the snowboard industry
for over ten years.
Cold Fusion Sports, based in San Francisco, has already
established contracts with OEM Manufacturers to develop products under
the Kingpin trademark. Their Kingpin line will consist of quality,
moderately priced snowboards, bindings, boots, boardbags, wakeboards,
clothing and accessories.
"Participation in extreme sports is on an explosive rise," said
Tom Williams, President of Cold Fusion Sports. "In addition to
carrying a variety of products from well-known manufacturers, we felt
the timing was right to throw our own brand into the mix."
Indeed, the number of U.S. snowboarding participants increased by
29.1% to 3.6 million in 1998, according to Mt. Prospect,
Illinois-based National Sporting Goods Association (www.nsga.org). A
whopping 5.8 million Americans, aged 7 and up, skateboarded at least
once last year, and 1.3 million rode the waves on a surfboard.
During the Summer X-Games in San Francisco, Cold Fusion Sports
expanded its snowboardshop.com into a comprehensive online shopping
site, fusion.com, that sells a full range of extreme sporting goods
and products for skateboarding, surfing, wakeboarding and
snowboarding.
The vast majority of extreme athletes are teenage males.
According to the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association (SGMA) 93%
of snowboarders and 94% of skateboarders are male. Whats more, 40% of
snowboarders and 56% of skateboarders are 12 to 17-year-olds.
For Cold Fusion Sports, adding its own proprietary product line
and expanding its selection of extreme sports gear made a lot of
sense. After all, the nations 70.2 million teens spent $122 billion
last year, according to Teen-Age Research Unlimited.
Fusion.com is in a highly competitive position to attract these
young eyeballs to their site. Early on, the company locked up large
quantities of prime keyword inventory like "snowboarding",
"skateboarding" and "extreme sports" on major Web directories like
Yahoo! and AOL. Input any of these keywords and up pops their ad
banner.
"This is prime online property that we have bought up for our
company's exclusive long term use," says Williams. "We have found that
the Internet is, by far, the most effective means of reaching our
target group." Cold Fusion Sports has contracted nearly 35,000,000
guaranteed pageviews through banner advertising this year on Yahoo!,
AOL, Infoseek, Excite, Goto.com, and OnTheSnow.com.
In addition, the company has invested in a year-long advertising
campaign with Times-Mirror's Transworld Snowboarding and Transworld
Skateboarding, the country's largest circulation magazines covering
Americas two most popular extreme sports.
"The strength of our marketing campaign has attracted top
sporting gear manufacturers to the table for online dealer
relationships," says Williams. To date, the brand names being sold on
fusion.com include Silence, Morrow, and Avalanche Snowboards; Shorty's
Skate Gear; Spy, Arnette and Smith Sunglasses and Goggles; Spoon
(Watches); Vernor Surfboards and Iconn Wakeboards to name a few.
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