Burton x Pottery Barn – This Year’s Hottest Collab?

Pottery Barn Teen x Burton Collab!!!!

LOL yeah this one got by me, but I guess Burton is now making comforters and duvet covers (if you’re asking “WTF is a duvet cover?” you’re obviously not married or female) and to make matters worse they’re cross-marketing with Pottery Barn Teen.

This is one of the reasons why I feel dirty every time I think about buying something Burton.

The Angry Snowboarder asks,

Does the mainstream market actually pull in more participants? Will a set of sheets suddenly make a kid that’s never ridden before want to take it up? …

This is a topic that honestly should be up for debate is it a good or bad decision to cross market with stores that as a whole don’t offer anything for snowboarding as a whole. Lets hear your opinions.

I guess as long as for every pair of bindings they don’t sell to someone like me, they’re betting they’ll sell enough duvet covers to the Johnny Lifestyles of the world and as long as that holds true it makes “business sense”.

Are these kids going to become new snowboarders, supporting the sport, the riders, etc.? It would be nice, but I doubt it. Think about all the mall kids you see wearing “lifestyle” clothing or skate-branded apparel who couldn’t push a skateboard if their life depended on it. Sure some kid who already loves snowboarding will get mommy to buy a Burton comforter but is that really the point of this sort of cross-promotion? Of course not.

How this resonates with the core market should be obvious to anyone but I’ll spell it out just in case.

What does this do to benefit the sport? Not a damn thing. Is it detrimental? I don’t know. There’s the angle of brand dilution which I couldn’t care less about, but overall the mainstream market is something that is not going away and so from time to time we’ll have to put up with crap like this. Sad, but true.

This is the age of image is everything, and most of our consumer-driven culture is only concerned with image; what they look like to perfect strangers, and corporations being principally concerned only with the bottom line, are going to try and exploit that to make more money. Unfortunately the core market doesn’t drive profits, or at least not enough profits for most businesses to cater exclusively to them. As long as the mainstream market outnumbers the core market by an order of magnitude, companies are going to be tempted to branch out, “diversify”, and expand their offerings to pad that bottom line.