We expected the worst, but at the end the situation has been demonstrated less serious of the previewed one. This in synthesis the judgment of the exhibitors and the visitors of Ispo Winter 2012. It is necessary to premise that market offers different faces according to whom observes it. On one side Europe north of the Alps, from the other the south face. Almost stable situation in the first case (some decreasing numbers, contained and completely previewed), risk of financial ruin in the second (landslide of turnovers, closing of sale points, unsolved bills).
Certainly, in Italy, the situation is serious and many speak about an unavoidable normalization of the market, an arrangement that in some sectors, like ski business (above all apparel), will carry to the passing of brands and, above all, of stores. The “perfect storm”, someone said, triggered by three primary factors: economic crisis, political crisis, climatic crisis. None of these factors is under the control of the players on the pitch and, consequently, there is an evident tendency to release responsibility, to assume major events as alibis, avoiding to face errors and underestimations done in the past and still in. To the cited “three crises”, I would add a fourth factor, this time endogenous, called “defect in planning”. The insufficient ability to look further, beyond the fluctuations of the market, is in fact what combines in the last decade, production, distribution and retail. Contructors continued to grind out products convinced that the emergent markets would have absorbed in some way the surplus, but this has not been. Distributors, pushed by producers, have lend exaggerated listen to sell-in data, closing the eyes to difficulty signals coming up from the last field, the retail one, since various years.
When the tree will be shaken, and it will be soon, retailers will be falling. Only the most professional, the specialized ones, the suppliers of services besides the products, will be able to resist. For all the others there will be no more space. The Fair, from this point of view, has been demonstrated, even more than in the past, a strong indicator, tracing a clear track between who has chosen to be present, although the costs, in order to update themselves and to interpret the trends of market, and who instead has decided to remain between the four walls of their store, to garrison a more and more narrow and poor territory.
