2020 Year End Wrap Up and Stats

January 1, 2021January 1, 2021 KWar

We’re going to start with general chat, then get into the sales data and charts. So scroll down if you’re interested in the data more than my ramblings about the year. This is a long post, like usual.

Holy Crap what a year 2020 was. Definitely one that will go down in history. The year started out normal with higher than average winter sales. Then, the end of March brought us COVID-19. On March 20th, we closed up the house to in-store sales due to the rising virus numbers. On March 23rd, our state announced that all businesses will be closed anyways. Crazy times. Since we run this out of the house, it was a no brainer to shut down to avoid any unknown risks. Still to this day, we have kept in-store closed. It would be a lot easier if the store wasn’t in the house, but the family is number one priority. Thank you to my locals for understanding. We did a lot of porch pickups, but we definitely lost out on the local disc golf boom. Thankfully online sales were there.

The Disc Golf Boom of 2020. From March through April, sales were at a major standstill. The world was unsure of what was happening, what they could or could not do, how safe were activities, etc., and the sales showed it. We had the worst April that we’ve had in the prior 7 years. Then, all of the sudden, BOOM! People were off work and had tons of free time on their hands. Disc golf exploded. It blew up so hard that manufacturers struggled to keep inventory available.

Manufacturer inventory was/is at crisis levels. All companies saw emptying of the shelves very quick in the late spring. It got to a point where anything that was produced was sold out in a matter of days, or sometimes hours. Most companies saw, and are still seeing, over 95% of their discs out of stock. Innova was the only company that was able to keep a majority in stock with minor hiccups here and there. I think that’s expected with how much bigger they are than the rest of the manufacturers.

As for our stock levels at the store, I’ve never seen so many empty shelves. We’re typically around 3500 discs in stock at any given time, and we’ve only been able to keep around 2000 discs. When I get a big order from Innova or Discraft, I might get up around 3000, but that inventory flies out the door in the matter of a week. The sales here have been unprecedented, which is a good problem to have. I have had to change they way I place orders. Typically I order each company once per month. Now I have to order little bits here and there whenever a company gets something in stock. The Discraft boom has been so huge over the past couple years that I found myself ordering mass quantities of whatever was in stock. I typically don’t order 50 of one mold at a time, because I used to be able to order more the next month. This year, discs might not be in stock for months at a time, or ever again, so ordering large quantities of the top sellers was a must. Unfortunately, that still didn’t help. If I ordered 50 Buzzz to last me until the next restock, they still sold out in a couple weeks. That happened to many different molds from most companies. Just insane!

Sales Data

Ok, enough rambling about how crazy a year it was.

Companies that I carried in 2020 are as follows: Axiom, Discraft, Discmania, Dynamic Discs, Infinite (started in July), Innova, Kastaplast, Latitude 64, Mint, MVP, Prodigy, Prodiscus (started in December), RPM, Streamline, Thought Space Athletics, Viking (started in July), Westside.

As I always say, I’m not a big store, I sell less than 15,000 discs per year, but I think it’s a decent enough number to get some market perspective. I have compared my sales charts to Infinite’s charts and they’ve been pretty close to their overall trends in the past.

In 2020 I shipped to all 50 states, and 19 different countries.

**Sales numbers could be extremely skewed this year due to tons of popular molds being out of stock for long periods of time, and other semi-popular molds being in stock a lot of the time. I’m seeing discs in the top 25’s that have never been in the top 50.

Distance Drivers

This year, I will not list every disc in order of most sales. I will show a top 25 chart of each category.

I generally categorized anything labeled speed 10 and above as a distance driver. Of course there may be borderline discs, but that’s just the way I chose to categorize drivers.

Top 25 Distance Drivers: