Okay, my two cents worth. I really hope that the new owner of the company has deep pockets, as the expansion plans seem rather aggressive. Figure skating is not a growing sport at present; the market is highly competitive; and skating stores seem to be cutting back on the number of lines instead of expanding them. I can also seem them cheapening the brand name with some of these offerings, but, that's just me.
If you want to see the "boots" go to the Kling website. There is a link out to them .. they're being made by a sister company, from what I can figure out.
Well, we don't know how it'll turn out, but I think the owner is being ambitious. He's probably following the "Scared money don't make money" adage. Which is true....but it also doesn't lose money either. To be fair on his part, it's a "logical" business idea. Remember, he only has to sell the boots, not get people skating. How many people buy hockey skates every year? How many people skate often in them every year? Get what I'm saying? Put two big brand names on it, Sasha Cohen and Klingbeil, get people to be like "Wow I want Sasha Cohen skates!" and tada. As far as quality, the lower end Riedells are imported from China. I don't see how they could really do "worse" but, we're not gonna see Edea Concertos or something at the price point yet. But, to make figure skating boots cheaper, you gotta have more people skating, it's that simple. So they figure if they can bring the boots, the people will come. Or they just wanna make some money. Even with hockey skates, people can get skates that are usable hockey skates from department stores/sporting goods stores now. The Easton skates are a good example of this. Are they perfect, are there better skates? Yeah, there's better skates, but those skates work all right for casual use. You can get a totally skateable hockey skate for $60, it's hard to do the same for figure skating. Hockey is a bit unfair comparison, though, as many people overboot in hockey to make up for bad sizing/bad skating. For most people that aren't pros on the ice 4 hours a day or something, cheap skates work fine for hockey. The only reason stiffer skates exist is simply because pro/collegiate hockey players don't wanna break in a new pair of skates every month or so.
Assuming the boots aren't horrendous, it might help figure skating out a little tiny bit, as far as just getting more people skating. It'd have been quite cool to just hop into a department store instead of catching my pro-shop during its like 3 hours a day it's open to buy my first pair of boots. Thankfully I obviously knew/was told enough to not buy any of the currently existing department store kinda boots, but if a skate can be made that'd be similar to a lowend Riedell or Jackson at a similar price point, but in department stores, it'd be quite good for figure skating I think.
Topic: Sasha Cohen's line of Klingbeil Skates (Read 3352 times)