Tobin, I honestly don't know how you or anyone outside the major manufacturers make a living in this business! I think most people forget just how small the total available market is for scuba products. Looking at the stats in the US (info from DEMA) it is not a large or growing market: total certified divers are less than 3% of the population; only about 175k new divers are certified each year (a number almost 20% lower than a few years ago); majority of certified divers don't own their own equipment, and only 1/3 of those would consider purchasing gear.
I'm sure the niche of people who are willing to go outside the basic jacket BC mentality is a far smaller number as well, and it seems that many of those try to scrimp and save so much on their dive gear that I expect you must see very large price sensitivity in your market (look how many posts are on SB from people trying to do things like save $2 by getting brass boltsnaps instead of splurging the whopping $5 for a stainless version). And if you tried to service your market with different versions that appealed to each diver's specific desires you'd probably end up with 249,999 different product versions servicing 250,000 different diving consumers (I assume there are probably two people who coincidently want the same thing
).
I'm not in the dive business and given the market opportunity I don't think I'd ever want to be - as a businessman I don't find businesses with shrinking market size and increasing barriers to entry for new participants to be an attractive opportunity. But I'm glad you and others like you try - it's good to have choice other than the pablum products that the Big Few manufacturers pitch to the masses!
I'm sure the niche of people who are willing to go outside the basic jacket BC mentality is a far smaller number as well, and it seems that many of those try to scrimp and save so much on their dive gear that I expect you must see very large price sensitivity in your market (look how many posts are on SB from people trying to do things like save $2 by getting brass boltsnaps instead of splurging the whopping $5 for a stainless version). And if you tried to service your market with different versions that appealed to each diver's specific desires you'd probably end up with 249,999 different product versions servicing 250,000 different diving consumers (I assume there are probably two people who coincidently want the same thing
). I'm not in the dive business and given the market opportunity I don't think I'd ever want to be - as a businessman I don't find businesses with shrinking market size and increasing barriers to entry for new participants to be an attractive opportunity. But I'm glad you and others like you try - it's good to have choice other than the pablum products that the Big Few manufacturers pitch to the masses!
