Let’s provide a little context, shall we?

First, I have a few YouTube channels I follow with some regularity. There’s the guy building his own cabin with hand tools, the dude who builds the coolest inventions ever (like a giant nerf gun), and who doesn’t love a good Casey Neistat vlog.

Second, I love ski resort logo t-shirts. Not the vintage looking ones, not the witty ones with cheesy sayings, just the ones with a plain colored shirt and a nicely-sized logo in the middle. I’ve started somewhat of a collection I try to add to on a regular basis.

So what do these two things have in common? Everything.

Try to Rep…No…Really
I want you to pull up the website of any resort you have an affinity for. Seriously, I’ll wait. Got it? Okay, I want you to do one simple thing:

• Find a resort t-shirt for sale online (not even a logo-t, just any shirt) and put it in a shopping cart to begin the checkout process

This time I won’t wait, because on 95% of resort websites this is virtually impossible to do.

Here’s the thing, resorts rely heavily on loyalty and branding and word-of-mouth and all the things that make merch a valuable thing to pursue. YouTubers are in a very, very similar boat. Yet go to any YouTuber’s website or channel and you’ll be 2-3 clicks away:

“Shop” in top nav -> “T-shirts” -> “Add to Cart”

I’ve browsed every resort website multiple times logging likely tens of thousands of pageviews over the years, and I had never seen a resort make it that easy for someone not physically at the mountain to buy gear.

That is, until last week.

Pebble Creek
Pebble Creek, in case you missed it, was purchased by one of the original YouTube celebs (Shay Carl) in 2016.

With that in mind, this block 2/3 down their homepage may be a mere coincidence, but my experience with YouTuber’s marketing strategies tells me it’s not.

Having a few hundred or thousand people in the world wearing your gear isn’t going to make or break your season, but I truly believe it can make a bigger difference than we give it credit for.

The crazy thing is how many resorts already have online stores and systems in place for fulfillment, they’re just buried in some corner of the web few visitors ever see. Maybe the first step to tapping this potential is just not doing that. That’s what Pebble Creek did, and I tip my Diamond Peak logo-hat to them for doing so.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.