If you’re an outdoor power equipment parts buyer, you know it’s not the sexiest category. Spark plugs, air filters, oil filters, and other maintenance and repair parts take up several feet of space on your walls and they don’t offer the opportunity to drive incremental sales.
But what if you could change that?
Good Vibrations — a line of outdoor power equipment accessories by HY-C — offers a chance to drive truly incremental sales in the outdoor power equipment (OPE) parts section of retail stores. And it’s been successful, too; well-known retailers across the country have Good Vibrations units in hundreds of their stores.
But what are the products? And why should you stock them in your store?
That’s what we’re going to cover in this guide. By the time you’re finished here, you’ll know what Good Vibrations products are, and you’ll understand four ways the product line can help you drive incremental outdoor power equipment parts sales.
What Are Good Vibrations Products?
The outdoor power equipment parts segment can essentially be split up into three categories:
- Maintenance items
- Repair items
- Tools and accessories
Maintenance items consist of spark plugs, air filters, oil, and things like that. They’re a planned consumer purchase driven by need rather than impulse. Customers tend to come in, find the maintenance part they need, and leave, having purchased only that one part.
Repair items are probably even less fun than maintenance items both for customers and retail buyers. These are model-specific parts that customers dislike because they only need them when something breaks, and buyers dislike because they take up vast amounts of retail space for very little payoff.
Good Vibrations products fall into the accessories category of the outdoor power equipment parts segment. We’ve covered what’s in the Good Vibrations lineup before, but here’s a quick overview:
- Tractor steering wheel knobs
- Weed eater straps
- Hitch plates
- Hitch pins
- Mower pull cord handles
- Mower deck scrapers
- Offroad drinking mugs
- Tractor wheel covers
- Tractor seat repair sealant
These items are universal, not constrained to one model of lawn mower, trimmer, or tractor. They’re upgrades, too, offering a more fun, satisfying, and robust solution for customers. They’re impulse-driven purchases that provide a positive surprise for shoppers who may have been in your store to buy something else.
Four Ways Good Vibrations Drives Incremental Sales
All of this may be well and good, but you may be thinking, “Okay, but why should I carry Good Vibrations products? Why should I sacrifice valuable space in my store or swap out other items for these?”
Those are great questions that deserve thorough answers. With that in mind, here’s a list of four ways that Good Vibrations can help retailers drive incremental OPE parts sales.
1. Over 100 Million Shoppers Own Applicable Equipment
Talk about a wide consumer base.
Yes, from lawn mowers and zero turn mowers to tractors and trimmers, there’re a lot of lawns in the U.S., and a lot of equipment to mow them. The chances are very high that if someone walks past a Good Vibrations display in your store, they have the prerequisite equipment to make an impulse purchase.
Good Vibrations products go beyond the lawn care niche, too. Our Easy-Rider Tight-Turn Steering Knob works great on boats and UTVs. The Start Me Up and Get-A-Grip pull cord handles are great for snow blowers, pressure washers, or anything else that utilizes a pull cord starter.
The applications are endless. If your shoppers see the products, they’ll almost certainly envision a use for them.
2. They Take Up Little Space (Relative to Other Products in Their Segment)
Think about your selection of spark plugs. Picture your current selection of mower blades. They take up a lot of room, and customers tend only to buy one part for $2 to $25. For as much space as those maintenance products and repair products take up, they don’t offer a whole lot of payoff.
Those kinds of items may even be better off out of retail stores altogether; after all, a customer can just search a SKU and buy the part online.
Good Vibrations, on the other hand, takes up just a few feet of space on shelves, and is likely to move more units. After all, if a customer decides they need a hitch plate, they may as well buy a hitch pin while they’re at it. And a steering wheel knob. And, since they’re already in the store, why not some tractor wheel covers?
That’s the consumer mindset that helps drive incremental sales.
Good Vibrations offers a great bang for its real estate buck, providing retail buyers a real opportunity to drive sales while saving on space.
3. The Packaging Sells The Products for You
Good retail products all do this, but Good Vibrations does it exceptionally well. And that’s not us patting ourselves on the back, either; we acquired Good Vibrations from the inventors, and we were impressed ourselves at how intuitive and interactive each product’s packaging is.
Take the King-Pin Quick-Connect Hitch Pin, for example. It’s a one-handed hitch pin with a spring-loaded locking mechanism, and its packaging is designed so that a customer can actually feel it and use it while they’re in the store:
The Rough Rider Off-Road Drinking Mug is the same way. It’s packaged for ease of transportation and barcode scanning, but customers can also interact with it to see how its spring-loaded locking lid works:
The packaging of every Good Vibrations product is designed this way to one extent or another, allowing shoppers to test out (or at the very least see) key features before they buy. Once they actually see and feel it in action, they’ll be more likely to make a purchase.
4. They Can Be Displayed on Their Own or at Checkout (or Both!)
The entire Good Vibrations line works best together. All the products are related; they’re all outdoor power equipment upgrades for tractors, lawn mowers, trimmers, etc.
But they’re also impulse items. A person probably isn’t primarily looking for a steering wheel knob for their tractor when they come to a store, but once they see one, they can’t help but think that it would be nice to have.
Because of their cohesion as a complete product offering and the impulse nature of their design, Good Vibrations works well both in the outdoor power equipment parts section of a store and at the checkout line.
Particularly dedicated store owners may even want to try to place Good Vibrations in both locations to see what works best in their shop.
Will Good Vibrations Increase Your Sales?
By now, you know what Good Vibrations products are and what they do. You know that millions and millions of shoppers are eligible to buy them. You know they’re economical space-wise and that the product packaging is a huge part of the line’s appeal.
But there’s a lingering question: will Good Vibrations increase your sales?
Of course, in retail, there are no guarantees.
But what we can say is that we have POS data from three big box stores, and these locations move hundreds of units per month.
The bottom line is that in the OPE parts segment, Good Vibrations is much more fun and exciting than a maintenance or repair part, and there’s scarcely a person in the country who can’t get any use out of one (or more) of the products.
If you put Good Vibrations in your store, you will have the opportunity to drive truly incremental sales in outdoor power equipment parts.
And if you want to get started, get in touch with our sales team. They’ll be more than happy to start the process of getting Good Vibrations onto your store’s shelves.
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