The Cold, The Bold and The Awesome: Send It at Sedona MTB Festival
The Send It team loaded up the official Send It toy hauler with High Roller tailgate pads, food, some rudimentary sleeping arrangements and headed down to Sedona, Arizona for the Sedona Mountain Bike Festival March 8-10. There were grumblings on the internet about the previous year and how snow prevented bikes from being ridden, but that didn't stop Send It. To be honest, not much can stop Send It. It's unstoppable.
The cruise across I-70 coming out of the Front Range always makes for an exciting drive. Sure, traffic on I-70 has turned into many a calm driver into a raging lunatic, but when you're haulin' a trailer filled with tailgate pads it's pretty easy to keep things mellow. Plus, exiting the Eisenhower Tunnel with a view like the one below reminds you that bigger things are at play and it's best to just keep calm and drive. Thankfully we didn't encounter accidents, but rest assured that our friends over at Mountain Recovery would be on hand to if so.
Send It arrived in Sedona roughly 9.5 hours later in the middle of the night during a snowstorm. Not exacly what the team was expecting when leaving Colorado for the high desert of Sedona. However, it made for an exciting time and it meant that everything was on the up and up from there on out. Plus, it cleaned off the Send It exhibit booth much better than the team could do with a spray bottle and rag.
Day 1
Like most highly aniticipated events, the line to get into Sedona MTB Festival was winding down the block before opening. Thirsty mountain bikers eager to get their hands on the latest demos from Yeti, REEB, GT, Commencal, the bike company formerly known as Fezzari, Privateer, and whole bunch more. The Send It booth was located at the very far end of the festival - next to Privateer and Hunt Wheels and Pearl Izumi - so the opening of the event was only heard at the booth. However, a rolling thunder of footsteps could be heard before hoards of people came running past the exhibitors to get to the Yeti booth. (This is assumed, since Yeti was catty-corner to Send It.)
A quick bike through the event grounds opened up a whole world of options for attendees. There were sunglasses from Pit Viper and the casual neon glow that seems to follow that crew at the booth (see: loud colors, loud noises, and someone with a megaphone directing people to make more noises); Loam Lander provided airbags for some jump set ups (although one young man on either Saturday or Sunday took quite the tumble off one of the jumps and had to be gurney'd off by medical professionals. If this blog somehow makes its way to either him or his family, Send It would like to hook you all up with a tailgate pad so that although you may ding up your body from mountain biking, your bike and truck will be ding-free thanks to your High Roller tailgate pad); and then for some odd reason there was also a large-scale area dedicated solely to Mercedes Benz. Now, Send It bears no ill will toward Mercedes Benz - hell, we think they make some pretty kickass cars and vans - but why is it they got prime placement at a mountain bike festival? Best guess is Mercedes Benz probably has a whole lot more money than mountain bike brands so, it got this great prime location. .
Send It donated a High Roller tailgate pad to our friends at Wheel Fun. Now this is an organization that we can get behind. In our "6 Things We're Most Excited About at Sedona MTB Fest This Year" post, we mentioned this awesome organization that pretty much focuses on one single goal: Building community by getting more children on bicycles. Hard to argue with that. Send It gifted a pad for the raffle, and it was awesome being able to support such an amazing organization. More on that later, though.
Day 2
Saturday started off pretty similar to day one with attendees lined up down the road salivating at the thought of jumping on the latest rig. It's awesome to see this, and gives hope to a small brand like ours that despite the doom and gloom articles that float around various blogs and publishers there is still a rabid and voracious audience all over the world eager to get on bikes.
It was relatively quiet down by the Send It booth for most of the morning - to be expected given everyone in Sedona for the weekend was on the trails ripping bikes and demoing new frames. E-bikes weren't quite as prevelant as anticipated, but the occasional sweatless juggernaut would come casually pedaling up the hill looking like their heartbeat was teetering just below 71bpm signaling that his or her day on the uphill was quite enjoyable.
Send It continued with bigger sales on day two. It's wild: Create a product that blows the competition away and people begin taking notice. Our favorite customer on the day actually let us know that it wasn't worth trying to sell him a High Roller since he had a new tailgate pad waiting for him when he got home. What an invitation, right? We took that one seriously. After a few minutes of showing the differences between the Send It High Roller, and literally every other tailgate pad on the market, he was swiping his card and walking away with a brand new tailgate pad.
It was difficult to hear the music from the Send It booth, but on the rare occasions we made it up to the beer tent and the bathrooms, from what we heard it sounded like a pretty fun time.
Day 3
After two full days of event roaming, slangin' tailgate pads and sun hats, the Send It team was excited for a casual and low-key Sunday. However, such was not the case. First, Send It's sales and marketing guy, Britt Chester, was the focus of an interview with Thomas Yoxall of Get Out Arizona about the High Roller tailgate pad.
(Britt has a bit of experience being on camera talking about things that break...or don't break.)
Get Out Arizona is a video channel that promotes all things outdoors in Arizona. Pretty self-explanatory and simple, while also pretty rad at the same time. Thomas just goes around and sheds light on brands doing cool things in the outdoor space, and when saw the High Roller tailgate pad, well, he obviously had to stop.
The remainder of Sunday saw a flood of people coming and going through the event. If you've attended shows like this, you already know that the swag is a-plenty, and the people looking for swag are also a-plenty. Send It doesn't really subscribe to this model since it's a) pretty darn wasteful to hand people some trash that won't live long outside of the rubbish bin, and b) no one is exactly begging for small squishy tailgate pad stress relievers or whistles with the Send It logo. The booth offered stickers, and more than enough people purchased the what's becoming quintessential Send It sunhat, but Send It came for one reason: To educate the general public and mountain bike aficionados alike about the best damn tailgate pad on the market.
And Send It did just that. We get you. We got you.
Send It.
