Monday, August 24, 2009

Wrestling tournaments/dual gimmicks/fun activities

Post a comment here about what you do at your wrestling dual meets to make them more interesting. When leaving a comments, tell us what level it’s for…e.g. high school, grade school/junior high, college, senior level, open etc.

Posted by WrestlingGear.Com - Wrestling Shoes and Wrestling Gear in 13:26:27 | Permalink | No Comments »

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Longaberger Baskets

Check out my wife’s new Longaberger Baskets Website If you are looking for pottery or handmade baskets, be sure to check out her site.

Posted by WrestlingGear.Com - Wrestling Shoes and Wrestling Gear in 19:35:46 | Permalink | No Comments »

Saturday, July 4, 2009

Is Bigger Better?

Yesterday, I experienced the opposite…bigger is definitely not better. We use one of the largest companies that helps process internet transaction - authorize.net. They had a fire in the building where they keep their equipment (fire was not in their part of the building), but it effected their equipment. I guess shame on me for assuming one of the largest companies that helps process credit card transactions would have backups through out the world that they could switch over to…

With that said, when you are shopping around to decide where to spend your money…bigger is not always better. Granted we are one of the largest wrestling stores in the country, but there are big name sporting goods stores that are much much bigger than us that more than 1 out of every 4 of the US Wrestling shoe market shop.

How are we different, we are committed to wrestling year round. Those companies are so big even if they just committ to wrestling for about 6 weeks they control much of the market. We carry the entie lines of Nike Wrestling Shoes, adidas Wrestling Shoes, ASICS wrestlig shoes, Double Sport Wrestling Shoes and Matman wrestling shoes. We offer the most selection of wrestling shoes in the country. No one (to our knowledge) has all five of these brands under the same roof.

Another way we differ from the much larger sporting goods stores is we reinvest in wrestling. We help promote the sport at the youth, high school, college and Sr level (think Olympic/World Championships). When we do our advertising - we have allocated money to help wrestling teams promote their team and our company at the same time. We could just as easily put that money into a billboard or a yellow page ad that does not help wrestling as much, but we are responsible with our advertising budget and reinvest back into wrestling.

In these tough economic times, we are definitely feeling the crunch and do need the support our past customers but definitely need to bring new customers to our store and help create new wrestlers all of whom will hopefully buy from us in the future.

Take care - good luck this season. This is the time you need to start training for next Feb/March!

Posted by WrestlingGear.Com - Wrestling Shoes and Wrestling Gear in 13:47:44 | Permalink | No Comments »

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Living The Dream Fund

Just want to let all of you know there is a new fund that has been created to motivate our athletes and really allow our athletes to continue to train. There is a bounty on a World Championship of $50,000 and a bounty of $250,000 if they win an Olympic Gold Medal.

I help raise money for cleft lip repair ( http://www.thepapefoundation.org ) and I have talked with several charities and their average donation is $25 to $50. They get a whole bunch of small contributions from many many people. If everyone that wrestled for more than a few years or has kids that wrestle or wrestled, donated $25 to $50 we’d have this funded in no time.

They are raising money now for the fund, but right now the page is not properly secured that they are asking for money. Once the page is locked down and properly presented - we’ll be posting a link for you. I don’t have anything to do with the security of the page - otherwise it would be locked down and displaying the proper security in the web browser.

Security is very important for us and of course you…I have asked them to properly display the page (because it is a secure page - not really a tech guy so I don’t know why it’s not displaying the lock symbol)…once the site is locked down I’ll feel comfortable posting a link to the site…

Posted by WrestlingGear.Com - Wrestling Shoes and Wrestling Gear in 14:09:39 | Permalink | No Comments »

Saturday, June 27, 2009

How Did You Find Out about MJ’s Death?

I found this article interesting as a person that makes his living primarily through the Internet. I must admit I found out about Michael Jackson’s death on Facebook! What do you think about this article?

http://tinyurl.com/kmy5rr

I found the article pretty interesting that a story could do that to the internet. But than again the old fashion way of telling people what happened basically just happened on the web instead of people calling or talking to each other live. It just. happened on the net…but what has the web done for people getting together and hanging out, calling each other on the phone, or even writing a letter…

What do you use the web for? Remember we have all sorts of ways to stay in touch with wrestlinggear.com - we even have our own FB groups and FB fan pages, check out http://www.wrestlinggear.net, http://www.twitter.com/jeffpape, follow the owner on FB http://www.facebook.com/jeffreypape - I better stop otherwise google might think this is a spam page with lots of links on it…

I can’t help but post one more link to our golf outing page - we are raising money for http://www.thesmiletrain.org and the National Wrestling Hall of Fame - Illinois Chapter. The outing is July 28, 2009 - visit http://www.thepapefoundation.org for more information!

Posted by WrestlingGear.Com - Wrestling Shoes and Wrestling Gear in 13:42:09 | Permalink | No Comments »

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Get the Top Wrestling Gear While You Still Can

Here is a brief article I wrote for our email newsletter. Remember you can sign up for free. We will also send you info when we add a new free technique video and specials. Also, remember to join wrestlinggear.net to interact with wrestlers through out the world (we have two international members now).
 
Each year we try to predict what will be the top gear and what will run out. And each year we kick ourselves because top gear we should have known will sell out always does and some gear we just totally guess wrong on…
 
So we’ll see what this year’s predictions brings…keeping in mind all the manufacturers are likely to be lean and mean with inventory this year…which means we predict more than any 10 years we have been in business a bunch of gear will be sold out by the time the season starts. So if you don’t plan on growing too much, you might want to look at some of this gear.
 
Nike - they will basically have two pairs of shoes. One black and white and another white and black. The Speedsweep will be available in youth and adult sizes and will be prices around $35 and $42. The Takedown will be available at around $60. The Inflict Wrestling Shoes, which we have, were dropped from the line. We’ll we bought up just about any available Inflict that was left and we’ll have a few more coming in around September. The Speedsweeps will be poplular because they will be about 30% cheaper then adidas or ASICS equivalent. And the Inflicts will likely be gone in many popular sizes by September. Do not wait on these shoes…
 
adidas - they carried over a lot of shoes from last year and brought out a ton of new shoes this year. I suspect inventory will be tight on most of the new stuff and much of the inventory they brought back this year has already been bought. So what does this mean for you? We’ll if you want a Response or an adistrike wrestling shoe in a particular color from last year, look to buy it now. We only have some key sizes left in those two shoes and many are already gone from adidas. If you want a white adistar, we are the only place in the country that has some of those left in good sizes. Black adistars should not be too difficult to find early in September and October, but watch out for early November when sales start heating up. So few people carry them that I suspect that shoe will be tough to get in late December and early January.
 
Several sizes of the Cejudo’s are already out until adidas reloads them later this year. We’ll see how those sell. Last year the $80 shoes did not sell well for us, but this is a different economy so that shoe might sell through well this year with parents telling their kids they have to make sacrifices.
 
Mat Wizards - I suspect the top color will be White and if the Red and Gold shoes sell out White will be a safe choice and then those will be gone. Again this is an expensive shoe so I suspect many of my competitors went short in this shoe and we are all trying to clean up our inventory a little bit and I suspect pulling back a little bit with our high end shoes.
 
ASICS - with the Ultratek coming back this year sales of their high end shoes may suffer. Really adidas Black adistar is almost a new shoe since it was only available at a few places last year. Top colors of the Ultratek will be the Grey and the Red, White, Blue shoe a  lot of the elite wrestlers are wearing. The Dan Gable wrestling shoes are the wild card, many wrestlers unfortunately have no idea who Dan Gable or even Cael Sanderson are…will this shoe be a hot shoe this year? I think it will. They have safe color choices that I think will sell through this year.
 
Rulon’s - hey can the Rulon Wrestling Shoes make it two or three years in a row with sell outs? We want to know! Sales will almost have to slip in this shoe. It’s everywhere right now and I can’t see it selling again, but we will likely have a bunch of these available in Black and Gold and Black and Red. Those shoes have been a great seller and have sold out each year. Don’t wait on these shoes if you have to have them, otherwise, you’ll be looking at a different color than the one you want for next year.
 
Cael’s they pruned a few of the bad colors or should I say slow selling colors from this year’s line up. Look for the Navy Blue shoe to sell well in PA. Did ASICS know they needed to make a Cael shoe for Penn State this year? In case you don’t know what I am referring to, Cael switched from Iowa State to Penn State this year. These are sort of like the Cejudo’s the $80 shoes did not sell very well last year and I suspect they will sell about as well as they did last year. The main factor will be how much do ASICS and adidas committ to having them in inventory. I suspect that will be a main factor in availability of the Cejudo’s and Caels for next season.
 
Old School Update (e.g. last year’s shoes)
 
Some of the top selling shoes in years past are still available at our site. We have select sizes in Cael’s, Gable’s, Responses, and adistrikes. We have seen an up tick in sales of these shoes as people are realizing they are harder to find since we are all trying to keep our inventory a little tighter this year. At least twice a month I get an email from someone looking for a shoe from a year or two ago, hoping we have a secret spot in the warehouse where we put inventory that we don’t want to have on our website. If you are looking at any of these shoes, look to getting them now for the summer season/summercamp season. I can tell you in many of these shoes we are already sold out and won’t be bringing more of them in this season.
 
Next week we’ll write up some more top gear that we think you should be taking a look at…
Posted by WrestlingGear.Com - Wrestling Shoes and Wrestling Gear in 14:33:53 | Permalink | No Comments »

Saturday, May 30, 2009

Special Promotion

Your choice of deals You can choose from two items for a $.01 or one that is $9.99. In order to qualify you just need to spend $75.00 on merchandise. Put the one item you would like in your shopping cart. Just be sure to spend $75 and we will include it with your order. This offer may not be combined with any other special offer. Limit one item per order per address. Here are your choices of deals on gear.

Also, don’t forget to check us out on our new social network - http://www.wrestlinggear.net - we will be posting photos there from the World Team Trials.

Posted by WrestlingGear.Com - Wrestling Shoes and Wrestling Gear in 03:02:51 | Permalink | No Comments »

Friday, May 8, 2009

Nike Wrestling Fans

You guys asked for it so I did my next youtube show #10 on the Nike Wrestling shoes.

We have the Inflicts in stock at wrestlinggear.com

Posted by WrestlingGear.Com - Wrestling Shoes and Wrestling Gear in 23:46:01 | Permalink | No Comments »

Thursday, May 7, 2009

Quick adidas and Nike wrestling shoes update

Check out our youtube video - it’s using a new camera - do you notice a difference?

Vote early and often for our next video? Nike Inflicts and New Nike Shoes? Adidas new shoes or DoubleSport’s new shoes? You can vote on twitter, this blog below and through our facebook groups and facebook profile page…we live in Chicago where even the deceased can vote two or three times. So we want you to vote early and often you can vote in as many places as you would like. It’s your choice on our next video.

Posted by WrestlingGear.Com - Wrestling Shoes and Wrestling Gear in 18:15:40 | Permalink | No Comments »

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

New adidas Wrestling Shoes

The new adidas wrestling shoes are now available - at least several of them are available now for shipment. The new Response GT’s, new Response II, Tyrint’s, new Extero’s and Extero Jr are now in stock ready to ship. The new Mat Wizzards III and Cejudo’s did not come in as expected.

We did get a bunch of new white adistars in and a bunch of Nike Inflicts in yesterday.

-Jeff

Posted by WrestlingGear.Com - Wrestling Shoes and Wrestling Gear in 23:51:16 | Permalink | No Comments »