Online retail or a bricks-and-mortar store: why not both?

XSPO in Neuhaus am Inn, near Passau, is one of Germany's biggest ski retailers. Bernd Geiling, the third generation of sports retailers, launched his online shop in parallel to the retail store, back in 2001. He now sells the majority of his goods online and delivers them across Europe.

 

After several years of strong online trade, Bernd Geiling is turning to bricks-and-mortar retail again. Last year, he set up a new, visually appealing 2,600 m² sports shop with a black entrance area and glass facade. A further 1,000 m² of warehouse space are available in the old building. Bernd Geiling is using this new building to optimize logistics for online retail. The result is a spectacular, stylish store. Part of the new store is designed based on the "shop-in-shop" concept: Individual retailers or brands are given their own areas for their products. The location is also ideal – right in the center of the business park at the highway interchange in the direction of Passau.

 

Must-have: perfect ski service.

Whether it's online or in person, the skis must be perfect. Bernd Geiling sells a lot of premium skis, including FIS racing skis. To deliver the very best quality, the new skis are perfected according to special customer requirements at XSPO. To do so, Bernd Geiling has set up a ski service workshop with a Mercury service machine featuring three processing modules, a Waxjet hot waxing machine, a Waxfuture for infrared waxing, and a Speedbrush brush machine. When asked about his investment in the ski service workshop, Bernd Geiling says: “We want to offer a diverse ski service and whether we are grinding racing skis or any type of customer ski, from the XC or Ladycarver to the Freeride, the Mercury always delivers on quality.”

 

Service Technician Andreas Jeske backs this up: “The Mercury is a great machine. An automatic machine makes total sense for the number of skis that we grind. It takes care of the majority of the manual work. The Mercury is very versatile – we can grind a wide range of skis and snowboards. This winter we received some touring skis that were really broken with deep scratches and we managed to fix them.” The Mercury gives the service team a flexible choice of different base structures and is very efficient when it comes to quickly changing the edge angle from leisure to racing skis.

 

When asked how he found the switch to an automatic service machine, Jeske says: “It didn't take long at all to learn what to do, the machine does the majority of it itself and WINTERSTEIGER configured the Mercury really well to suit our needs.”

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