“This island is like a gateway to the Everglades,” Esther Alonso-Luft says of Virginia Key, a strand of sand and mangrove on the watery edge of Miami, a metropolis of six million, glittering on the far side of the causeway.

“We open these opportunities for the community—for people who live in the city and have never experienced wilderness,” says Alonso-Luft, owner of Virginia Key Outdoor Center in Miami, Florida. That’s right—in Miami. The largely undeveloped island lies within the city limits, just north of Key Biscayne.

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With nearly 900 acres of parklands and lagoons (plus a water-treatment plant), Virginia Key is an urban wildland hiding in plain sight. Visitors to the outdoor center regularly tell Alonso-Luft they didn’t even know Virginia Key existed, despite its rich history and proximity to city neighborhoods. The island is barely a mile from downtown, and serviced by a bus line—the 102 to be precise. It is also home to Historic Virginia Key Beach, which during the mid-1940s was established as the first beach for Black residents of Miami-Dade County during the Jim Crow era.

Alonso-Luft opened her first business, The Paddle House, at Historic Virginia Key Beach in 2010. Five years later, she opened the Virginia Key Outdoor Center on the island’s northeast end, building on the site of an infamous dive bar that would have made Hemingway blush, if the stories are true. The businesses serve an increasing number of winter visitors and nurture a growing core of outdoor enthusiasts in the local community.

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Alonso-Luft says one of the most effective ways she’s been able to reach new audiences—including those who have traditionally been underserved in paddlesports and the outdoors—is by partnering with organizations in the city that have similar goals. She brings the missing pieces only a paddling outfitter can: boats, and a place to paddle.

“Our partners, they already have these relationships in the community,” Alonso-Luft says. “They reach out to us for support, and we’ll provide them with equipment at no cost. Now I’m putting my services in front of a whole new group of people.”

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Virginia Key Outdoor Center also hosts weeklong summer programs providing local youth opportunities to participate in all the outfitters activities on the island including stand up paddleboarding, kayaking, and even mountain biking. The program charges tuition to those who can afford to pay, and offers scholarships to families who can’t. Virginia Key Outdoor Center advertises both the summer camps and the scholarships, but what largely brings youth to the program is word-of-mouth between friends from Miami and neighboring urban areas. “We have a bunch of kids who come out from Miami Beach for the summer program because they have nothing like it,” Alonso-Luft of the narrow island city to her north, which has a population density on par with Philadelpiha.

“The scholarship is an opportunity to offer kids in the city the program who couldn’t otherwise afford it,” she adds. “We found going through the kids has also been a really positive experience because it brings the parents out. So we may be taking a cut on the registration, but it comes back in other events.”

This is an important factor. As a business, the goal for a commercial outfitter like Virginia Key Outdoor Center is ultimately to profit, grow, and foster continued relationships with customers. In expanding her audience in Miami, Alonso-Luft says what she puts into the community is ultimately an investment in her business.

“If I am going to be paying money to Google and whoever else I’m doing my marketing through—hundreds of dollars a month just to get my name out there—it would be worth it for me to do it with my community, to get my community out there.”

She says the key to broadening participation is not offering free paddling, but providing an experienceengaging new participants and fosters a lasting connection to the sport. Alonso-Luft believes in order to make that connection, both her business and the participants have to be invested in the experience. Whether this means a volunteer exchange, a monetary commitment or something personally meaningful, both business and participants have to feel its value.

A key to engagement is to make Virginia Key Outdoor Center a welcoming place for all, which Alonso-Luft says starts with her staff, who reflect the diversity of a great American city. “We come in all shapes, colors, and orientations. We are what we are as people who love the outdoors, and enjoy what we do, and share it. I think that makes a difference. My staff makes a difference.”

Alonso-Luft sees Virginia Key as invaluable to the community, a driving force in her determination to grow her Outdoor Center and the eclectic gathering of paddlers and urban adventure-seekers who use it. The island serves as a gateway connecting Miami’s urban residents to the coastal wilderness just 15 minutes from downtown,” she says. “We’ve become the last vestiges of primitive existence in an urban area. Humans are a part of the wilderness equation, we just forgot our role.”

The Virginia Key Outdoor Center helps people re-discover—or discover for the first time—this connection. “We go out there and you see the financial and legal district of Brickell, downtown, the residential area of Coconut Grove. Then you see the old mangrove islands, and coral islands that are part of Virginia Key, then turn back to the lagoon where we are. You can see this all sitting in one spot. This is the epicenter. This is where everything comes together.”

This article was first published in the 2022 issue of Paddling Business. Inside you’ll find the year’s hottest gear for canoeing, kayaking, whitewater and paddleboarding. Plus: Industry leaders on surviving COVID, the dirty little secret of pro deals, brand consolidation and more. READ IT NOW »

PHOTO: COURTESY VIRGINIA KEY OUTDOOR CENTER

If you’ve noticed an influx of rookie standup paddlers this past year, you’re not alone. A sport initially dominated by niche categories like racing, downwinding, surfing and whitewater, standup paddling has trended decidedly toward casual participants.

At the Confluence paddle shop in Denver, Colorado, owner Jon Kahn says his decision to increase his standup paddle inventory for 2020 felt like a gamble at first. But after Covid-19 accelerated the emerging trend of more recreational paddlers buying boards, Kahn sold out by early July and logged record SUP sales.

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“Definitely the bulk of the market is more casual versus higher performance,” said Kahn. “The whitewater SUP niche is still growing, but it’s like how whitewater kayaking is to kayaking in general.”

The explosive growth followed a decade-long identity crisis in SUP. While the niche categories got the attention and drove growth among core users, the bulk of the potential market has always been casual paddlers. Stuck between rentals and racers, the industry struggled to convince people that standup paddling was more than just a vacation activity—or a sport reserved for the Laird Hamiltons and Kai Lennys of the world.

[ READ MORE: Did COVID-19 Kill The Retail Star? Here’s how the pandemic helped specialty retailers stem the big box tide ]

According to the Outdoor Industry Association’s participation data, prior to the pandemic, America’s 3.5 million standup paddlers spent an average of just 6.3 days per year out on their boards, with 26 percent going out seven to 10 times annually. Almost half of standup paddlers own their boards, and of the 53 percent who do not own boards, 42 percent rent them and 26 percent borrow them from someone.

The pandemic only further tipped the scale in favor of casual paddlers. With millions of people looking for an excuse to get outdoors, recreational standup paddleboards became the hottest ticket in town.

“It brought a lot of people into the paddling scene who used to only paddle on vacation, but realized they could paddle all year round,” said Eric Disque, owner of Disco’s Paddle Surf in San Diego. “The light just turned on for people that SUP is a great family activity.”

Disque tripled his sales revenue in 2020 and could have sold more were it not for a production backlog creating a crippling supply shortage. The tidal wave of recreational paddlers was not limited to California. Landlocked and coastal retailers alike reported similar spikes in casual paddlers.

“River SUP surfing and coastal SUP surfing is fun and aspirational, but the vast majority of folks just want to paddle around the lake,” said Brian Vincent, General Manager of the Appomattox River Company in Virginia. “We’ve seen an uptick in that and have been doing really well with inflatable SUPs this year.”

The growing popularity of price point inflatable SUPs is no surprise. Vincent noted with younger generations increasingly living in smaller spaces and driving smaller cars, the ability to store an iSUP in a closet or transport one in the trunk of a car is appealing. Not to mention, most iSUPs come with everything needed to get on the water—board, paddle, fin, leash, backpack and pump—at a reasonable price.

Kahn said 90 percent of his SUP sales in Denver are inflatables, with many of those customers being newcomers to paddlesports.

“I definitely see it growing paddlesports overall by introducing new participants who maybe wouldn’t have thought about a kayak,” said Kahn.

With life slowly returning to normal in the second half of 2021, the pandemic-fueled buying frenzy figures will likely wane. Yet with so many new people being introduced to the sport, a cycle of long-term organic growth traditionally follows. As Disque explains it, “Boards on the water sell boards.”

While the racing scene slowed down considerably during the pandemic and new sports like foil surfing have dulled SUP’s cutting edge appeal, retailers like Vincent are banking on the continued strength of recreational SUP. Whether it’s first-time paddlers or long-time kayakers or canoeists looking to add to their paddling quiver, the appeal of price-point inflatable SUPs is undeniable. Vincent plans to follow the tide.

“As a retailer, you can’t dictate where the market goes,” he says.

This article was first published in the 2022 issue of Paddling Business. Inside you’ll find the year’s hottest gear for canoeing, kayaking, whitewater and paddleboarding. Plus: Industry leaders on surviving COVID, the dirty little secret of pro deals, brand consolidation and more. READ IT NOW »

Paddleboarding’s explosive growth has been followed by a decade-long identify crisis, pundits say. | Photo: Alija Bos