New to SCOPE in 2023, the Universal Dashboard offers great insight for businesses that need Market Intelligence but not the in-depth analysis offered by the higher tiers of SCOPE.  If your business is looking to maximize the value of SCOPE’s shipment and inventory data, the Universal Dashboard might be exactly what the doctor ordered.

Failing to plan is essentially planning to fail. Every industry has shifts in supply and demand around particular seasons, but it hits the outdoor industry especially hard. If you don’t order and stock guns, ammunition, and other items far enough ahead of when consumers need them, you can’t sell them. Bring in too much too late and you’re losing money on inventory. Nobody needs a turkey shotgun mid-summer. You no longer have to just guess. SCOPE provides data that drives fact-based planning.

The digital age has ushered in an era of data collection and utilization that has significantly affected the firearms and shooting sports industry. When people think of data, seemingly endless excel spreadsheets and rows of numbers come to mind. The question is — how do you use it?

There’s a range with shotguns. You either have one, old inherited pump shotgun or a small collection of target and hunting shotguns. Compared to the myriad of handgun and rifle cartridges, variety in shotguns tends to come in action type and appearance.

Cellphones, mp3 players – the original trend was to make them as small as possible. Compact, easy to transport and slip in a pocket. Nowadays, it seems as though manufacturers and the market are heading in another direction, newer phones hardly fitting in a jeans pocket with larger screens not unlike a small tablet. Storage and capacity are still top of mind, but remote cloud service storage options reduce the necessity of internal storage.

During “the Surge” in 2020 and 2021, firearm manufacturers saw an increase in demand for  guns to accessories to optics.Ammo saw a massive spike in sales right away and then struggled to catch up on production, which led to high demand and low supply. Looking at the wholesaler shipment and sales data from the first half of 2022, sales of all optics appeared to shadow the decrease in the overall market and inventory mix as the surge curtailed. While all optic sales trended downward in the past year, SCOPE DLX data showed red dot sales declined at a sharper rate than other products within the mix of the optics market.

According to the SCOPE DLX Q1 Report, the pandemic surge of 2020 and 2021 is officially over. Shipments have slowed and inventory is building. Despite the drop off, most categories are still trending above pre-pandemic levels, an encouraging sign that the industry is still strong despite the slow down since the the peak of the surge. "Plan sales relative to 2019 performance with a 15-20% increase," mentions Tom Hopper, NASGW Senior Data Analyst, in his key takeaways found in the report.