Should you buy your own snowsports apparel?

Your friend invited you to Tahoe this weekend. You’ve never skied before and you’re excited for the sheer adrenaline rush of flying down some slopes. You leave work early on Thursday to pick up some apparel…

Wait, a jacket alone is $250? Do I really need to buy?

However, historically there hasn’t been an easy way to avoid buying, since snowsports apparel is rarely rented on the mountain — unlike the skis, snowboards, and boots.

Now, with Last Minute Apparel’s rental & delivery service, you have an alternative! We help you:

Save money—we rent apparel for less than the cost of buying
Save time—we deliver apparel to you & pickup from you when you’re done
Save space—we store the apparel & maintain it in performance condition

Last Minute Apparel finally allows you to ask yourself whether you should buy or rent.

And, we’ve done the math to help you figure this out! The short answer is not surprising — unless you are a really frequent skier, it almost always makes more financial sense to rent.

If you want to dive into the numerical details, scroll down and keep reading!

Ok, here are the numbers!

It’s pretty obvious that if you buy an expensive set of apparel, you’ll need to go very often to make the investment worth it. By our calculations, if you spend $500 and go to Tahoe 3–5 times a year, you’ll still need to use your apparel for 3–5 full years to drive your average per trip cost down to $40 (which may still sound expensive).

Less obvious is the fact that even if you buy a cheap set of apparel, you might also lose because of two critical points:

Cheap apparel wears out faster, you might need to toss it out before you’ve gotten your money’s worth. If you buy a $250 set (already pretty cheap!), you might think you’re OK going only 1–2 times per year. At that rate, you’d need to use the apparel for 4–7 full years to average a price per trip of $40! And who can say if the apparel will last that long?
If you end up loving the sport, you’ll spend more money later on quality apparel (essentially buying another set!). Or if you try to keep the cheap set, you might lose in terms of performance on the mountain.

To make the scenarios more visual, consider the below graphs. The line on each graph represents the $40 per trip cost for apparel threshold. Based on how many trips you’d realistically do in a season (X-axis) and how many seasons or years you’d realistically keep the clothes (Y-axis), if you land in the red to the left of the line, you’re financially better off renting.

In case you’re wondering, $500 is the average retail cost of our apparel items, and $40 is what we recommend for rental + delivery ($10/item) over the course of a single trip (regardless of length of time, so take out our apparel for as long as you want!).

There are an endless number of scenarios, so you can download our calculator & graph generator in an Excel here. Play around and figure out what’s right for you! If you have any questions, send us an email at info@lastmingear.com and we’ll be happy to help!

This blarticle was written in the context of building an on-demand rental & delivery service for outdoors recreational equipment. Check it out atwww.lastmingear.com.