Old Town Canoe Company advertising, inquires, and sales from 1914 to 1948

Benson Gray

Canoe History Enthusiast
Staff member
I have been digging in some of the Old Town Canoe Company factory records again and thought that the attached chart might interest someone else here. My research started with some old cards that had a record of the inquiries from 1914 to 1948 as shown in the blue line. It clearly shows the devastating impact of both World Wars along with a rough idea of how many catalogs were printed and mailed out annually. The next column of figures on the cards had a series of numbers that I’m guessing is the annual advertising expense by year as shown by the red line. (They didn’t print a new catalog in 1944 so this seems like a reasonable interpretation.) The black line shows the end result of unit canoes sales for each year (which probably includes the Carleton Canoe Company totals as well). The exact unit sales totals were not recorded in the corporate secretary’s notes during the wars (1918-1919 and 1944-1945) so I estimated those from the production numbers. The actual totals were probably lower than these estimates. They spent an average of over $14K annually on advertising. About $0.70 of each advertising dollar produced one inquiry and one out of every five inquiries resulted in the sale of a canoe.

This was a period of significant inflation and pricing gyrations so I added the price of an 18 foot Guide’s model in the yellow line and the Consumer Price Index in the green line over the same years for comparison. (These prices were both multiplied by 100 to get the scales to match the range of the other numbers.) The page at http://www.wcha.org/catalogs/old-town/guide/ has more detail about the source of these pricing numbers. The average canoe's price over this period is just over $81 so each one sold had to cover just under $4 in advertising costs.

Thoughts?

Benson
 

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It's interesting that sales were on a decreasing trend from 1923 through 1948 -- some ups & downs, but overall decreasing. Given the Great Depression and WW2 wouldn't be goo dyears, and the advent of aluminum canoes hurt, but I would have thought the 1920s would have been better. Any idea why those years don't look so good?
 
I suspect that many paddlers took up power boating, which was growing in popularity, and forsook canoes, especially with the development of the relatively cheap outboard motor. Ole Evinrude started his company building motors in 1909, sold his company to others, but by the 1920's was doing business as ELTO, competing with Evinrude, Johnson, and several other very successful outboard makers, all selling to a booming market.
 
It's pretty easy to see one reason why Bert Morris decided not to rebuild the factory. Thanks for this research, Benson.
 
Any idea why those years don't look so good?

The drop in 1924 was attributed to the automobile as described at http://forums.wcha.org/showthread.php?2335 and the one in 1948 was probably due to aluminum canoes which the page at http://www.marathonboat.com/about.asp describes as starting production in 1945. The dip in 1948 is also interesting because both advertising and inquiries were relatively high at that point. The decline in the late 1920s may have been due to simple market saturation since they had just finished two record breaking years in a row. Advertising and inquiries were unusually high then as well. The peak number of inquires in 1939 is also unusual since there was not a corresponding rise in either advertising or unit sales.

These numbers include Old Town's power boats as well so the move away from paddle boats may not have had as much of an impact. It is clear from this that the Morris factory fire occurred at one of the worst possible times. It is too bad that we don't have a similar amount of information available from his company to compare with this for further insights.

Benson
 
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