Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 30, 1994 TAG: 9411290064
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SANDRA BROWN KELLY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
A place to dine is one of the few things not planned in CMT Sporting Goods' new digs.
"And we actually thought about food, but nixed it," said Cary Mangus, the "M" in CMT Sporting Goods Co. Inc. of Roanoke, which next month opens the largest operation in its 24-year history.
There will be freeze-dried grub in the camping goods section, and elsewhere there'll be items ranging from popular-priced equipment for the casual sports person to $5,000 tables for the sincere billiards player.
A "sports mecca" is what Mangus calls the 54,000-square-foot retail store the company is building just one door away from its current location in Southwest Roanoke.
Certainly, it has that potential. The 25-foot, $30,000 climbing wall near its entrance is more or less a standard in retail sporting goods places these days, but the two independent shops that have leased space at the rear of the store take the boutique concept in a new direction.
The stores-within-the-store will house Diving Enterprises, which will relocate to CMT from its quarters on U.S. 220 South, and Bryansteens Gun Shop, another 220 South store that is opening a branch at CMT.
The idea is to create a group of specialty shops under one roof and to provide customers access to merchandise for a variety of sports and the advice of fitness experts.
Steve Hetherington, a competition biker and veteran climber and runner, will oversee the climbing wall activities. He also runs the climbing wall at Roanoke Recreation Department's Reserve Avenue facility.
Gus Carper, a former athletic director for the Roanoke YMCA and a veteran karate instructor, has joined CMT's staff.
The company also has the services of Denise Tolusso, a personal fitness trainer who operates The Training Edge. Tolusso, who is a graduate student at Virginia Tech in exercise physiology, will help CMT select its fitness equipment and be at the store, at least initially, on Saturdays to meet with customers.
CMT currently supplies equipment for Tolusso's gym on Starkey Road Southwest.
Not all facilities will be in place when the store opens Nov.7. By the first of the year, however, CMT expects to have a training room for use by Tolusso's clients and an archery range where Bryansteens' customers can try out equipment.
By spring, the company hopes to expand its equipment rentals to include bicycles; it already rents skis and in-line skating equipment.
With the new retail complex, CMT will have 100,000 square feet of space at its combined quarters on Brandon Avenue. The new store more than doubles the current retail space. And with the company's retail operations having its own store, space for institutional and team product display will more than triple at the existing Brandon Avenue store. The remainder of the space there will be devoted to offices and a distribution center for CMT's six stores.
In addition to its two locations on Brandon, CMT has a shop at Tanglewood Mall and stores in Blacksburg, Lynchburg and Bristol. The company also operates a silk-screening facility in Southwest Roanoke to serve the company's team and industrial division.
CMT said 60 percent of its business comes from retail sales, and the remaining 40 percent is from sports teams and institutions. The company expects both segments to expand incrementally with the changes.
CMT was opened in December 1970 by five Roanoke County men: Mangus, CMT president Banks Conner (the "C"), Richard Trent (the "T"), Ed Cox and Charlie Tull. All except Trent were then co-workers at Graves-Humphreys Co., a former Roanoke Valley sporting goods wholesaler. Trent, who was the company's first president, had worked at Graves-Humphreys but left to pursue other business interests.
"We never bought from Graves-Humphreys ... at the time, they weren't pleased," recalled Tull, now vice president for personnel and purchasing.
The men weren't sports enthusiasts especially and still don't claim to have any special sports expertise. None has a golf score he wants to reveal.
They opened a sporting goods store because it looked like a good business, Conner said.
The Brandon Avenue site was chosen because Trent owned the property, which had housed a series of furniture stores. Trent died in 1982, but his estate still owns the site. The new building and its 4 acres are owned by Conner, Mangus & Tull Partnership. Cox is retired.
CMT's first store was 16,000 square feet, and the owners feared that was too big. They expected to lease out some of it, but sales took off right away.
In the first year, the business grossed $600,000. Within a couple of years, they expanded - and kept expanding until the current quarters meandered through 47,000 square feet.
The company started with five employees, had 80 by 1983 and now has 175. There has never been a time when CMT wasn't growing, its owners said. Despite this, the company has dropped on one magazine's list of the 100 top sporting goods stores because everyone else is growing, too.
CMT is a private company, meaning it does not report financial results. But its 1993 sales are estimated at more than $13 million by Sports Trend magazine, which places the company as 96th on on its annual list of 100, down from 88th. All companies on the list have sales above $10.1 million; the top 35 have sales of at least $100 million. At the top is Wal-Mart with $2.4 billion, followed by Kmart, Foot Locker, J.C. Penney and L.L. Bean. Kmart's Sports Authority chain is sixth with $607 million annual sales.
When CMT opened, it had little competition locally, the owners said. For years, it was also the largest sporting goods store in the state.
"Now there's competition from everywhere," Tull said. "There's three or four trophy shops in town; and at the other end of the spectrum, there are Wal-Mart and the other discount stores."
This latest expansion should serve two purposes: It will allow the company to increase its sales, and help ward off more competition.
Sporting goods chains like Sports and Recreation of Tampa, Fla., have crept closer to the Roanoke Valley. Sports and Recreation in the past year opened 11 stores, including one in Greensboro, N.C., and two in Richmond.
Expansion "might buy us some time," Conner said.
After the chains saturate the larger metropolitan areas, they'll look at the markets the size of Roanoke, he said.
And when they do get here, Conner wants them to find a CMT that is a "sports center for everything from team needs to retail."
by CNB