Spencer and Tosh - The New NOC Skirt Rack

Over the years I’ve never quite seen a good way to stock or display sprayskirts.  I know it’s about as nerdy of a topic as there could be, but being a seller of sprayskirts I keep an eye out for such a thing when I visit retail shops.  Sprayskirts typically hang like a limp, wet, droopy noodle from a display rack or grid-wall hook, and there’s really nothing very appealing about they way they are displayed in shops.  To be fair, it’s a product that is very difficult and awkward to display and it takes up a lot of space.  Again, it’s terribly nerdy, but this bothers me, and for a couple years I’ve had an idea to make a sprayskirt display rack kind of like the poster display racks you see in records stores (photo below).  The folks at NOC happened to be on a merchandising kick this winter and were willing to give my concept a shot.  Myself and Tosh Arwood, who manages the boating department, put our heads together to come up with a way to implement this concept.  Below I’ve posted a photo journal of the process we went through to make this dream a reality.

First, find a kayak company or friend who doesn't mind sacrificing the cockpit off of their broken boat(s). In this case Pyranha and Liquidlogic donated some old hulls that worked out great. Jigsaw works well for cutting these off the boats but I employed a chainsaw for all these. I've done it both ways and the chainsaw is just quicker and easier. No photos of that glorious process unfortunately. Tosh wanted ten cockpits, so we got five from each of the two companies. It was a chainsaw kayak massacre.

Excess plastic needed to be taken off each cockpit rim, so this is where the jigsaw came in handy.

I took a cross section out of each rim so you could see the underside of the bungee or rand once the skirt was on the cockpit. Detailed photo below.

NOC’s handyman, Scott, prepared a nicely varnished backing for the cockpits.  Tosh picked up some door hinges to fix to the board and cockpits to make the whole thing operable.

Tosh and Scott mounted up all the cockpits as I continued to jigsaw the rest of the stack.

Out of the workshop and onto the sales floor, we mounted our new creation to the grid-wall. Kerby (left) and Jason McClure (not pictured) also lent their assistance and keen eyes for the mounting.

Here's a poster display, if you can possibly see how I first got the idea for the skirt display. It was actually when I saw Mel Gibson that the concept first came to me. You could probably use an actual poster display and put plywood in place of the posters and mount cockpit rims to the plywood. Our method gives each skirt more breathing room, but it could work possibly. Just thinking out loud.

Almost fully loaded with skirts, our creation was near completion.

Now you can see the cross section cutouts that I mentioned above. These allow you to see precisely how each skirt grabs the underside of the cockpit rim, something you never see on an ordinary skirt rack, or even on your kayak.

Spencer and Tosh - The New NOC Skirt Rack

Once it was all said and done Tosh and I sat back proudly and celebrated with some cheeseburgers, a birthday cake, captain crunch cereal, little debbie oatmeal pies, a dozen krispy kreme donuts, a whole large cheese pizza all to ourselves, some dark chocolate reece's cups, chocolate oreo milkshakes with rainbow sprinkles, ices mocha frappacinos with whip cream, all you can eat at the indian buffet, and some junior mints, for the breath, because of the onion on the burgers.

Feel free to write in with questions about Skirt-rack-zilla, and how you can make one all by yourself for your kayak shop.  Meanwhile check out the best sprayskirt fitting resource available, SKIRTFIT.COM.

Thanks,
Spencer Cooke, IR Rep.