Did you hear?… Ropegun is closing down

SNEWS® received the following email Friday, April 26; “Hi All, Sorry for the ‘bulk’ e-mail. As you may or may not have heard, Ropegun is closing down. I would personally like to thank you for your enthusiasm and support. It has been a pleasure working with you. I’m looking forward to the change in my life and excited about doing some climbing this summer! I hope our paths cross again. Perhaps I’ll see you at a future show. Until then, wishing you and yours all the best! Cheers, Troy Mayr, formerly of Ropegun” Calls to the company phone have gone unreturned, as have emails. The Website — www.ropegun.com — is basically a shell and no one is answering the company email there either.
SNEWS® View: Since no one at the company is returning calls, SNEWS® is left to speculate what might have happened to this young (it became a California LLC in 1999), influential apparel company that catered to the climbing crowd. Calls to climbers and competitors of Ropegun revealed that the community thought of Ropegun as the real deal — climbing clothing that worked, made for climbers by climbers. Since it is now apparently shutting the doors, it would be safe to assume that the company has been challenged financially for at least a year now. A downturn in the economy last year likely didn’t help either. Too, their competition was severe. Walk through the climbing area at an Outdoor Retailer Summer Market and you see every third booth with apparel. Couple that with well-established brands and those with deeper pockets — Verve, TNF, Patagonia, Gramicci, Stonewear Designs, etc. — and you have a recipe for a company struggling with distribution issues in a market where retailers are getting increasingly conservative with their open-to-buy.