Global warming is affecting cold-weather businesses.

Posted on March 20, 2013 by Jean Spencer

: Global warming, melts snow at ski resorts.

Temperatures across the globe are increasing regularly, and CEOs of cold weather companies are noticing. When the weather is warmer, there is less of a consumer need for a really warm jacket, a new pair of gloves or a new hat, and sales revenues are reflecting that decrease in consumer demand. As an effect, the outdoor industries are changing the game plan.

“Examples include ski resorts beefing up their snowmaking capability while simultaneously investing in zip lines and mountain bike trails. Some national retailers, meanwhile, are trimming pre-season orders for winter goods, pushing back deliveries of heavier weight apparel, and shifting inventory dollars away from snow sports equipment toward other faster growing sports such as cycling, running and yoga,” said a Outdoor Industry Association article published March 14, 2013.

Here are a few industry tid-bits we’ve compiled from a news sources we trust:

Vail Resorts is investing $25 million into ziplines, ropes courses, climbing walls, mountain bike trails and other summer amenities. Read the source.
“We have to go back to the drawing board on how we think about the risk and reward relationship between inventory and sales in our snow business,” Zumiez CEO Rick Brooks told analysts late in 2012. “Snow in general is just a changing business for many reasons, including the fact that it doesn’t snow as much.” Read the source.
The 2011-2012 winter season was the fourth warmest on record for the U.S. Read the source.
The number of skier visits nationwide dropped by 15 percent. Read the source.

Here at Agloves we have a similar situation. We have noticed that the “winter sales season” is shortening. March is no longer a winter month, despite a majority of its day technically being winter. You get to the end of February and sales hit a wall.

It’s funny to take a step back and look at what is really happening. As a business owner, it sometimes feels like things are always possible as long as you work at it. But no matter how much business savvy you have, how many marketing dollars you have, or how viral your YouTube video goes….Mother Nature trumps all. We are doing business as a consequence of the weather and the environment in which we all live. It’s funny.

Well, no matter. We love winter for business and gloves. We love summer for vacations, warmth and –best of all – margaritas!

Enterprising mom builds business out of fighting dry hands

Posted on February 20, 2012 by Sara B.

For years Renee Harris lived with having dry, cracked hands. But she got tired of putting on Band-Aids just so she could work in her kitchen or make soap.

Using lotion and sleeping with gloves at night did little to solve her problem, so the mother of 8 turned to the Internet. Her Google search turned up several recipes for hard lotion bars.

Renee Harris turned her quest for healthy hands into a family business.

Being a do-it-yourselfer, she decided to try the simplest one with just three ingredients: coconut oil, shea butter and beeswax.

“I didn’t want to invest in something that wouldn’t work,” she said.

Her hands were dry and covered in cuts when she made her first lotion bar. Within a day, her hands were healed. She then decided to try the bar on her son’s seasonal eczema. After about a week, the bar had cleared that up, too.

“I found a solution to the problem of dry skin so I started making the bars and giving them to relatives and friends. I was getting lots of good feedback, so I decided to try it out as a business.”

She started small and took her bars to a farmers market near her home in Cottonwood, CA.

The MadeOn: Skin Care business grew quickly. She got the attention of some bloggers and used Facebook to promote the business. After her husband was laid off from Hewlett-Packard, he joined the company and helped it continue to thrive.

“We decided to go all out,” Harris said. “We knew it was make it or break it. For my husband to have to switch jobs would mean we’d have to move and we didn’t want to do that. We love where we live.”

In addition to her hard lotion bars, Harris also sells soap, hair butter, rash cream and a collection of e-books filled with simple recipes for skin care products. She’s also experimenting with creating a zit stick to fight pimples and a zinc stick to protect people from sunburn.

Agloves President Jennifer Spencer discovered Harris and the MadeOn hard lotion bars while looking for photos of dry hands for a project she was working on.

The women share a mission to keep busy hands happy and healthy. “It’s the job of the Beesilk bar to clear up cuts and wounds, and get your hands soft and ready to do the work you need to get done,” Harris wrote in her blog.

“But what the Beesilk bar can’t do is keep your hands warm while out in the cold. That’s when I recommend Agloves because they not only ward off the nip, but they keep you connected when using your iPhone or iPad.”

Photography and Digital Media for Touchscreen Glove Company, Agloves

Posted on February 15, 2012 by Agloves

Agloves wants to give a big shout out to our lovely creative minds behind the media and images you see on our page. An ode to our creatives. Indeed, one of the best parts of living in Boulder, Colorado is the seemingly unlimited supply of entrepreneurs and creative collaborators that dot this town. And sometimes it’s good to give thanks outside of November.

Our touchscreen glove company wouldn’t be possible without:

NVRVR, a video production house that focuses on 30-sec viral videos and SeeMonster a graphics design firm. Both of these companies are located in our Pearl Street office building and do a fantastic amount of creative work in and out of the Boulder community.

Joe Coca Photography, Forest Woodward Photography and Jim Aikman Cameraworks have been the creative minds behind a majority of our product and “fashion” photos including all our web site photography, graphic design images and photos that traditional media outlets — like CNN — run with articles about Agloves.

Red Head Web Development, our fabulous web-development team based in Oklahoma. Red Head does an amazing job streamlining our front-end website with our back-end shopping cart to make sure that all orders are processed and received quickly and accurately.

Here is a snapshot of some of our favorite pieces:

Agloves Bamboo and Agloves Original prop up a handstand. Photo by Forest Woodward.

Jean Spencer listens to her iPod with Beats by Dr. Dre with Agloves. Photo by Joe Coca

Agloves takes a trip to Eldora Ski Resort in Colorado. Photo by Jim Aikman

Click here for NVRVR’s YouTube video of Agloves Touchscreen Gloves

Click here for a web page developed and designed by SeeMonster

Agloves: a winter wardrobe staple

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Sara B.

Every woman needs a little black dress, a sexy pair of black pumps and a pair of winter touchscreen gloves.

Agloves are the ultimate fusion of fashion and technology.

Traditional winter gloves don’t work with touchscreens, forcing smartphone users to freeze their fingers when they answer their phones, post to Facebook or send a text or tweet.

But Agloves®, America’s best winter touchscreen gloves and the ultimate fusion of fashion and technology, work with all touchscreen devices and allow fashionistas to stay connected while being both warm and trendy. The gloves, made with patent-pending technology, provide full 10-finger access to all smartphones, tablets and touchscreen interfaces as accurately as a bare hand. The gloves have a snug, comfortable fit providing optimum dexterity and precision for texting, scrolling or swiping.

Agloves Sport, knit with a blend of acrylic, spandex and silver yarn, are black with silver flecks to produce a charcoal grey color. Because the gloves are primarily made with acrylic, they are breathable and help draw moisture away from the body.

Agloves Bamboo, knit with a lightweight blend of silver yarn and bamboo, are made with a total of 87 percent antimicrobial fibers. The cream-colored winter gloves can be worn alone or as glove liners.

Both styles are attractive and affordable at $23.99 and are available online at agloves.com and at selected retailers, including Best Buy and Verizon Wireless.

Smartphones create jobs

Posted on January 5, 2012 by Sara B.

In today’s job market, you rarely hear the words hot or lucrative.

But in 2012, as reliance on smartphone technology intensifies, an entire sub-culture of jobs and industries continue to fatten at least this one technology sector job market.

Smartphones have created a demand for protective cases, Bluetooth headsets, interactive apps and winter touchscreen gloves.

According to a July 2011 survey by freelancer.com, the number of smartphone development jobs grew 12 percent from the first quarter of 2011 to the second. Jobs ranging from software engineers to marketing positions for the Android, iPhone and iPad all saw double-digit growth rates over the two quarters. Technical support also comprises a large share of the new jobs.

And because while smartphones have become so fully incorporated into our lives, they also have created some new needs that developers and business professionals are now making money by fulfilling.

Who knew you needed a device charger everyday, at least once a day, or maybe several chargers conveniently located at home, in the car and at work? Or a Bluetooth earpiece to make it easier to actually use your smartphone to make calls? Or a rugged cell phone cover to protect your device?

Fort Collins, CO-based Otterbox, which manufactures smartphone cases, added 240 employees from 2007 to 2010 and saw its revenue skyrocket from $5.1 million to $168.9 million during that time frame, according to Inc. Magazine.

Facebook, the world’s most popular social networking website, inspired an “App Economy” that created as many as 235,644 jobs and spent $15.71 billion in wages and benefits through September 2011, according to a study from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business.

But it’s not just the development of technology that is growing, some analysts said.

“People need to be attuned to the use of technology,” said Woodson Martin, Salesforce.com’s senior vice president for employee success, according to a Dice article.

For example, the touchscreen glove market is a relatively new winter apparel industry that revolutionizes winter gloves to be touchscreen-friendly.

Agloves, warm winter gloves knitted with silver that work effectively with all 10 fingers on all touchscreen devices, were created by Boulder, CO mother-daughter duo Jennifer and Jean Spencer when they discovered two years ago that their normal gloves wouldn’t work with their iPhones.

The pair experimented with several products, before deciding to use silver, to create Agloves.

Initially launched as an online only e-commerce store, Agloves sold 43,000 pairs into 43 countries in 2010. In 2011, the company sold 173,000 pairs. During the 2011 holiday season, the gloves sold at a rate of 2.4 pairs per minute on the Agloves online store.

Dry finger funk

Posted on December 20, 2011 by Sara B.

By Jennifer Spencer

AAAAAAaaaaargh! My fingers don’t work on my touchscreen! I have to touch the screen multiple times for it to even recognize my touch.

Agloves Sport gloves help solve the problem of dry winter skin.

What’s happening here?

For capacitive touchscreens to work, the body’s natural bioelectricity must be recognized by the screen of the device. Small electric charges are transferred through the moisture and salts on the surface of the skin completing a circuit with the screen.

It takes moisture and salts to make your skin conductive.

Chances are that your fingers are very dry…. And therefore less conductive. Try licking your finger to see if it works better on your device. Moisture and salts matter.

Agloves understands this dynamic. Hands, and especially fingertips, get drier in the winter. We are in and out of heated environments. The cold air often makes for drier skin. When fingertips become too dry, our touchscreen devices won’t recognize them.

Agloves to the rescue.

Agloves are knit throughout with real silver. Using patent-pending technology, Agloves pull the bioelectricity from the entire hand, taking advantage of the more conductive parts of the skin (the palm and wrist) to deliver energy to your gloved fingertips. You get consistent performance with a light touch and top-rated accuracy and precision.

If you suffer from dry skin, lick your fingers or wear Agloves.

Two good options, but one is definitely warmer and more sanitary.

Agloves: warm hands and warm hearts

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Sara B.

By Jennifer Spencer

The old adage is: cold hands, warm heart.

At Agloves, we believe that times have changed.

We believe that if your hands are cold, your smartphone is probably in your pocket and all communication has ceased.

Keep your hands warm and stay connected.

We suggest that one can have both warm hands and a warm heart. In fact, we believe that staying connected to your loved ones may be the best way to warm your heart, and theirs.

So, perhaps its time to update the old adage to:

Warm you hands and warm their hearts.

Isn’t that a nice thought?

Agloves: Winter gloves for touchscreens.

Agloves help you prevent texting gaffes

Posted on December 18, 2011 by Sara B.

By Jennifer Spencer

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For some laughs about texting errors, check out these gems from DamnYouAutocorrect.com.

Agloves can help you be more accurate.

Wait. Can gloved hands type better than bare hands?

Agloves can help you improve your texting accuracy.

Yes! Many people find that they can type better with Agloves on.

It’s all about moisture, salts and conductivity.

For your capacitive touchscreen to work, an electrical “conversation” between the screen and your skin must be completed. You touch the screen and it reacts. If your fingers are quite dry, however, the screen may not react. That’s because dry fingers may not conduct enough of your body’s bioelectricity.

Agloves to the rescue.

Agloves gather the bioelectricity from the more conductive (moist) parts of you hand (the palm and wrist) and send that bioelectricity to your fingertips. The conductive oomph of your fingertips increases. You can operate your screen with effortless accuracy.

Agloves conductive oomph is illustrated by an informal study we did with the Raynaud’s Association. Raynaud’s is a chronic condition that makes fingers very cold and dry.

As a result, many sufferers of Raynaud’s are not recognized by ATMs or by their smartphones. It can be quite frustrating. When our sample study tried Agloves, 100% found that they could operate ATMs and smartphones. 100%. You can read more about the study here.

If Agloves can provide a solution for individuals with Raynaud’s, think what they will do for you.

Effortless accuracy. Uncompromised performance.

Same day delivery service

Posted on December 17, 2011 by Sara B.

By Jennifer Spencer

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I love the sound of deadlines as they go whizzing by.

We live in fast paced world. The team at Agloves just learned more about how fast it can be. We had a last minute opportunity to appear on a major morning news program. The trick was that we needed to get our gloves from Boulder, Colorado to NYC by the end of the day. It was 2 p.m. MT.

We have a terrific team. No one said, “Impossible.” Instead the whole staff jumped into an insta-problem solving mode. Within 20 minutes, here’s what we found out.

Agloves are iPhone gloves, iPad gloves, Android gloves, winter touchscreen gloves.

Teamwork is a beautiful thing.

FedEx and UPS offer same day delivery in the United States. To qualify to use this program you must have a FedEx or UPS account number. ($150 – $175 for door-to-door service if a flight is available)

Some airlines offer counter-to-counter service. You identify a flight and drive your package to the airport (It must weigh under one pound). The package can go on the flight. It will go to the counter at the destination airport. ($75 – $80)

New York City has 24-hour couriers who will pick up your package at the airport and deliver it to the proper location. Even in the middle of the night. ($95)

New York City also has car services. You can pay for the car service to transport your package. ($105)

If you need to be sure that your package is under one pound, in a pinch, a local restaurant can be convinced to weigh the package for you. (Thank you, The Kitchen in Boulder, CO)

You can book a flight and send a person with the package. One individual even suggested chartering a flight.

Who knew there were so many options?

What we do know is that communication is becoming more and more in the moment.

That’s why we love Agloves. Despite the fact that they are winter gloves, they are effortlessly accurate. Even in the winter, you can capture the instant in a photo, text a loved one before the train goes into a dead zone or take the call from a potential employer. ($18 – $24)

Isn’t life beautiful?

Still too many cold hands and fingers

Posted on December 15, 2011 by Sara B.

By Jennifer Spencer

So many hands to warm.

Help us spread the (g)love.

I was in Chicago last weekend. It was cold. People were shopping.

As a glove professional, I spend a good bit of time looking at individual hands.

I noticed there are still many people who use bare hands to operate their smartphones. There are people who are wearing only one glove to do that.

I shiver just thinking about it.

Agloves sold 22,000 pairs of winter touchscreen gloves last week (compared to 4,000 pairs the same week in 2010.)

We are proud of our success. But this trip demonstrates to me that there is much work to do. There are many hands to warm and many texts to send.

Help us to warm up America.

Help us to share the (g)love so that each of us can stay connected to those who are important in our lives.