Local ski shop wins award

Written for The Villager

The popular ski shop, The City Garage, won the national award for “Best Vibe” by Skiing Business, an online magazine.

Sean Lowes opened The City Garage with his wife in 1999. The ski shop is open year round and specializes for each season. During the winter, the store specializes in skis: alpine skis, Nordic skis and Twin Tip skis, just to name a few.

In the summer, the shop switches gears to provide people with the best in technical summer gear; including, sunglasses, footwear and The City Garage is the only one in the area to offer stand up paddle boards. The latter is a growing trend on the West Coast that is slowly but surely migrating to the East Coast where The City Garage is fully embracing it.

Trey Clauss, The City Garage’s store manager, went to Denver, Colorado to receive the award. Clauss, who has worked there for nine years and has lived in the area for the past 15 years, said that this year was a special year.

“This was their first inaugural awards that they gave out,” Clauss said.

The ceremony coincided with the SnowSports Industries America trade show. Ten ski shops and three sales representatives were given their awards to honor their contributions to the skiing industry.

All of the votes casted for the ski shops were done so by ski manufacturers and/or sales representatives, while the voting was reversed for the sales representatives who won.

The City Garage was one of only two ski shops to win an award in New York State but was the only one from the Ellicottville area. The City Garage won the “Best Vibe” award, but was also nominated in the “Best Customer Engagement” category as well.

The Best Vibe award really means that the ski sales representatives, the ones they do and do not work with, believe that The City Garage’s customers have “the best overall perception of the store – the lay out and the store itself,” Clauss said.

What goes along with receiving the national award is that The City Garage will be featured on the e-magazine.

The shop wrote a brief 300-word history that included the story of Lowes’s conception of the shop to what it is now. The article is to be revealed this month, but the award ceremony is already up on www.skiingbusiness.com.

You can sign up for the free subscription to Skiing Business to read all about The City Garage’s success and keep up to date on all the latest skiing trends.