It's been almost a week now, but my head is still spinning from all of our excitement last week! We started the week with a fantastic 25th Anniversary Event at our factory. Then, immediately after the event, the Lifetime Sales and Marketing Team, lead product engineers, and some leaders from other departments held their annual sales meeting.

This conference is a chance for a group of us at Lifetime to communicate, review our progress from the past year, and preview what's planned for our products and business in the coming years. We present and discuss new products, new accounts, manufacturing innovations, international growth, marketing, and more.

If I had to sum up this years meeting in one word, it would be: WOW! You won't believe the list of new products we are rolling out soon! While many of the products are still under wraps for a little while longer, I can tell you that some new Lifetime products already hitting or soon to hit store shelves include a Lifetime Paddleboard, a Lifetime Tailgate Table, a Lifetime Adirondack Chair, and a Sit-Inside Kayak!

During our two-day meeting, we also participated in a few team-building activities. One of the activities this year was some water-fun in our own kayaks, new paddleboards, and new sit-inside kayak. Any person who hadn't had a chance to test the new products, got the opportunity. Those who tried out the new sit-inside kayak were very impressed with the ease of which the kayak can move in the water. The sleek design really lends itself to speed and ease! 

The paddleboards also received two thumbs up. Most people were a little apprehensive to try them at first thinking they would tip easily or be hard to balance and paddle. But, everyone agreed that once we were on them for a few minutes and found our "sea legs", it was easy to get the hang of them and they really are quite stable.

To truly test and compare our different kayak models, we played a game of kayak rugby/football.... Ok, maybe a little bit of everyone's competitive nature that played into that decision too. Jan has explained the basic directions of how to play this game in one of her previous blog posts. As she mentions, it really is a great way to improve your paddling and agility skills.

This kayak rugby challenge was yellow Lifetime Daylite vs. blue Lifetime Calypso, and check it out, it was caught on film by Lifetime President Richard Hendrickson! To put us all on spotlight he used his head camera to capture video from his perspective (as you will see, even though he's president, we don't go too easy on him). I've included just a brief video clip in this post for you to see a glimpse of the fun.  We are planning to edit all of video clips together and create an instructional video on our YouTube channel for how to play Kayak Rugby so we can get even more people excited about this fun activity to do with our products!   

Long story short…stay tuned because we are going to be rolling out lots of new Lifetime products in the next few months and throughout 2012!