Steamboat entrepreneur Peter Hall was among the first to design an inflatable paddleboard specifically made for navigating whitewater.
With a $30,000 initial investment in 2011, Hall’s Hala boards — with catchy names like the Hala Atcha, Hala Peno and the Hala Nass — helped create a new way to play in rivers and creeks.
“We set people up with a board that could tackle all kinds of whitewater. We were doing R&D and designing stuff for a cohort of paddlers that didn’t exist back then but we helped bring the sport to life,” said 41-year-old Hall.
The pandemic broke Hall. Shops canceled orders in the summer of 2020 but then doubled up on orders heading into the next year as outdoor recreation soared. He tried to recover with a loan from the Small Business Administration but then the federal government’s rate increases added more costs. And shops with overflowing shelves nixed big orders as the post-pandemic outdoor recreation boom ebbed.
“Within three months of getting that loan, we went from our biggest season ever, to canceled orders and the Fed actions raised our debt service by $135,000 a year,” Hall said.
Hall moved fast to get boards to paddlers at the height of the pandemic. It left him too far over his paddleboard.
“Now there are prices being driven down by the oversupply of paddleboards and all these pool-toy paddleboards that sell for $199 and people are selling them for less than cost just to stop paying for storage,” he said. “The bottom has just been swiped out of the whole paddlesports market.”
And Hall has filed for bankruptcy protection. He helped his creditors sell Hala Gear to a longtime employee, Colleen King. He sold Colorado Kayak Supply — an online paddlesports retailer founded in Buena Vista that Hall acquired in 2019 from a seller who was struggling — to Jon Kahn, the longtime owner of Denver’s Confluence Kayak and Ski shop.
“Oh yes, I’m keenly aware that the previous owners have not been able to figure it out,” said Kahn, who first opened Confluence Kayak in 1995 on Platte Street “when there were five, six other paddle shops in Denver and Boulder. Now there’s just two of us.”
Kahn hopes operating Colorado Kayak Supply — it’s often called CKS, conveniently matching the initials of Kahn’s shop — in Denver with his existing warehouse space and shop will help the company. The previous operators rented storage space in the Upper Arkansas River Valley and Steamboat Springs. And Kahn, who was among the first shops to carry Hala boards in 2011, has a vibrant winter business that will help him weather the seasonal flow of paddlesports.
“We have some advantages built in and we’ve been through some ups and downs in the paddle industry,” said Kahn, who found 60% to 70% of CKS’s online customers were also regular visitors to his Denver shop. “E-commerce, in general, has been a bad thing for local paddle shops … that’s bad for the industry because local paddle shops bring new paddlers into the sport. I think we are going to find a new balance between online and our brick-and-mortar shop.”
King was born and raised in Steamboat Springs. Her parents operated small businesses in the town and she’s spent six years working with Hall at Hala. Hall has promised to stay on board as King prepares the 2025 product line for the company.
“To me, Peter is Hala. He has really built out the sport and contributed so much to the community,” King said. “We’ve been through a rough two years and I’ve been so impressed how Peter has handled everything with such grace.”
Hala sells 15 types of boards, most for navigating whitewater and a few for flatwater and surfing. King said her plan is to “hunker down, slim it down and really focus on what we are good at with our river line.”
Earlier this year King worked with Hall to assemble information for potential buyers.
“Nobody was biting and it got to the point where it was looking like the brand was going to die. So when there was an opportunity to buy it, I had to do it,” King said. “It’s just too good to let it disappear.”