The Mid-Atlantic Scuba
Retailers Association
The Mid-Atlantic Scuba Retailers Association is a group of dive stores in the Maryland and Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC. Member stores are located as far south as Charlottesville and as far north as Columbia. Store owners attend monthly meetings, host an association website and sponsor joint projects such as an area-wide underwater photo contest and an annual scuba equipment “Demo Day” at the local lake.
Among the greatest benefits of association membership, according to one store owner, is that it “opens lines of communication and stimulates the sharing of ideas.” I got to see this in action when association treasurer Scott Evans, of Adventure Scuba Company of Chantilly, Virginia, invited me to accompany himself, his wife Julie and his store manager, Henry Johnson, on a visit to other association member stores in neighboring Maryland.
The idea behind the trip was to look for display, merchandising and other ideas that Scott could put to work in his store — and to invite the store owners we would visit to do the same. In so far as Scott had already visited most of the dive stores in his immediate market area of Northern Virginia, he wanted to visit some stores in suburban Maryland that he had not yet seen.
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