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Pitching a tent in the great outdoors used to mean getting away from it all, including many of the comforts of home. In 2007, the number of creature comforts that must be left behind is a little smaller.

Some campgrounds, including many in the KOA system, already offer wireless Internet access. For 2007, Eureka! Tent has made it a little easier to accommodate other electronic appliances by introducing the N!ergy line, three tents of various capacities which include three factory-installed 1-volt outlets inside. To run current to those outlets, Eureka! offers the E! Power System, sold separately.

Camping purists may shake their heads, but the flip side of the argument is that encouraging participation is the main thing, and that these wireless and/or electric-powered campers may soon find they enjoy camping enough to leave the laptops and DVD players at home. Anyway, there are still hundreds of models of more traditional tents available, from Eureka! and other manufacturers.

With that said, Eureka! isn’t the only tent maker electrifying the category. For the 2007 camping season, Coleman introduced what it calls “the industry’s first hinged door, lighted tents.” According to Coleman, the integrated lighting system on these tents “provides a bright, useful light and not just ambience illumination.” It’s powered by an eight D-cell battery pack. A replaceable 15-watt spiral fluorescent tube produces enough light to read by at night, according to Coleman, and the light can be turned on and off with a push-button remote control from up to 50 feet away, or by using the backlit switches located at the light fixture and the battery pack. There’s a choice of low and high light settings, with more than 16 hours of run time on the “low” setting and 12 to 14 hours of run time on “high,” according to the manufacturer.

However, these options—electricity or no electricity? lights or no lights?—aren’t the be-all and end-all of the decision-making process in tents and sleeping bags. The prospective homebuyer will ask a realtor to help him or her zero in on housing that best meets his or her requirements; think of yourself and your selling staff as realtors.

At the same time, buying a sleeping bag is like buying a mattress: The smart consumer knows that the final choice comes down to individual needs in comfort as well as pricing considerations. Therefore, it’s not wise to buy a sleeping bag without trying it out first, something that’s more easily accomplished in a brick-and-mortar store than in cyberspace.

Accordingly, a tent that suits a family of four would be too cumbersome for a backpacker who requires only a one-person shelter, something that’s little more than a covering over the sleeping bag. The qualities that make a cabin tent attractive to a family group—spaciousness, breathability, separate compartments or “rooms” for privacy—don’t matter. However, the backpacker will put greater emphasis on the quality and suitability of the bag.

The tent market is a big tent

And the family-vs.-backpacker scenario isn’t the end of it. Even among families that are demographically identical (mom, dad, two kids), there can be great variations in their requirements. Your tent-buying customers might like to travel light, or might pack as though going on a month-long safari, or might need to accommodate the tendency of one of the kids to spread out.

All will need to judge for themselves whether a particular tent will allow everyone ample comfort when they’re arrayed full-length on the floor in a sleeping bag, and whether there will be enough floor space to avoid that cooped-up feeling during an all-day rainstorm. One customer’s roomy six-person tent might be somebody else’s cramped quarters, even if the group sizes are identical.

Sleeping bag requirements are even more individual. People not only vary by size and shape, but also by tolerance to cold (and, conversely, heat) and also by sleeping style. A camper who tosses and turns while sleeping will probably need a roomier bag. The more confining shape of a mummy bag might be more appropriate for a camper whose season extends into the colder months.

Making matters just a little more complicated is the fact that while the basic formats of tents and bags remain consistent among different manufacturers—Company X’s mummy bag will have pretty much the same silhouette as Company Y’s—the details of construction and design can vary. For example, Slumberjack employs such design features as internal collars to prevent heat loss, draft tubes sewn adjacent to zippers to keep out cold air, the “Weather Wedge” to prevent heat loss at the zipper opening, and anti-snag zipper tape sewn along the draft tube and the liner to prevent zippers from snagging.