Don’t forget the middle. There are many excellent spots for flying kites away from the coast.
One of my favorite kite shops is out of Boulder, Colorado: Into The Wind[0]
I’ve only bought from them once or twice, but I used to spend hours paging through their paper catalog as a kid. I also visited their shop in Boulder as a teen — that was really fun.
When I was 10, the Into the Wind catalog lit my imagination in so many ways. It was a fantasy novel crossed with a science book.
A couple years ago I wandered past their store in Boulder and was floored that there was a real, physical incarnation of that magical catalog. I took my little kids there this winter and it was like passing a spark between generations.
My brother got his daughter a kite from there. The wind didn't cooperate on the first day we went to fly it, but her dad and I still tried getting it into the air by running with the string to see if we could get it high enough that it'd catch what wind there was higher up. We failed, but my niece saw us running with the kite, so she wanted to run with the kite. She had a great time running around the park with the kite bouncing on the ground behind her.
The kite survived that & flew fine on later occasions. Now that she's seen it fly, though, she has lost interest in kites that won't fly.
Maybe in market value with all the gear that comes with it, but unlikely by numbers. Regular kite festivals still draw massive numbers anywhere in europe and casual or kid kites are still at thing. Regular kites where really huge in the late 80s and 90s for some weird reason, with any bigger town in Germany having at least one dedicated kite shop.
No kitesurf kites though, probably the most popular kites on the market now? Maybe in the west, not sure about the east.