The thing is, I really like Skullcandy’s marketing. There is some commonality of message and attitude among their sponsored people (notice I don’t just say team riders) even when those people come from very different places and perspectives. I like it is because while they have, for example, sponsored surfers the message isn’t just about […]
Unfortunately, I didn’t write that just to get your attention. It’s true. You can read all about it in this article. As you read it, please focus on what it says about Amazon’s goal in having the store. It’s all about gathering and using data, says the author. Retail today is about getting the right […]
I knew about this article on the Wavestorm $100 surfboard before it ever came out. In some ways, it’s old news. Less expensive surf boards of various constructions and materials have been popping up for years now, and the Wavestorm isn’t new. I guess the genie was out of the bottle around the time Clark […]
I’m going to try and keep this pretty short. Nothing has really changed strategically. Spy is still in business only because its major shareholder has lent the company around $20 million. In terms of operations and expense management, they’ve done everything that I can see they can do. They tried to stake out a differentiable […]
On the face of it, GoPro had a pretty good quarter and, as usual, we’ll take a look at the numbers. The stock closed at $30.21 on October 28th. They released their earnings after the market closed. The next day, the stock closed at $25.62, down 15.2% on by far the biggest trading volume since […]
So, in a market where your customer may value the experience more than the product, how do you know that your product improves their experience? How do they find out it will? Why should they associate your product with the experience? What, exactly, is the experience you are improving? Let me tell you a story […]
Kering’s report for the quarter ended September 30 included almost no information on Volcom and Electric. No analysts asked questions about either brand, but that’s pretty standard. Historically, there’s been enough in the slides and prepared remarks that I can use some simple math to figure out things are going, but not this time. Here’s […]
My family has a beach house on Long Beach Island, New Jersey. I’ve been going there since I was a kid and still try to get back most summers. It’s where I learned to surf (I know- New Jersey surf? We work with what we’ve got). Anyway, I was back there in September and as […]
In the retail and economic environment we’ve got right now and given the results of some of its competitors it’s kind of hard to complain about a company that put 10% of revenue to the net income line in the quarter that ended August 1st. Revenues were pretty much the same as in last year’s […]
It was last December when A&F’s long time CEO was “resigned” by its board of directors. I posted a link last winter to an article about how that came to happen. Here’s that link. That’s not to say he had complete responsibility for what went wrong at A&F. But, as the article made clear, it’s […]
