It’s not usual that I’m happy to see a decline in year over year revenues during a quarter, but in the case of Quiksilver, I think I’ll make an exception. Their revenues for the quarter ended January 31 fell by 4.8% from $412 to $396 million. But at least some of that decline is from cleaning up […]
We’ve all been interested in Deckers since they bought Sanuk. I want to start by pulling what we can on Sanuk out of the 10K and conference call. But Deckers also said some interesting things about direct to consumer business and how brick and mortar integrates with online. Finally, of course, I’ll look at their numbers for the […]
Okay, strong balance sheet, revenue growth, profitable, blah, blah, blah. I’ll get to all that. But on page 22 of the conference call an analyst asked about their interest in potential acquisitions. The answer from CFO Bob Shearer, in part, was “…how we think about acquisition targets, and we think about it a lot, and yes, we have […]
I don’t follow Sport Chalet closely. But they said something in their 10Q for the December 29th quarter that related to some other ideas I’d seen on how the retail market is changing. I thought they might be worth talking about together. Sport Chalet’s Dilemma Sport Chalet operates 52 stores, 34 of which are in Southern […]
Billabong reported their financial results for the six months ended December 31, 2013 last Thursday. I’ve been diving into a hoard of details they posted. After all of that, I think I’m going to end up spending a lot less time than usual on some of those details. That’s because I largely agree with a couple of […]
Billabong’s announcement last week that it was, among other things, conducting a strategic review of SurfStitch and Swell caused me to focus on the similarities of its situation to Quiksilver’s. It also made me realize that most of what has been discussed publically by both companies is what I’ll call mechanical issues. I want to remind you […]
So I confess. I’m from Seattle and there was no way in hell I was going to be on a plane Sunday while the Super Bowl was on. I left Saturday. But in my two days wandering the show, I had some thoughts I wanted to share with you. There was a bit more of a somber attitude […]
As many of you know, Intrawest, the owner of Steamboat, Winter Park, Tremblant, Stratton, Snowshoe, Mammoth, and half of Blue Mountain, started trading as a public company on January 31. The initial offering price for the stock was supposed to be $15 to $17, but it ended up going public at $12 in a soft stock […]
We sell a lot of apparel. It’s where we, as an industry, make somewhere between a lot to most of our money. We’ve benefited over many years from apparel prices that have risen slowly if at all, and certainly more slowly than inflation. This article demonstrates that. It further tells us that apparel prices have started to rise and […]
I have written before about the value of Zumiez’s hiring, training, and promotion process. They take kids with a passion for the activities and brands their stores sell, train them, support them, make them compete with their peers, and promote the ones who succeed. The average age of store managers is something like 23 and pretty much […]
