jeff | Jeff Harbaugh

Zumiez’s Quarter; Ho Hum, Another Good One. How Do They Keep Doing It?

If it wasn’t so intriguing, it would be getting boring. Zumiez’s sales for the quarter ended April 28, 2012 grew 22.7% to $129.9 million from $105.9 million in the same quarter the previous year. Comparable store sales were up 12.9%. Ecommerce sales rose 7.7% and were 6.2% of the quarter’s total sales. They think ecommerce may eventually be 10% […]

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Learning from JC Penney: Their Transparent Pricing Debacle (So Far)

Retail

As you are probably aware JC Penney, struggling to find a sustainable market position, hired a high powered Apple executive as CEO. He got rid of all their sales and started offering everyday low prices in an attempt to regain some customer attention and loyalty. Based on their recent earnings release, it’s not working, though I hope

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VF’s Quarter and some Broader Considerations

VF Corp. (Vans, Reef, North Face)

As I’ve told you, I’m not so much interested in analyzing the financial statements of big multi-brand corporations like VF (or Nike, or PPR, or Jarden, etc.) but of seeing, to the extent we can, what they are doing in the action sports/youth culture space (or whatever industry we’re in). Mostly I don’t think you want

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Decker’s Quarter and Sanuk’s Role in it.

Deckers (Sanuk)

I’m looking at Decker’s filings not because of a general interest in Deckers, but because they purchased Sanuk last July. Unlike Reef as part of VF Corporation, Sanuk is a significant part of Decker’s sales and profits so we can find out way more about how it’s doing as part of Deckers than we can find

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SPY Optic’s Quarter: Sales and Loss Both Grow

Spy

SPY’s sales for the quarter ended March 31 increased 22% during the quarter to $8.1 million compared to $6.7 million in the same quarter last year. The company had a net loss of $2.58 million compared to $1.52 million in the quarter last year. Sale of SPY branded products were also up 22% to $7.9 million. The

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The Management Changes at Billabong

Billabong

Let’s review what’s happened. Over a few years, Billabong transformed itself from a wholesaler with a group of strong brands with some retail to a 600 store retailer that owns brands. The retail growth, I’ve written, probably took place a little faster than they had planned, but if what you think is the right opportunity appears, sometimes

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The IASC Skate Industry Conference

Skateboarding, Trade Shows

The International Association of Skateboard Company’s conference week was, as usual, well attended by the people you want to see there. That’s a lot of what makes it worth attending for me. I enjoyed the Hall of Fame awards. It was great to see and hear some of these people I’ve only read about. I left before the bitter

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Skullcandy’s March Quarter: Great Sales Growth. Where’s the Income?

Skullcandy

There’s a lot of interesting information in this10Q and the conference call. Let’s start with the income statement to see where we want to focus. You can see the whole 10Q here. First, we see a 47.9% growth in sales from $36 million in the quarter ended March 31, 2011 to $53.3 million in the same

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What Can We Learn From Vail’s Metrics?

Vail Resorts

Vail Resorts released some metrics today on their season through April 22nd that I thought were worth a quick review because of some of the lessons it teaches any business about market positioning. I also want to discuss briefly accounting for season passes (try and contain your excitement). You can see the complete press release here. The numbers

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PPR Earnings Release and Volcom- Exit Strategies for Core Brands

Kering (Volcom)

This article was occasioned by PPR’s release of its quarterly results, but that’s not really what it’s about. When PPR, or Decker’s or VF or Jarden releases earnings we’re interested in what happened mostly because we’d like to know what’s going on with Volcom, or Sanuk, or Reef, or K2/Ride. We never find out very much. Volcom

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