Somewhere in the area of 75 AD the silver content of the Roman Denarius was about 100%. It was solid silver. Somewhere before 300 AD that content had fallen to around 10% or less. The value of the currency fell and the empire’s debt rose as Rome fell apart. I thought that was an interesting fact, so I […]
Or Maybe Zumiez is Going to Buy Them Oh, and Billabong Bought RVCA Okay, Zumiez is Out of the Picture Anyway, This is All Really Interesting- and Related As you know, Billabong made an offer on June 30 to acquire the Canadian action sports retailer West 49. Only July 9th, Zumiez said […]
As usual, we’re dealing with the numbers in the June 3 press release and the comments in the conference call rather than the actual quarterly filing with the Security and Exchange Commission that’s full of details. That just drives me crazy, and I want to explain why and what I think the result is in this […]
Orange 21 (Spy Optic) has been through a lot. The recession and resulting economic conditions were enough, I’m sure we’d all agree, for any company to deal with. But since CEO Stone Douglass came in, they’ve also settled a dispute with former CEO Mark Simo and No Fear, done a rights offering (they raise about $2.5 million […]
Volcom filed their 10Q on May 10th. After I listened to the conference call and they said how well the brand was doing in Macy’s, I was determined to get into a Macy’s and see for myself before writing this. I’ve done that now, so we’ll take a look at the numbers then move on to what […]
The concept of the European Community and a common currency worked okay (though with massive misallocation of capital) as long as long as there was lots of growth and lots of money and lots of subsidies for poorer countries and low interest rates. For a long time, what you could earn on a German bond wasn’t […]
Below is the handout I distributed at IASC’s Skateboard Industry Summit at the end of April where I talked about the evolving retail environment. These are quotes from recent fillings and conference calls by Billabong, Genesco (owners of Journeys), Nike and Zumiez about how they see the retail environment and their involvement in it. Except […]
It was, by any measure, a successful conference and IASC did a great job putting it on. Attendance, at around 95, was up over last year, which was also up over the first year of the conference the previous year. The attendees were the senior people from the right companies. The food continues to improve (breakfast still needs […]
Given that Vail says the snow up to about Christmas was the worst in 30 years, you have to say that they really did okay. But I think the most interesting thing in the whole 10Q was the disclosure that 13 holders of contracts to purchase Ritz-Carlton Residences had sued to get out of the contracts […]
A sales decline of 2.4% for the quarter ended Jan. 31, 2010 compared to the same quarter the prior year, from $443.7 to $432.7 million isn’t what you’d like to see. Then you notice that their gross margin percentage rose from 46.7% to 51.3% and that their gross profit was up by 7.2% even with […]
