I was recently paging through a couple of Transworld consumer mags (Surf and Skate I think) and something caught my attention. I don’t know what made me notice it, but I suddenly realized there was not one non-endemic advertisement in either mag. Okay, maybe I missed one, but there was no Ford Trucks, Mountain Dew, AT&T or […]
In my analysis of Billabong and Genesco, I have spent some time talking about their retail strategies and the possible impact on the action sports retail market, especially on the core retailers. Zumiez’s 10K has me thinking about this again. I would first like to thank Zumiez for keeping their 10K to only 75 pages, […]
Genesco, the owner of Journey’s, reported its results for the quarter and year ended January 10th in early March. A couple of days later they made an investor presentation that discussed these results. I’ll talk briefly about their numbers, but what really caught my attention was their discussion of the retail environment and their retail strategy. Genesco […]
Billabong released its numbers for the six month ended December 31, 2009 last week and held a conference call. Though clearly not immune to a tough economy, the company’s raising of capital to strengthen the balance sheet, long term focus on brand equity, willingness to lose some sales rather than become too promotional, realism as to […]
As they do every ASR, IASC and BRA hosted a round table meeting by invitation only to discuss issues of mutual interest and, as usual, I attended. The meeting was well attended and the exchange lively. The first issue on the table was Manufacturers’ Suggested Retail Pricing (MSRP) and Minimum Advertised Pricing (MAP). I’ll assume you know […]
The beer is a lot cheaper in Denver, assuming you don’t actually consider the beers they handed you at the gambling tables in Vegas to be free. The hotels are more expensive and getting to said hotels from the airport takes longer. Most of the people I talked with (by no means a scientific sample) would […]
In the middle of December, when Quik came out with its quarterly and fiscal year results and held aconference call, I pretty much ignored it. I glanced at the release and read the conference call transcript, but I had no idea how to evaluate the results of a company that was highly leveraged without a […]
You can go here http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ecopro.nr0.htm to see the report. If it does help you sleep, it will probably give you nightmares. You can see in the first line of the report, released last Thursday, that they expect total employment "…to increase by 15.3 million, or 10.1 percent, during the 2008-18 period…" Now, that may sound encouraging, but […]
It’s a nice leather chair. I’ve had it less than two years. So I wasn’t happy when it started tilting side to side as much as it rocked from front to back. It felt like it was going to leave me on the floor any day and, besides, it was practically making me seasick. The nice people […]
For the quarter ended October 31, Aeropostale reported sales up almost 18% to $568 million. For nine months, they rose almost 20% to $1.43 billion. Gross profit margin in the quarter rose from 36% in the same quarter last year to 39.3%. For nine months, it was up from 34.4% to 37.5%. Selling, general and […]
