Surfing

Hi, I’m back. This was just too interesting not to inflict myself on. And I imagine O’Brien couldn’t find anybody else willing to touch it.  From the last issue of TransWorld Biz, you may remember that our hero, Sean Kennedy of New Zealand, had started a company called Coastline owned by, so far, 42 core surf shops […]

I’m glad, I guess, that I’ve gotten to the age where I don’t feel completely compelled to take too much advantage of these “all inclusive, drink at much as you want of anything for free” conference packages. Because if I were so inclined, I suspect all the worrying going on at the conference might have driven

It has been a while—ten years actually—since we endured the lastr ecession back in ’90/91. But business cycles are pretty much immutable.  What goes up must come down. “Regression to the mean” they call it in statistics.   Two things have me especially concerned about our current situation.  First, the economic rubber band is stretched

Almost as soon as my article on surf industry internet models was finished, Swell shut down its Crossrocket site and then, on May 3rd, announced it had raised $2 million in bridge financing. I hate it when that happens. Rather than just throw up a press release that created more questions than it answered (see it

Just about a year ago, I asked here in Surf Biz what it took to make money on the internet in the surf business. I said that if you were exclusively an etailer, and had to be both a merchant and journalist, it cost a lot of money just to operate, and you had the added