Big is the enemy of cool revisited
As the mega-brands become less so and struggle along the rocky road of ‘profit improvement plans’, lopping heads, stores and extraneous lines as they go, it is becoming clearer every day that now is a window of opportunity for a couple of surfers (not entrepreneurs) of passion, creativity and soul to reinvent the surf industry wheel.
Perhaps not since 1968 - when Alan Green parked his 1953 Ford Customline outside the old Boston Road bakery in Torquay, grabbed a couple of neoprene samples off the passenger seat and marched into the Rip Curl Surfboards factory and said, ‘Boys, I have an idea’ – has there been such a yawning gap between industry supply and consumer demand. Greeny had no money and no contacts. He was just a surfer who couldn’t find a locally made wetsuit or a pair of boardies that worked. He was just an ordinary bloke with extraordinary nerve, and his ideas created two of the three surf brands that still dominate the world today. But only just.
Researching a 10-year industry review for Australian Surf Business magazine recently, I was struck by how much the different segments were on the same page. The big brands know they have to change, the new brands know that now they have a shot, and the retailers, sick of being bullied by the Biggish Three, are prepared to give the little guys some rack space. After the storm of the past five years, it’s the perfect calm! Jeez, I’d be clearing off the kitchen table and cutting out some patterns myself, if I wasn’t such a fossil.
Mind you, there are a few fossils in the new guard too, notably former Billabong heavy Paul Naude with Vissla. It’s not much more than a decade since another cashed-up Bongan, Doug Spong, tried to build a bigger Taj Mahal than his former masters with Cult, which crashed and burnt. But Vissla, run in Australia by Billabong’s savvy former corporate mouthpiece John Mossop, is a very different proposition. With deep pockets, Vissla is almost in a category of its own, and the product I’ve seen all over major surf retailers in California recently, looks pretty damn good.
The quandary for all start-ups is to create a point of difference – to reinvent the tee shirt, basically – and it comes as no surprise that over the past five or so years the hipster movement has led the way, first with Deus Ex Machina (again, the creation of a fossil, Dare Jennings) with Rhythm and then Jim Mitchell’s Critical Slide Society not far behind, and Byron Bay’s Afends recently getting a push along. Out of Mambo, you would expect Deus to have a sense of humour, and it does, as does Slide. Afends apparently wants to save the world while smoking cigarettes. Or worse, were they three-paperies I spotted hanging out of every second team rider’s mouth? Anyway, Afends dudes are ‘not ones to climb the ladders of popularity by commercial methods but instead push the boundaries of their respective disciplines and are not afraid to flick the finger to that of the cultural norm.’ So there.
Now we have the second wave of newbies that includes Banks-Brand (with Brad Gerlach lending his name to it), Depactus (which sounds like something you put up your arse, but is in fact Luke Egan’s well-considered tilt at the waterman market) and Vues. If I was a betting man, I’d probably back Louie to survive out of this lot, because he’s smart and a good promoter, but Vues, with Rhythm co-founder Jamahl Grey behind it, has the most intriguing point of difference.
Vues is all about product – no team riders, no advertising, no sponsorships. And they have turned the universal negative (everyone does it, no one likes to talk about it) of Third World labour into a positive. Every Vues swing tag carries a photo and story of the worker who supposedly made it, with a percentage of profits being fed back into the brand’s Sew Happy project to create better working conditions. Mmm. I know it’s coming from a good place but I’ll let others decide on that one.
The one thing all the newbies have in common is that they all say they’re not in it to get rich. It’s all about the lifestyle, man. It’s still in dispute as to whether it was Michael Tomson or Danny Kwock who first said, ‘big is the enemy of cool’. Since they both went on to become obscenely wealthy on the back of big brands, it doesn’t matter much.
But it could again become the mantra of the new surf industry. //PHIL JARRATT
Comments
Not in it to get rich?
Bwa ha ha ha ha! Good one.
thank god i am old enough to not worry about what label is on my clothing , plain tshirts for me and i will spend the savings on a good locally made and shaped surfboard.
exactly......has the era of brands passed?
do we no longer even need a brand?
asking for a friend.....I get my boardies two for thirty from Bylsey.
Yeah, but all old pricks go through the same transition; the urge to shuck off the surf clothes and proclaim to the world you're logo free. That's great!...but this article isn't about personal transformation.
The surf world will also house surf clothing: but what's changed since the wider world proclaimed they're not interested in surf clothing and the industry slumped? Are the new brands just Billabong-lite or are they bringing something new to the rummage bin? Perhaps something - gulp - even old pricks will wear?
So after four decades we seem to be back more or less where we started with a number of small surf oriented labels producing clothes for surf orientated people and hoping to cash in on that image in the wider market. Personally I can't see it working, but then I couldn't first time around either.
The enemy of cool? Surely the fact that Phil is writing for a magazine called "Australian Surf Business Magazine" means that horse has BOLTED.
Vues- definition: sending jobs and money overseas and making us feel good about it,
Vissla- write your name in enough places next to creator and innovator and that's what you will believe, this just looks like a big brand throwing lots of money around and bringing down good hard working people who actually create and innovate, but everyone has a price and good for them,
As for colostomy bag, I like Luke Egan and I hope he pulls it off, great project to have, I think the name means Bargained in latin if it was meant to mean anything at all,
I think all these brands are missing a lot though, maybe they will kill it, maybe not, lets wait and see, none of this really has to do with surfing anymore though.
Davidattinborough, sorry to hear about your brother (?). But to be serious mum, I am an old fart and some of us are reasonably happily married (still?) and I for one have to wear something which is deemed passable by my fashion conscious wife and daughter otherwise I can't step out the door (I obviously don't wear the pants in this household). I am told that some Deus is OK if hand picked by them otherwise no labels on T shirts, again unless handpicked by them. I could go on and on however I have no idea about fashion but believe me it does exist. What am I trying to say, it's gotta be fashionable and cool and thats where the hipsters nailed it, and good on them. No harm in bringing a bit of style to a fun pastime just adds to the melange.
Brands still matter. They identify what you are or where you want to be. Notice that the big brands will have several brands / labels. We maybe seeing the known marketing problem of brand recognition, namely the lifetime of a brand. Generally goes thru four phases. Notice how Gillette blades reinvents itself. Product enhancement has to happen. New materials, new styles, new cuts. While the key players (surfers) wear these brands then you will notice we tend to follow. Who retails the goods is critical. If it is in Woolies / Target its gone. There is reason why the big brands opened their own outlets but they had problems with product choice - hence had to close many down.
mate they had way more problems than product choice, that was the least of their worries.....
a massive debt fuelled expansion just as the market sailed off a cliff and surf brands became as cool as a half-sucked cock at a wedding....sales down as costs went up= big problem.
FR - what was meant by 'product choice' was the outlets they set up also had to sell their competitors.
Yes they borrowed to open too many outlets in high rent locations.
You will see that's changed. Certainly GFC did not help but it is not clear that's the problem.
Let's see what the local hot grommet is wearing ? Quality is the other big one.
Hey Freeride you certainly have a way with words..........as cool as a half sucked cock at a wedding...........
The Grooms, by the Brides best friend..
Ah it's all still all a crock pot full of dingo dung in my book. Anybody who has a brain fragment these days is suspicious of anyone or anything that is still branding anything and trying to "market" it to the surfing masses.
There's a new paradigm. I don't think people want to be human sandwich boards anymore for some innovative breakthough marketing genius who wants to make big bucks from their creative funky ideas. Regardless of the hairshirt lifestyle they espouse they are still all about living the dream on your $$$.
The name of the game now is don't be named and branded by anything if you really want serious authenticity and originality in your life.
So in summary Phil, I'm really thinking that this whole surf marketing branding thing is dieing quietly in the gutter. But as some sort of conselation, dear old PT Barnum did indeed say, "theres a sucker born every minute". So you just never know!
exactly, when evrything is made in the same factories by the same brown people why would you pay more to have some white honkey put their sticker on it?
that's a rhetorical question.
No mention of The Mad Huey's brand going global? I don't know if "Australian Surf Business Magazine" would want to associate with them as a Surf Brand, but they have definitely opened up a lucrative market that the big brands wouldn't touch!
I look for my brands in Smorgasboarder, free to surfers from surfers.
Australian Surf Business Magazine is a trade mag for big businessmen, big business, big brands, big money, leaves little time for surfing. Got to keep up the self promotion Phil, it's what marketing is all about. Marketing marketers, promoting promoters, selling shite.
BTM, if you like Smorgasboarder then that's great, but don't trump up your admiration for it by criticising other publications, especially when your accusations are way off the mark. As Phil says below ASB is for independent retailers. It's also written by surfers, same as Smorgasboarder.
Lastly, the charge of self promotion: Phil Jarratt currently writes for Swellnet, I asked him to submit a story on the new surfing clothing companies. This is it. No self promotion, no advertorial, no marketing.
And your point is, BTM? ASB is actually primarily for independent surf retailers, the struggling heart and soul of the industry.
Hmmm.....I think that the Surfboard industry is the real struggling heart and soul of surfing...the surf retailers seem to only support a few of the Big Brand s/bds .....meanwhile sales of s/bds are moving very quickly to online sales......so there is very little connection between all the s/bd makers and retail...
retailers have only them selves to blame for their current soft position in the marketplace
Never having seen it Phil I am guessing that the market for the magazine is the independent retailer but the publisher would be generating revenue by the sale of advertising to the major players. So I think BTM has a point, it is about promotion. Also given the bully boy treatment of that "heart and soul" over the years by the major players their concerns are probably a little belated.
Well I reckon there has been a big shift in youth culture in the last 10 years where the electronic gadgets (iphones etc) ,and social media have diverted time, money and social energy away from the space surf brands once held. If you have the latest phone and just posted some hot pic on snapchat that everyone loved, who cares what little logo sits on the T-shirt you are wearing? Buy with Mum and Dad's money or your part time job scarce $$$s a $100 pair of boardies and a $60 T-shirt with some logo or a nice stripe down the side or pay your iphone account for the month? Or get a $15 T-shirt and post a cool link on FB?
The big versus small brand is a very valid issue though. A parent I recently spoke to said her daughter would not wear Billabong after she turned 14 cause her younger sister had started to wear it. The big brands not only went too big in market penetration geographically, they also plunged across too many age groups and demographics so became something actively avoided by many trying to be "different". Niche brands will work I guess but I suspect though that the 30 year boom and "easy money phase" was a once off that won't be repeated. It will be hard work from here on in.
I'm wondering why some of these struggling companies haven't gone back to the styles that made them big in the first place, lets face it in the fashion world the early nineties are so hot right now..... haha, those old billabong and hot buttered logos were dope and don't get me started on the old Op boardies!!!!
I also think long standing respected shapers (Maurice is a perfect example) could really do well selling say just simple logo tee-o's online, credibility and nostalgia goes a long way, the old boys would eat it up for sure ( although while lifting their NSP longboard off the the roof of the car), i know i'd rather support them than the big three.