Hoby Darling was a lawyer on the up at the “powerhouse law firm” of Latham Watkins when he took over the Volcom account, according to a story in the Wall Street Journal.
Now, six years later, he’s living the core life as VeeCo’s general counsel and helping Volcom to bridge the “divide between the Beach and Wall Street,” with what they call Volcom University.
Beginning this year, up to 20 employees can attend, free-of-charge, classes in finance taught by executives from Goldman Sachs and accounting from professionals at Deloitte & Touche. Senior Volcom executives, some of whom have also gone through M.B.A. programs while working at Volcom, then teach employees how to apply the concepts from those lessons to their specific work at Volcom.
If you’re going up against the establishment it pays to know your enemy, right?
Remember Tim Pogue? He worked at Burton in the early 90s and then joined Jamie Salter to launch and subsequently take Ride Snowboards public back in May of 1994. After exiting Ride Tim launched a retail store and denim line in Seattle called Faction.
After Faction went south he sort of drifted off our radar. Apparently, he’s now the Chief Marketing Officer at Jamie Salter and Kenny Finkelstein’sAuthentic Brands Group. They’re the new owners of both the ass-kicking “bad for the sport” MMA clothing brand TapouT and the mellow Bob Marley brand (which recently collabed with Burton on a snowboard).
The only reason we’re mentioning this is that Pogue was interviewed on FightHype.com regarding TapouT and Authentic Brands Group’s plans for the brand and we thought what he had to say was interesting:
We’re recreating a similar structure that Jamie and I built while we ran Ride Snowboards; a tiered branded strategy. At Ride, we had incredible demand for that brand, which is great, but if you sell your brand to every level of distribution, you won’t last long. So we started several other brands and even bought a few more to target certain levels of distribution to keep each brand clean. That’s what we’re doing here. . . TapouT is all about respect, discipline and the will and desire to train to be the best. We’re not afraid to say that we’re going right after Under Armour and Nike.
While we have absolutely no interest in MMA or MMA fashion, we’re glad to see that Tim is still hard at it.
Colin Madden, the former director of sales at Burton, DC, and vice president of sales at Neff,has joined the Holden Outerwear team, according to a release sent out today.
“Hiring Colin is the culmination of an intensive search to find the right fit,” says Holden Co-Founder Mikey LeBlanc. “We recognize that we need to do more than make a great product—we need to deliver it to the right customers on terms that are mutually profitable. We’re confident that Colin’s skill and experience will let us take this fundamental step.”
For the rest of the “Holden Transforms” info, follow the jump. [click to continue…]
Jeff Harbaugh delves into Nike’s recently reported quarterly numbers today on his Market Watch blog and sees another quarter of the “monster” is doing well on nearly all fronts; including Hurley and Converse.
Hurley, which we’d all like lots of details on but don’t get, is part of Nike’s “Other Businesses” segment. In addition to Hurley, the segment includes Cole Hann, Converse, NIKE golf and Umbro. That segment generated revenues of $693 in the quarter. Hurley revenues were up double digit, but that’s the only specific we get, and it’s not all that specific.
For the rest of Harbaugh’s walk though click the link. . .
In a nearly perfect metaphor for the Nike Corporation and the way they treat anyone who gets in their way, Danny Kass is ripped apart by some of his favorite zombies to promote his new Zoom DK snowboard boots. Lick it up.
The blingineers at Nixon have created an extremely icy timepiece for the overall winner of Street League which will be named in Las Vegas on September 25, 2010.
The Champion will be awarded a one-of-a-kind Nixon 5130 Ceramic watch adorned with 12.76 carats of diamonds.
For those who believe wearing their fortune on their wrist is the best idea ever, it doesn’t get much better than this.
Siamak Michael Rahimi, 56, of Santa Monica, California owns a big building in Los Angeles that he likes to use to hang tremendously huge advertising banners from. The most recent banner was for Vans Shoes. Problem is the banners are illegal in Los Angeles, according to a story in the Daily Breeze.
Rahimi. . . was arrested for installing and maintaining the jumbo-sized exterior advertisements on a vacant building and adjacent parking garage he owns at 9800 South Sepulveda Boulevard, across the street from LAX, according to the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office. . . Rahimi, LAX Enterprises and Westside Investment Group were each charged with 12 counts of illegally erecting a supergraphic sign, 12 counts of illegally maintaining an off-site sign, 12 counts of obstructing Fire Department emergency entrances and exits from the building and 12 counts for failing to identify the person or entity responsible for installing and maintaining the signs.
Wonder if the VF Corp is going to cover Mr. Rahimi’s legal costs?
Jeff Harbaugh checks in on the progress Quiksilver has made lately. He says things at the action fashion giant are looking up.
Quik is the poster child of a company that’s done what it needed to do following the twin blows of the Rossignol acquisition and the recession. As somebody who’s done a bit of turnaround work, I can tell you it’s no fun, for either management or employees, to be dealing with negative stuff month after month. Quik maybe has a little more work it wants to do on its balance sheet, but it’s largely out from under the reverberations of that deal though, like all of us, not of the recession.
And all they had to do was trade off a chunk of the company. Click the link for the rest of the analysis.
According to a story in the Daily BreezeBlack Flys is still in business a year after Jack Martinez sold the trademark to the company’s Asia distributor Carrozzeria Japan Co. Ltd.
“This past year we have been doing everything we can to just gain the relationship and trust back from our old clients,” Black Flys Inc. co-manager Cary Hokama said. . . The 32-year-old manager – dressed in a white collared shirt – said the company plans to . . . attract younger customers who embody an “absence of restraint,” in addition to its older, “hard-core” loyalists.
Jeff Harbaugh just wrote up his analysis of the most recent Zumiez quarterly report but the part of his column that has everyone talking is something he mentioned about Zumiez purchasing 14.3 percent of an unnamed apparel and hardgood manufacturer.
On May 11th, Zumiez bought a 14.3% interest in a manufacturer of apparel and hard goods for $2 million. I emailed Zumiez asking for more details but they aren’t disclosing any, which is what I expected. Zumiez has the right to sell its interest back any time between the fifth and the seventh anniversary of the investment. And the company they invested in has an option to buy their stock back on or after the seventh anniversary of the initial investment.
And it makes us wonder: what brand is so important to Zumiez’s that the core mall retailer was willing to pay $2 million to keep them in business. If you have any ideas, please leave them in the comments
. [Link: Jeff Harbaugh’s Market Watch]
