Our friends at Valahalla Design & Conquer have created an epic Halloween shirt perfect for any late-night haunt. Titled Full Moon On Abby Road the shirts feature “Tut & Drac & Frank & Wolfman out on a moonlit stroll through London, England.”
The design by Scott Hultgren is printed on black ringspun / combed cotton shirts and available in all sizes for $22 (use the code “boardistan” and get 20% off). Click the link to check them out.
A man wanted in the Edmonton, Alberta homicide of a 20-year-old man apparently ran right out of his DC Shoes and RDS hat as he fled the scene, according to a story on Canoe.com.
Investigators late Friday released photos of the distinctive DC shoes and RDS ballcap found near 15908 98 St., hoping someone who knows the killer will recognized the items and contact police. . . The victim — Scott Shane Brown, 20 — identified by police on Friday, was on the lam in 2008 for parole violations and has a rap sheet that includes Fort McMurray gun crimes as well as a home invasion.
Brown was Edmonton’s 21 homicide of the year. Red Dragons.
While the rest of us were simply praying the 33 men trapped in a Chilean Copper mine would survive, Oakley appears to have lucked into a marketing bonanza.
According to a statement from Oakley, a Chilean journalist apparently recommended the company’s eyewear to a Chilean private health insurer. The insurer called Oakley and Oakley responded by donating 35 pairs of Radar With Black Iridium lenses, according to a story on CNBC.com.
Now, thanks to all the images of happy rescued miners rocking Oakley, the company has gotten world-wide branding on an enormous scale. The sponsorship evaluation firm of Front Row Analytics figures the value of Oakley’s “protective eyewear” donation is worth about $41 million.
Eric Smallwood, vice president of project management for the company, told CNBC that the company took into account the live coverage, the recaps and a rough estimate of the audience watching around the world. . . Front Row broke the exposure down by country. Oakley will get the most exposure in China ($11.7 million), $6.4 million in the United States, $898,000 in the United Kingdom and $703,000 in Chile. . . “It’s a goodwill gesture that will turn into mass amounts of exposure for Oakley in a positive manner,” Smallwood said.
When Vans opens it’s newest promotional space inside a Brooklyn, New York warehouse it will not be to sell shoes to the general public. No. The 24,000 square foot warehouse will be used by Vans to host parties, music shows, art exhibits and skate demos, according to a Conor Daugherty story in the Wall Street Journal.
The “House of Vans,” as executives at the Orange County, Calif., company have dubbed the park on Franklin Street, a few blocks from Greenpoint Avenue, is part of a broader strategy to beef up Vans’s presence in New York and the East Coast. . . “Brooklyn is one of the best Vans strongholds outside of California,” says Doug Palladini, Vans vice president of marketing. “As big as Vans has become, we’re still really only known in a few key spots outside of California.” . . But while “you can’t just show up,” Mr. Palladini said there will be occasional chances—a special event through a local skate shop, for instance—for outsiders to get inside the park and roll around. He declined to say how much the company is spending on the facility.
NYC party space rental is expensive. Might as well just own it.
Every month Volcom’s Chairman and CEO Richard Woolcott sells some of his personal shares of Volcom stock. Occasionally, we like to check in on the totals. Here’s what he’s been selling lately, according to GuruFocus.com.
July 14, 2010 20,000 shares at $19.44 ($388,800)
July 27, 2010 20,000 shares at $20.00 ($400,000)
August 16, 2010 10,000 shares at 16.04 ($160,400)
August 24, 2010 10,000 shares at $15.32 ($153,200)
September 14, 2010 10,000 shares at $17.49 ($174,900)
September 24, 10,000 shares at $17.88 ($178,800)
That means he’s sold 80,000 shares in the last three months and turned that into $1.4 million in cash. But don’t worry. Wooly still has at least 2,730,932 shares left. And at today’s trading price that’s worth a little over $50 million.This brings to an end our Monday afternoon pep talk.
“The acquisition presents the opportunity to extract significant synergies in areas including warehousing, distribution, back-office support and overall retail management consolidation,” Billabong chief executive Derek O’Neill said. . . “Additionally, direct retail operations greatly enhance Billabong’s visibility into the buying trends of the end consumer and assist in the speedy development and delivery of on-trend product to both company-owned and independent retail accounts,” he said.
That brings Billabongs total retail fronts to 558, according to the Sydney Mourning Herald and will add three percent to the company’s annual revenue. Buying retailers in bulk is such a nice way to open new doors.
Their graphics have always been loud so it is surprising that Danny Kass and Grenade hadn’t done their own motocross line long ago. Either way, they’re doing it now with Grenade MX Standard Issue.
After successful collaborations with The Metal Mulisha, Hart & Huntington, and Sullen, Grenade is launching a complete line of technical dirt riding gear. The gear debuted at industry tradeshows in August 2010 and includes two styles; the higher-end “Bulletproof” and the more affordable “Macadam Series. Grenade also introduced six new styles of premium MX gloves and is offering a full casual apparel line built specifically for moto accounts.
It seems, like most boardsports brands, Grenade has finally discovered that motocross fans have money, need loads of gear, and exhibit no discernible level of shame when it comes to covering everything they own in corporate logos. For Grenade it sounds like a match made in heaven. [click to continue…]
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…]
