Backcountry.com’sPresident John Bresee discusses user generated content and how his company has been able to leverage all those free worker bees into increased sales, in an interview with BusinessWeek.
Our belief is that user content should exist to directly support the products we sell. So we don’t have a video area where people can upload videos of people snowboarding. We don’t have any authority in the world of snowboard videos, but we do have some authority in that we’re good at selecting products for snowboarding. So that’s where the content goes—right on the product description pages.
Not exactly a new idea, but it appears to be working for them.
Today the two big action sports fashion mall retailers are going to kick down their quarterly earnings and make their pitches to analysts who have an inordinate amount of control over the companies’ stock prices.
Pac Sun will go first at 1:30 PST followed by Zumeiz at 2 PM. Both will likely be reporting more dismal news from the shopping centers of North America, but we never know. Back to school could be coming up hard.
It would appear that Greensboro, North Carolina based online and brick and mortar retailer Boardparadise.com has been forced into “involuntary Chapter 7 bankruptcy proceedings,” according to a story in The Business Journal.
Crossroad Sports Inc., the corporate name of Triad-based action sports equipment and apparel retailer Boardparadise, has entered involuntary Chapter 7 bankruptcy proceedings following complaints from four out-of-state creditors who say they’re owed more than $785,000. . . Burton claims it is owed about $563,000. . . Sole Technology Inc., based in Lake Forest, Calif., joined the petition Aug. 7, saying it is owed about $113,000. . . Robert M. Weinstein, a Greensboro attorney representing the four creditors, said Crossroad Sports has until Aug. 27 to respond, which the company had not done as of Wednesday.
And there are even more creditors interested in getting paid . . .doesn’t sound good.
We always thought that Swell.com was missing out on a large piece of the action sports fashion business by not setting up white-label sites that would allow smaller brands to easily sell direct by jumping on Swell.com’s quality distribution system.
They still haven’t done that, but with Coreshops by Swell they are branching out into an equally cool and potentially large side business, according to an interview with Swell.com CEO Stacy Clark on Shop-Eat-Surf.com.
CoreShops by Swell is doing two things: one, it is aggregating the branded apparel from these shops and offering it for sale on Swell.com. (Want a Whalebone Surf Shop T-shirt from Nags Head, NC? Click here); and two, it pulls together an easy to search listing of core shops from around the US that makes it easy for anyone to find a nearby core shop, event, or promotion.
This works out well for shops and for Swell.com according to Clark.
Yes, it will generate revenue for the shops as well as Swell. What we are most excited about is that it’s a brand differentiator that also helps strengthen a very important industry distribution channel that we do not compete in. Oversaturation by leading industry brands has forced us to think differently about how we partner to do business and create a unique customer experience online.
Truth is, there is really nothing more core in “surf fashion” than T-shirts from local surf shops and shapers. For the rest of the story and the press release, follow the link.
While we hate to think that analysts have this much power over stock prices, Caris & Company analyst Dorothy Lakner reportedly gave Zumiez a 17 percent bump this morning when she said she liked what she was seeing at the mall retailer, according to a story on CNBC.com.
Caris analyst Dorothy Lakner said Zumiez said it would offer back-to-school deals, and “its efforts seem to be bearing some fruit.” Lakner said things look “less bad” ahead of the back-to-school season and that there were signs of improvement at stores in the western U.S.
It’s the middle of summer, but the Snow Industries of America wants everyone to know that the show’s move to Denver, Colorado (yee haw) is the best thing ever and they’ve got video proof from the likes of Joel Gomez, Dave Roseberger, Andrew Marriner, Rick Alden (and some guys we don’t know from some ski companies) in this six minute “come to cowtown” video.
Zumiez has settled a class action lawsuit with some California employees regarding overtime pay and food breaks to the tune of $1.3 million, according to story in the Puget Sound Business Journal.
Zumiez said a former employee alleged that the company didn’t pay all overtime owed to the worker, didn’t provide meal breaks as provided by California law, didn’t provide employees with proper itemized pay stubs, and didn’t pay fired employees their waiting time penalties as required by California law. . . The class-action suit covers Zumiez employees, except store managers, who worked in California from March 5, 2004 to Sept. 13, 2009.
If you worked at a California Zumiez during that time, better check in to see if you can finally get paid.
According to the 2008 SIMA Retail Distribution Study released yesterday by the Boulder, Colorado based research firm Leisure Trends Group 2008 saw a slight decrease in skate/surf retail sales (down 3.5 percent to $7.22 billion) and the “softness was most apparent in the fourth quarter of 2008.”
Apparently, December 08 was a bad month in retail. Who knew? Or how about this insight. Did you know that: “Passion and youth largely drive the surf industry. Surfers and skaters view the industry as a lifestyle, not a passing trend.”
But don’t worry, according to SIMA President Doug Palladini the “powerful brands” will see us through:
“While the surf/skate retail industry is not immune to the downward pressure on retail sales nationwide caused by the global recession, the resiliency of the surf/skate industry is very positive and promising,” says Doug Palladini, SIMA President and Vice President of Marketing for Vans. “Powerful brands with close connections to their consumers will see us through these challenging times and put us in a strong position as the overall economy rebounds.”
Thank god for the titans of industry. For more of this kind of in-depth analysis into last year’s retail disaster, follow the jump. [click to continue…]
Backcountry.com’s President John Bresee discusses user generated content and how his company has been able to leverage all those free worker bees into increased sales, in an interview with BusinessWeek.
