Ride Snowboards Co-Founder On TapouT

by The Editors on September 30, 2010

Authenti BrandsRemember 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’s Authentic 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.

[Link: Fight Hype]

{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }

Sammy September 30, 2010 at 7:05 am

Hey remember when Ride was core? Then they weren’t. Oh but, then they came back and were like ‘hey were core again, sorry about that’.

Tim, you should do a TapouT Collab with Rome. . . That’d be killer!

What about outerwear? Ever thought of getting into Snow again?
Don’t forget the go pro camera mount!

Chill September 30, 2010 at 7:55 am

Ride was core for about a half season. Spark plugs, a strong team, and fat albert were the secret of their “core” success. It only took one ride on their boards (cheap RIM injected garbage) to change that status. Those things rode like barn doors. And weighed as much too.

NigHeist September 30, 2010 at 6:16 pm

Tim Pogue is a douche, whose douchiness is eclipsed only by Jamie Salter – a get rich quick svengali, who’d happily hawk Razor scooters if it thought it would put a few extra quarters in his pockets. Hardly surprising that they’d both jump on the MMA bandwagon.

Maybe they can hype Tapout up enough to take it public, buy up smaller MMA companies and fire all their employees, and then cash out on the IPO. Then afterwords we can all sit back and watch clueless investors complain about it on the Motley Fool forum. It’ll be just like 1997 all over again – only without the purple hair.

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