With a knack for overstating the obvious, retail consulting group Customer Growth Partners President Craig Johnson lays down the bad news in a story on CNN:
This is not a good time for retailers. If people are fearful for their jobs, they will tightly hold on to their money and not spend it. This [situation] makes it very difficult for retailers.”
Matix (which seems like a really new company to us sometimes) is releasing a book to celebrate 10 years in the action sports clothing business. It’s called This Is Progress and features the work of: Daewon Song, Marc Johnson, Rick McCrank, Rudy Johnson,Mikey LeBlanc, Reda, and many more.
According to MarketWatchZumiez same store sales are down. . . again:
Zumiez (ZUMZ:7.18, -0.23, -3.1%) said late Wednesday that its January sales at stores open at least one year fell 14.8%. Analysts, on average, had expected the same-store sales to fall 14.1%, according to Thomson Reuters. Total net sales for the four-week period ended Jan. 31 decreased 2% to $20.3 million, said the specialty apparel retailer.
Source Interlink Co.s the parent company of the ASG Group (publishers of Snowboarder,Surfer, Surfing, and Skateboarder magazines) is denying that it is shutting down its magazine distribution business after major publishers pulled their titles from the magazine distributor thanks to the proposed 7 cent per issue fee Source was hoping to charge:
Gillis said the country’s biggest publishers, along with national distributors Curtis and Time Warner Retail, are shutting Source and Anderson out of the magazine supply chain in a bid to wrest pricing control away from retailers. “This is about American Media and Curtis and Bauer and Time Warner trying to control retailer pricing by eliminating magazine wholesalers so they don’t have so many they’ve got to do business with,” he said.
Guess it’s kind of hard to distribute magazines if no one is giving you magazines to distribute.
We’re kind of glad it only took two minutes to distribute this post to the world and that we didn’t have to deal with anyone to make it happen. No wonder print advertising is so expensive. . .
Forever the Olympic Weedhead: Ross Rebagliati, the first snowboarder to ever win Olympic Gold, is apparently the goto man for any Olympic weed smoking story. And when swimmer Michael Phelps was photographed blowing the glass trumpet Reuters’ Allan Dowd picked up the phone and called Ross.
Ross Rebagliati said on Wednesday he is not surprised by the controversy that erupted after a photograph was published that purports to show Phelps smoking marijuana, but said the public and media need to put the incident in context. . . . “I think Michael Phelps is an incredibly talented athlete and it’s a shame the media is choosing to focus and scrutinize one photo taken months ago at a private college party. The guy has 14 Olympic medals,” Rebagliati said.
Then again, Ross has one gold medal and that hasn’t stopped him from participating with the media in this story, now has it?
We’ve been fans of Rome Snowboards‘ co-founder and snowboard engineering wizard Paul Maravetz for years, but when we saw the camber menu on the side of the Rome booth it was a little hard to process. Then Paul walked us through “hybrid camber” and discussed how it works on the Rome Anthem SS. Here’s what he said:
“As you know as someone who turns a snowboard. The camber gives you a nice crisp initiation it helps initiate the board and guide the board into where you want it to go. It also helps you exit with a really crisp, poppy, snappy feeling.
“Reverse camber has its benefits. You loose a little of that crisp initiation; you lose a little bit of that exit where you’re snapping out of your turns. What we do with our reverse camber is we’re adding stringer technology to help increase the pop and stiffness torsionally in very targeted regions in the board so you get some of that crispness and back.
We always liked the idea of a snowboard brand that only sold direct online and through a company-owned shop. And that is exactly what Lance Pitman did with Illuminati snowboards.
Earlier this week, however, Lance Pitman announced that “We are shuttin ‘er down!” And as the final act of closing the snowboard business Lance is throwing an Illuminati Snowboards End Game Sale which begins on Friday, February 6 at 9:00 AM at 517 Village Way in Victor, Idaho. Here’s how Lance explains it:
I met with our investors and explained to them that I am not committed to spending 5-10 more years selling snowboards. I then thanked them for their trust and willingness to invest in the project and kindly asked for their blessing to allow me to close it down. Over a year and a half ago we started this process with the closing of the Ill23 Shop.
What is next for Lance? He’s not going to spill it just yet.
One could say I had a calling to show up in the world in a different way. I have been putting all my efforts for the last year and a half into trying to unravel (without throwing away) what I have created with Illuminati Snowboards. The company is not done in the sense that we are closing the LLC, or going bankrupt, or something. We are simply not producing snowboard products any longer. I can’t say fully what it is that we are transitioning into, but I will leave the product selling to those who do it best, so that I can spend more time going snowboarding
We’re pretty sure whatever Lance is getting into now it’s going to be something mysterious. Check out more on that in this interview Lance did with Planet Jackson Hole.
Former pro snowboarder Brett Johnson was responsible for some of the funniest stuff ever seen in snowboard movies: there were several installments of the Snowboard Bikers with Dana Nicholson from the Creatures of Habit series by Jon Freeman, there were all the little clips from Snowboarder TV, and then there was the epic GI Joe vs. Ski Fun Ken.
Writer Colin Whyte catches up with Brett Johnson and gets the back store on the entire clip in a story on ESPN.com/Action. Here’s what Brett says:
I was doing some traditional animation for Doug Palladini and their Snowboarder TV project in tandem, but all in all we spent about 8 months on it. We shot it in two weeks, sent the cans off to the developer and had no clue what it was going to look like. At that point, I’d never shot 16mm before, or done really any stop-motion animation. Artie picked me up at the airport and just gave me a headshake and a long ‘dude’. I thought the footage was totally bunk or something. The whole way back to Truckee, Artie held me at ‘dude’…
Where is Brett now? Oh, he’s creating web strategies for Forture 500 companies and wearing a suit to work every day.
We hung out with Tim Humphreys at the Flow booth at the SIA Show last week and the kid definitely has his shit straight. We didn’t watch the Winter X 13, but got to see his runs right here thanks to Sessions.
