Bong in big trouble

[Beanpole]

At least Jack Nasser was a rev head when he took over general motors. People who run WalMart type businesses and furniture companies know business but no surf brand would have achieved what they have if people like that ran them.

[Nick Carroll]

Everyone's a revhead beany.

Not everyone knows how to run a business like Billabong has become.

http://www.smh.com.au/business/simple-p ... 24wmg.html

[JaM71]

I am watching the billabong pro at the mo and just wondering what impact the billabong rennovation plan will have on pro surfing? I cant see a target/wallmart style set up accommadating a stable of lavishly paid free surfers and WCT events

[kayu]

I think trying to revitalize a chain of retail outlets these days , is to embark on a futile endevour .....how come a mug like me can see this as plain as day? ............( maybe I should get a job as a high paid CEO)

[Beanpole]

Everyone's a revhead beany.

Not everyone knows how to run a business like Billabong has become.

http://www.smh.com.au/business/simple-p ... 24wmg.html

Maybe they could get Jack to run Billabong,"Okay, first we get rid of all this surf stuff and start printing muscle car T Shirts."
"Then we go into the wavepool business world wide".

[Hollowed out]

it is gunna get interesting when the Bong Pipe event rolls around in Dec because bythat time Bong will be back privately owned by greasy and a VC or will be run by LornaKmart and either way $$$will be tighter than in the past and when one recalls the debacle at the end of last years contest where certain Bong hieracy where under considerable pressure from residents of the rock to see things 'their way'.
Will Lorna step up and tell them to fcuk off?? or the TPG VC boys back Greasy to 'grease' some of the locals foer a passport?? Interesting times ahead

[Nick Carroll]

Well I don't think Launa Inman will be trying to run surfing contests.

Look can I suggest what we are watching here is a significant evolution in the surf industry -- but perhaps not in the way many surfers would think.

The perceived domination of the "Big Three" is over. Its era has already passed. In time I bet we will look back on it and be reminded of American manufacturing capitalism of the 1950s and 1960s, a blunt and simple time, when giant conglomerates ruled, jobs were for life, and "What's good for GM is good for America" was the catchcry.

In its place will emerge an era of wider corporate range: more companies, humbler yet savvier and more ruthless operators, cleverer marketing, broader and more diffuse reach. Surfing will be just one arrow in such companies' quivers, an essential arrow for many, but far from the only one.

Overall the industry will continue to grow and will far outstrip the boundaries of the Big Three; these new diffuse companies will penetrate the middle layers of the US and other youth cultures in a way the Big Three have always wanted to but never quite managed. They will be very well positioned to work into the next big target areas for image marketing: notably Asia, northern Europe and Sth America, where social cultures are older than the US and Australia and aren't so easily suckered by dumb "extreme" youth marketing.

Surfing itself will continue to grow and expand across many boundaries. I would think a doubling of the world's surfing population over the next 25 years is not too big a stretch. It doesn't really matter if a few older surfers like this or not. Surfing is just too good. It's why you all did it in the first place.

[Beanpole]

Well as long as I can continue to get regular uncrowded surf at Bondi, the Gold Coast, Byron and Noosa I'll have nothing to complain about

[Nick Carroll]

but wooly...the growth want come from kids

all the promtion is aim at older and older markets

there is alot more competion for the kid market....ask most kids

do u want a surfboard or ipad for xmas

anyways....a doubling of the surfin population just means we all catch half as many waves

which makes it less half the point go the effort too surf in the first place :?

Ha ha yeah maybe, I do suspect the most committed surfers will keep getting the most waves as they tend to do today.

You're right on the money with the kid/iPad comment. That wide range of choice and the subsequent blurring of cultural lines between surfing and everything else is a big part of why these savvier, more diffuse and harder-to-pin-down sorta companies will be the winners in the next 20 years or so.

The other kind of winners will very likely be the smaller yet quality "core" companies, the hardware specialists, the ones who can sell authenticity to newcomers seduced by surfing's still quite potent mystique. Think Harley-Davidson in the motorbike world.

I dunno how the Big Three will manage themselves through this transition, they've been trying to be both Authentic and Diffuse which is a terrible look, you might sell alot of shit for a while but you end up pissing off the core and failing to truly connect with the diffusion, who after all, flit from thing to thing without a care. The Three still hold a lot of cards, but not as many as General Motors did in the US -- you don't hear the federal govt bemoaning Billabong's recent round of employee culling for instance. If they are prepared to slim down a bit and stick with their strengths they should be fine. But they won't "own" surfing the way they did.

[Hollowed out]

^^ Nick, agree about not 'owning surfing again' which brings me back to the point of what is gunna go down on The Rock this year because there are a bunch of Mokes who DO 'own' the North Shore and I bet Nick or anybody from ASP or Bong is gunna tell them otherwise.
The parody I see is that there have always been subcultures within surfing and at one level at least, apart from money, the Big Three held several unique 'culture passes' to gain certain access. Examples of those are having founders who are tribal leaders or core icons, sponsoring niche 'locals' in core global surfing arenas, goldern hanshake ties to the cultural elite (aka TC, Shaun Tomson, MR, Occy, Lopez, etc etc and of course the oldest chessnut, the 'guru' aging and poor as hell shapers, who thrown some crumbs and a pass to a free feed and pissup washed down with plenty of ego massaging. Of course there were drugs, girls and plenty of other enticements.
Public companies run by institutional investors puppet directors (Kunkel, Inman etc) have no 'passes' to show and the money card has dried up and that is where Bong have screwed up IMHO. The Bong carcas will arive on the Rock with a hundred past vulture looking for their annual feed. Greasy may own some prize beachfront real estate on the North Shore (as he does at several other icon locations) but a lot has changed since last Dec.
Nike et al have played the game way smarter and let the founders and icons and imports with the 'passes' run Hurley etc. and that is where nick's piece on the changes that are needed is spot on.

[ric_vidal]

Will Lorna step up and tell them to fcuk off?? or the TPG VC boys back Greasy to 'grease' some of the locals foer a passport?? Interesting times ahead

TPG are in looking at their books at the moment... think it might just be a matter of time.

[steve shearer]

Be interested whether it doubles in the established regions : Aus/USA etc etc .

Already there seems to have been a carrying capacity reached at alot of breaks and despite more dabblers I'm not sure that equal numbers of young people are really picking up surfing for life.

It amazed me when I was on the Northern Beaches recently : I saw hardly any young surfers. It was like an old peoples home and anecdotal evidence suggested that even offspring of lifetime core surfers weren't taking up surfing.
They do other things now.

That could be significant.

Maybe the number of committed surfers has leveled off in the Aus/USA arena.

I see a cadre of hardcore kids around here surfing, but I'm more amazed at the number of young people around here who don't surf.

[alakaboo]

Still quite a few youngsters on the Gold and Sunshine coasts.
Though I would say that there is a bulge in the age profile of males in their mid-late thirties, girls in their early-mid twenties.

Maybe it's because many people with kids can't afford to live close to the surf, and those that can don't have the time to take their kids to the beach every morning.
Except for tradie dads.

Dutch disease could be the best thing going for the established surfers.

[alakaboo]

Hmmm, got me thinking, maybe there is a Kuznets Curve for surf participation.

Might see if I can match up some land value data with some beach visitation data...

[steve shearer]

maybe there is a Kuznets Curve.

Hey Boo this is a family site.

[crabmeat thompson]

My last surf on the gold coast revealed more than a few kuznets about the place.

[Nick Carroll]

Be interested whether it doubles in the established regions : Aus/USA etc etc .

Already there seems to have been a carrying capacity reached at alot of breaks and despite more dabblers I'm not sure that equal numbers of young people are really picking up surfing for life.

It amazed me when I was on the Northern Beaches recently : I saw hardly any young surfers. It was like an old peoples home and anecdotal evidence suggested that even offspring of lifetime core surfers weren't taking up surfing.
They do other things now.

That could be significant.

Maybe the number of committed surfers has leveled off in the Aus/USA arena.

I see a cadre of hardcore kids around here surfing, but I'm more amazed at the number of young people around here who don't surf.

Well there is some data (internal surf co market research) to suggest that the surfing populations of Aust/NZ have actually decreased slightly in the past five years or so.

Like the USA, we're a "mature" surf culture; numbers have stabilised since the last beginner boom of the late 90s/early 00s, and will prolly just tick over in years to come to match demographics.

We get an inflated sense of numbers these days thanks to a media-driven focus on a few high profile breaks which draw crowds out of all proportion to the true number of surfers in the overall population.

By contrast, at my home beach there's less hardcore surfers than there were in 1979.

[saucy gibbon]

Be interested whether it doubles in the established regions : Aus/USA etc etc .

Already there seems to have been a carrying capacity reached at alot of breaks and despite more dabblers I'm not sure that equal numbers of young people are really picking up surfing for life.

It amazed me when I was on the Northern Beaches recently : I saw hardly any young surfers. It was like an old peoples home and anecdotal evidence suggested that even offspring of lifetime core surfers weren't taking up surfing.
They do other things now.

That could be significant.

Maybe the number of committed surfers has leveled off in the Aus/USA arena.

I see a cadre of hardcore kids around here surfing, but I'm more amazed at the number of young people around here who don't surf.

Well there is some data (internal surf co market research) to suggest that the surfing populations of Aust/NZ have actually decreased slightly in the past five years or so.

sharks