Calif. Companies Ride to Success With Skateboarding
Kids are no longer looking for greener pastures--they’d rather have cement.
Or just about any other hard surface to plunk their skateboards on and catch imaginary waves. No place seems to be off limits: drainage ditches, empty swimming pools and even the tops of dumpsters.
More than 20 million acrobatic, dry-land surfers have turned skateboarding into an industry that took in almost $250 million in wholesale equipment sales and $240 million for accessories and clothing in 1987.
The business is dominated by six California companies, which specialize in making pro-quality skateboards and accessories. They generated an estimated $125 million in sales last year.
The industry’s rapid growth was reflected earlier this year at the Action Sports Trade Show in Long Beach, where up to 155 of the 775 vendors showed off skateboards or skatewear--a 30% increase from only two years ago.
Skateboarding has become an industry that caters to both a mass market and a trend-setting “outlaw” image. The style is commonly reflected in skateboards, particularly expensive customized ones, adorned with dancing skeletons and skulls, snakes, screaming faces or dragons.
“Always before, the skater wanted to surf and emulated surfing,” explained Dick Metz, founder of the Hobie Sports retail chain and partner of surfboard king Hobie Alter. “Now it’s rad to be a skateboarder and the skateboarder is more rad than the surfer. Skateboarders dress differently, act differently--it’s become more progressive and stylish, while the surfer has evolved into a conservative thing.”
More Cement
And you don’t need an ocean to roll like a pro.
“You can skate anywhere,” said Richard Novak, whose Santa Cruz Skateboards is one of the big three names making pro-quality skateboards. “The center of skateboarding right now is everywhere. You can see it in Minnesota, New York, Tokyo, Germany, England. . . . So people can relate to skating more than they can to surfing.”
“There’s more cement being poured every day,” noted Kevin Thatcher of Thrasher, a magazine named after rad skaters’ aggressive style. “Skateboarders thrive on an empty pool, a parking lot, a tennis court--just about everywhere there’s a smooth surface.”
And their sport has created a thriving retail trade. Galaxy Sports in Laguna Beach, for example, has been doing a booming business selling about 120 types of skateboards--the type of board you choose depends on the type of skating you do and what tricks you want to perform. The store also stocks accessories, including kits to build 3- to 4-foot-high skating pipes and launch ramps.
It is a business that is aimed at the very young. Mitch Muniz, Galaxy’s store manager, noted that the store sells mostly to 7- to 10-year-olds--”the ones that bring in Mom and Dad who’ll spend the money.” Galaxy sells about 50 to 60 skateboards a week for up to $170 apiece.
At the four Southland Chick’s Sporting Goods stores, skateboard sales have gone up 150% in the last year and a half. “We probably see 150 parents with kids every weekend,” said buyer John Christensen.
The massive interest in skateboarding has led to the creation of a big and bustling industry of board, wheel and deck manufacturers--not to mention all kinds of protective gear and three special-interest magazines.
Real aficionados put together their own customized boards, spending up to $170 for the components, even though the industry also offers fully assembled--if less sophisticated--boards for as little as $9.95. It is the professional models, however, that are the most coveted by serious skaters and set industry trends.
Mass marketed skateboards sold by companies such as Variflex, Nash, Valterra Products Inc., Sport Fun, Roller Derby and Brookfield range in price from about $10 to $59.95.
Not Spoiled
Ray Losi, president and chairman of Moorpark-based Variflex, said his company grossed $1.5 million from skateboard sales in 1983. That climbed to $30 million--or a 37% of the mass-market share--in 1987. The mass-market companies sold 1.6 to 1.9 million boards last year, Losi estimated. But skateboarders, like car owners, like to move up to flashier and most expensive models. So there is also a much smaller, more select group of customized board makers who are in the high-quality end of the business. Their contrasts--and increasing recent success--are embodied in Brad Dorfman and Tony Alva, two unconventional Orange County entrepreneurs who are among the industry’s leaders.
You can’t say that success has spoiled Tony Alva. It hasn’t made him cut off his pink, red and purple dreadlocks. And he isn’t averse to hopping a fence to do a little skateboarding in an abandoned swimming pool. That was why he was scratching poison-oak rash the other day.
These days, Alva heads Alva Products, an Orange County company known as the most “dreaded” because of the dreadlock hair style sported by Alva and his team of professional skaters who promote the products.
Alva’s dedication to skateboarding has brought him not only fortune but fame. He is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for his feat of leaping over 19 barrels on a skateboard in 1977.
The $2.5-million-a-year company produces mostly skateboarding hardware such as decks, wheels and accessories, and also distributes trucks. Alva also just expanded its T-shirt clothing line to include shorts.
The company is considered an industry leader despite the relatively small sales because of the legendary likes of Alva and the radical-punk image of the tattooed-type of skaters who work for him.
Brad Dorfman, casual but less punk with shoulder-length hair, owns Costa Mesa-based Vision Sports and Vision Street Wear--both major industry forces in skateboards and skatewear.
After starting the company 11 years ago, Dorfman, 38, expanded his operations through a mix of shrewd business savvy and hard work--to the point where today he conducts business from portable phones in his two Mercedes convertibles.
The company had a 1987 wholesale dollar volume of $30 million-plus a year from sales of skateboards, snowboards, skateboard parts, distribution of other company’s products, as well as clothing, shoes, safety gear, helmets, key chains and decals.
Canny Marketing
Vision sponsors scores of skateboarding exhibitions and distributes pictures of wholesome, if decidedly trendy, youths with their skateboards.
“The market for the hard goods will increase, but it’ll reach a plateau,” said Dorfman, who has become known as the “J. R.” of the industry to critics who claim his aggressive marketing has sometimes been at the expense of competitors. Some of them, for example, were angered when programs distributed at the recent Irvine exhibition made it appear that Vision was the event’s sole sponsor.
Despite the criticism, industry experts credit Vision for canny marketing.
But Dorfman insists that sales of skatewear “can well exceed the surf market.” That would be impressive since the California-based surfwear industry takes in about $1 billion a year.
“There are a lot more skaters than surfers,” said Dorfman.
And they all need clothes.
The skatewear industry “is pretty much in its infancy,” said Michael Tomson, president of Costa Mesa-based Gotcha Sportswear. “Potentially it could go to the size of surfwear, but right now it’s somewhat of a paper tiger. Everyone’s rushing to get into this because of what they think it might be, not because of what it is.”
“These kids are just flush with money,” said Gary Hanson, owner of Thunderwear, a San Clemente-based manufacturer of skategloves that feature heavy wrist supports and cut-out fingertips so that boards can be grabbed more easily. Hanson estimated that his firm sold about 50,000 pairs of gloves through 400 stores in 1986 and sales are increasing.
There are, naturally, also skateboard videos and a skateboard movie--”Gleaming the Cube”--is in the works.
The kind of audience they’ll find--and whether that audience will endure--is anyone’s guess, but industry experts don’t see the fad dying.
“I think it will level off and stay consistent,” said Larry Gordon, owner of Gordon & Smith, a San Diego skateboard manufacturer. “It’s too established to die. Like the bicycle or surfboard business, once something like this become established, there’s an ongoing market--new kids, kids that wear out equipment or want to buy newer things.”
Said 15-year-old skater Dan (Smitty) Smith of Banning: “It’s the danger--when you’re in the air if you don’t come down, you just die. It helps you relax, too, and takes your mind off your problems.”
Besides, it’s fun.
