Recession Takes Zip Out of Sports Trade Show : * Merchandising: Attendance was off at the San Diego event as beach-and- street lifestyle goods take a downturn. One of the busiest booths, however, was Orange-based Vans.
Bikini distributors from South Carolina, street-savvy fashion designers bathed in the sartorial grit of Orange County and surf rats still dripping from the waves of Queensland, Australia, are unlikely affiliates.
Yet, they all were in San Diego last weekend for a trade show and a recession-busting party, the semiannual Action Sports Retailer Trade Show for beach-and-street lifestyle manufacturers at the San Diego Convention Center.
Although it is still San Diego’s largest trade show with about 15,000 attendees, the meeting was scaled back considerably this winter, drawing about 15% fewer exhibitors than last year’s show, organizers said.
Sales of action-sports goods such as apparel, surfboards, skates and other items have slumped with the economy, and industry figures admit that many subcategories of the market have topped out. The downturn comes after five years of climbing industry sales and investor interest.
“There was a party going on during the mid-’80s and everyone came to it,” said Steve Tully, vice president of Costa Mesa-based Quiksilver, one of the nation’s largest surf apparel makers. “The economy has to take its toll. Our industry is no different.”
The Action Sports trade show began 12 years ago in Long Beach and was originally a small gathering of surf and skate specialty shops and their suppliers. By the mid-1980s, the fascination with the beach lifestyle crept into America’s mainstream and the demand for the clothing, equipment and accessories followed accordingly.
By 1988, when the show came to the San Diego Convention Center, the range of products was staggering. Beyond trunks and bikinis, surfboards and skateboards, makers have used the show to unveil new sandals, sun-block, sunglasses, sail boards, snow boards, in-line skates and solar-activated resin for surfboard repair.
Among the exhibitors this year was a hanger manufacturer from New York who was hawking an inexpensive plastic display item that hangs on a rack and fills in the skimpiest bikini with ample feminine bust and hips molds.
Absent this year were many of the general merchandising T-shirt and apparel makers, eschewed as quick-buck-grubbing poseurs who came to the action sports field during surfing’s “neon” boom period in the mid-’80s when fluorescent colors dominated surf fashion, said Mike Kingsbury, the trade show’s promotional director.
“Neon wasn’t surfing,” Kingsbury said. “Neon was a trend.”
Such die-hard San Diego surf companies as Rusty Surfboards maintained growth last year, but at a slower pace, said owner Rus Preisendorfer, a board and apparel manufacturer from La Jolla. His company, one of the world’s largest producers of surfboards, has gone through cost-cutting measures in order to ride out the recession. At the end of last year, Rusty consolidated clothing factories in San Diego and Fountain Valley.
“There’s no longer easy money out in the market so the people who have no connection with our lifestyle are thinning out,” Preisendorfer said. “Once they find a money-making alternative, they’re gone.”
Preisendorfer said the downturn in public interest will have a cleansing effect on the industry. Gone are the Ninja Turtle promotions of two years ago, and other “peripheral businesses” looking to cash in on surfing’s momentum.
Despite the continuing forecasts of a gloomy economy, there were bright spots for many at the show.
On his annual buying trip to the West Coast, Joe Clinard Jr. of Bikini Joe’s in Myrtle Beach, S.C., said he has dropped men’s surf wear and concentrated on women’s swimsuits and accessories. Although his purchases this year may drop 10%, he will still leave the convention with more than $100,000 in bikini orders, he said.
“T-bar styles are big sellers,” he said, “You know, the thong--the G-string. This year I’m after leather bikinis, Lycra, all sorts of stretch.”
Clinard said he has developed a mail order niche on the East Coast, supplying nightclub performers and motorcycle enthusiasts with, “that skimpy, rock ‘n’ roll” look.
Two companies that make skateboard shoes recorded significant growth last year. Lisa Hudson, a spokeswoman from Carlsbad-based Airwalk, said sales of T-shirts, jackets and 20 models of skate sneakers totaled $20 million in 1991, up 25% from the previous year.
Also among the busiest booths at the show was Orange-based Vans, another skate shoe manufacturer and retailer.
The most striking growth in the $1.5-billion action sports industry was in “street” fashions, a melding of “rap-gangster” styles with skateboarders’ durable wear.
The look is subversive, carrying with it an intangible mystique that appeals to youth, and that turns mere clothes into fashion, said Rich Rivera, a manager at Fresh Jive, a Los Angeles-based clothing designer. Fresh Jive owner Rick Klotz said sales tripled last year, but he declined to disclose specific revenue figures.
At the trade show, where exhibitors battle to top each other in conspicuousness, Fresh Jive set up a two-story sound booth with DJs playing “rough-neck” reggae music with abandon.
Between order-taking and schmoozing, crowds of hangers-on clustered around the booth to groove to the big sounds that poured from speakers. For Fresh Jive, it was a weekend when business, like the reggae bass, was booming.
