Three-Day ASR Trade Expo a Dark Day for Black Flys

The surf, skate and snowboard industries’ annual rite of spring--the three-day ASR Trade Expo in Long Beach--was overshadowed by the ejection of perennial bad boys Black Flys.

The Costa Mesa sunglasses marketer was tossed out on the show’s first day after founder Jack Martinez got into a fistfight with a former employee, while other Black Flys employees were found to be in violation of the show’s rules against alcohol consumption.

It was the latest black eye for the once high-flying company, whose sales fell 38% last year to about $8 million, as the sunglasses industry continued to slump.

The company lost two days’ worth of sales from the show, and its entire sample collection--some 300 pairs worth more than $20,000--was stolen from a loading dock at the Long Beach Convention Center, said Biaggio Mancini, the company’s chief financial officer.

He said the company hopes to get credit for the two days it wasn’t on the show floor and to be reimbursed for its lost sample collection.

Court Overin, the expo’s sales and marketing director, said: “We hope that they can work out their issues and come back to the show some day. Black Flys is an important part of the market, their style of marketing is very creative and they’re a good company.”

He’ll get no argument from Mancini. “We’re the gem of that show, from a business standpoint,” Mancini said. “If anything, this whole thing probably enhanced our image.”

Lost amid the incident was that attendance for the three-day show totaled 16,661, including 6,702 retail buyers, 1,100 of whom were from outside the United States.

While that was about even with the 1997 spring get-together, it’s a sign that the industry is very healthy, Overin said. “We still have lots of new companies coming in and our international buyers were up again this year,” he said. “That things are steady is a very good thing in an industry that goes through very high peaks and very low valleys.”

*

Russ Stanton covers retail businesses and restaurants for The Times. He can be reached at (714) 966-5609 and at russ.stanton@latimes.com.