Quiksilver And DC Cut Athlete Teams, Staff, & Brands
Well I’m not sure how much they could afford to pay others when they are paying Kelly ridiculous money, I’m pretty sure Dane is doing very well too. Interesting to see what they are doing with the DC snow team, they have one of the best. Seems the marketing depts suffered pretty heavily as well, to be honest I have found marketing depts in companies that I have worked for to be pretty much superfluous to requirements anyway.
Not good news, especially for the women’s programs. I’m also wondering if and how the snow brand has been affected.
Skip, I’m moving this to the surf section.
Thanks for sharing the article.
There is a sentence about the snow program there Jez. They’re cutting everyone except Rice.
I didn’t know they really had anyone other than Rice or does that extend to the Mervin side of things as well? They couldn’t very well kill off Travis, he rides for Quik, DC and Lib, he’s entrenched in there very heavily!
Quik has I-Pod, Bryan Fox, Chris Rasman and a few others. I don’t think it’ll extend to the Mervin side of things.
There is a sentence about the snow program there Jez. They’re cutting everyone except Rice.
You’re telling me they are cutting the entire DC pro team besides Travis? I don’t think that’s what they were saying. Maybe they were referring to Quiksilver. I doubt they are cutting guys like Torstein, Devun etc. Those guys are ket for DC. Actually I doubt they would be cutting any of the DC pros.
Looks like there’s now an internal memo there too. No mention of the DC snow team.
UPDATE: Quiksilver could not be reached for official comment at the moment, but Mooney did issue this internal memo outlining the details of the changes across brands:
I thought it would be helpful to share a few details about recent decisions made, the rationale behind them and the process involved.
I spent my first two weeks on the job with Bob, Charlie and Carol meeting Pierre and his team in Europe, Greg in Japan and Australia as well as Craig and the QAS team in Hong Kong.
Those two weeks were an invaluable learning experience, listening to the challenges and opportunities in each region.
After that I spent a a number of weeks with Rob and the US team.
After 10 weeks of meetings, capped off with a week long executive team meeting in Huntington Beach, Bob, I and the entire management team reached consensus on some key decisions we can communicate today.
Focus is a recurring theme you’ll hear going forward. We must focus on our key brands, key athletes and key categories in order to compete and grow.
Our key brands are Quiksilver, Roxy and DC. Within these brands we must further focus.
To that end, we have made the decision that Quiksilver and Roxy should exit the skate category and that DC should exit the surf category.
Those decisions were relatively easy to make and require little explanation.
A more difficult decision was for Quiksilver to exit women’s. We felt this was vital in order to focus our resources on making Quiksilver in men’s and Roxy in women’s as strong as they can possibly be.
The VSTR line inspired by Kelly Slater is shutting down.
The Quiksilver’s women’s and girl’s teams have done an outstanding job generating top line growth.
Some of this growth however has come at the expense of existing business, particularly within our own retail stores.
In order to generate significant future growth, it seemed inevitable that we’d cannibalize Roxy’s business in key categories.
This was a particularly difficult decision as many people have given their all to make Quiksilver women’s a success.
We believe this decision however will allow us to compete more aggressively in men’s with Quiksilver and in women’s with Roxy.
A few web articles over the last few days stated DC was exiting women’s. This is absolutely untrue.
DC will remain in women’s, in footwear, and apparel. We have always been strong in key items in women’s footwear and apparel at DC and expect to be even more so going forward.
We have made the decision to discontinue VSTR and to pass the management of the Summer Teeth brand back to Dane Reynolds, again, in order to focus on our key brands.
Athletes are vital to the success of Quiksilver, Roxy and DC. We have an amazing roster of talent at the top of their respective sports in surf, snow and skate and an equally amazing depth of talent. We’re committed to maintaining our leadership position in athlete endorsement in action sports.
Our key athletes should be household names, known well beyond the universe of core fans.
Over the last few weeks, we reduced the number of athletes under contract. This was done to free up resources to tell the world about the many great athletes we work with.
Quiksilver for example will continue to have 130 pro surf riders on its team, Going forward, we have the opportunity to tell people how great those athletes really are.
All of these actions are in support of our three strategic goals of strengthening our brands, growing sales and driving operational efficiency.
I hope this puts these recent decisions in some context. We have a great many details to work out and will have more news to share with you in the coming weeks.
I will do my utmost to keep you informed every step of the way.
Andy
Personally I reckon this is a good step in terms of their product lines, Quik was starting to get very confusing in terms of all the lines they had. I never understood why they would do Quik womens when they had Roxy and the explanation above regarding cannibalisation of their existing market share was my own exact thought. It sounds like Quik is only getting out of skate, snow would appear to be unchanged and I expect that is very much due to their mountain and the wave logo. What that means for the snow team I have no idea.
Just checked their website, as of today the snow team is
T Rice
Ipod
Todd Richards
Bryan Fox
Jesse Houghton
Only issue is that the site still lists a skate team…...............
@rider26:
[quote
You’re telling me they are cutting the entire DC pro team besides Travis? I don’t think that’s what they were saying. Maybe they were referring to Quiksilver. I doubt they are cutting guys like Torstein, Devun etc. Those guys are ket for DC. Actually I doubt they would be cutting any of the DC pros.
Looks like there’s now an internal memo there too. No mention of the DC snow team.]
No, I was talking about the Quik team not the DC team.