Zumiez

Zumiez Inc. is a Lynnwood, Washington specialty retailer of apparel, footwear, accessories and hardgoods for young men and women, built around the fashion, music, art and culture of action sports and streetwear. Founded in 1978, the company trades on Nasdaq under the symbol ZUMZ. Its stores — several hundred across the United States, Canada and Europe, alongside zumiez.com — sell the brands of skateboarding, snowboarding and street culture together with the company's own private labels, staffed deliberately by participants in the lifestyles the stores sell.

Company Profile

The February 2019 summary in the record describes the retailer as a leading specialty seller of apparel, footwear, accessories and hardgoods for young people who want to express their individuality through action sports, streetwear and other unique lifestyles. The October 2013 summary fixes the earlier scale: 434 stores in the United States and 10 in Canada as of January 2012.

The April 2006 summary reaches back to the format's definition: stores catering to customers aged 12 to 24 who seek popular brands representing a lifestyle centred on action sports. Across thirteen years of summaries the customer and the proposition barely change — Zumiez's record is one of extending a sharply defined niche, geographically and online, rather than broadening it.

The range behind the name is apparel, footwear, accessories and hardgoods for action sports and streetwear. Its customers are young men and women drawn to skateboarding, snowboarding and street culture, in stores and online. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Zumiez in the industry: it explains the company's costs, its competitors and the kind of news that moved its shares when it had them. A change in either half of the combination, a new product category or a new customer, is usually the first sign that the business described in the older summaries is turning into something different.

Scale should be read from the dated summaries with their dates attached. Store counts, sales descriptions and market positions quoted there were the company's own account of itself in that year, and they are the right basis for comparing Zumiez with the other companies in this section — a component supplier against a retailer, or a catalogue house against a mall chain — as long as each figure is compared with figures from roughly the same period.

For current dealings, the snapshot at the top of this page is the place to start: it gives the company's present status — Operating — and links to the official website, which is where current product ranges, store information and investor or corporate contacts are maintained. Anything in the dated summaries that conflicts with the snapshot should be read as the older position: summaries describe the year they are dated, and the snapshot describes the company as it stands now.

Company summaries of this kind were the working tool of the apparel trade as much as of investors: a buyer, landlord or supplier checking Zumiez could see its scale, its headquarters and its own description of its business in a few paragraphs. Those dated descriptions are kept with their dates, because a store count from 2013 or a strategy statement from 2019 is evidence about that year, not about today. The current position is the one given in the snapshot: operating.