Quiksilver History

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The Company Description of Its Time

Quiksilver designs, produces and distributes clothing, accessories and related products for young-minded people, and develops brands that represent a casual lifestyle driven from a boardriding heritage. That sentence, from the company filing, is the company's own summary, and everything else in this profile is evidence for it. Quiksilver's authenticity, the filing continues, is evident in its innovative products, events and retail environments across the globe, and its products are sold throughout the world primarily in surf shops, skate shops and other specialty stores that provide an authentic retail experience for customers. The reputation of its brands is based on outdoor action sports: Quiksilver, Roxy, DC, Lib Tech and Hawk are synonymous with the heritage and culture of surfing, skateboarding and snowboarding, and the house style is given as a youthful, energetic, yet casual vibe - a fantastic brand, Apparel Search adds, for the beach and beyond.

Torquay, the Late 1960s, and the First Boardshorts

The profile's centrepiece is a long historical quote from Alan Green, written at Torquay in February 2006, and its facts are kept here as he told them. When the founders started designing the first Quiksilver boardshorts, Green says, they just wanted to make them better than the others. The 'we' was Green and two mates, Carol McDonald from Ocean Grove and Tim Davis from Torquay, at the start of the last summer of the 1960s, when surfboard design was progressing rapidly, jet travel was almost affordable, and Indo was being whispered around as the best surfers began chasing the seasons. They made boardshorts because Green wanted to build his life around surfing - the simplest founding motive in this entire directory, and the one the brand's boardriding heritage claim rests on.

The technical details matter because they are unusually honest. The shorts are sometimes credited as the first technical boardshort, Green says, but the truth is the makers used snaps and Velcro instead of flies because he had bought a supply of them when he started making Rip Curl wetsuits. The yoke waist - higher at the back than the front, hugging the back while hanging low on the hips - was the other difference, and two-toned yokes made the shorts distinctive, functional and comfortable, and visibly different from the rest. The first customer in the world was the Klemm-Bell surf shop in Gardenvale, Melbourne, and a few months later their Torquay branch; the shorts sold, in Green's phrase, like stink, and soon he was driving up and down the coast supplying every surf shop he could find between surf sessions.

The people who followed are named in the quote and kept here: Brewster Everett joined early as a vital creative cog; John Law joined in 1976 and the company moved into its first proper factory; Jeff Hakman came to town, won the Bells contest, and proposed starting up in America. Green's closing reflection is a governance claim as much as a memory: the company was never about one person, and the brand evolved through interaction of a group of five or six people who think globally and act locally and rule the brand through rough consensus. That account, kept in full in spirit, is why this profile leads with boardshort construction and a coastline sales route rather than with a corporation chart.

The Brand Family Around Quiksilver

Quiksilver Inc. has other brands as well, the filing says, and lists them with short profiles this rebuild preserves. Radio Fiji swimwear combines fashion-forward looks and creative styling with premium fabrics and beautiful prints, dedicated to bringing its consumer exciting and flattering swimwear, sold in the best bikini boutiques across America. DC Shoes is an American company specialising in footwear for extreme sports, skateboarding and snowboarding, plus snowboards, shirts, jeans, hats and jackets; it was founded in 1993 by Ken Block and Damon Way and is based in Vista, California - DC originally stood for Droors Clothing, but since the sale of that now-defunct line it is simply DC Shoes - and on March 9, 2004, DC Shoes was acquired by Quiksilver in an $87 million transaction.

Roxy, the women's line started in 1990, has its own full filing in this letter and is summarised here only as the parent profile presents it: a gutsy move into an untapped women's surf market, born in the water as a swimwear line in late summer 1990, followed by sportswear the next year. A September 2011 report quoted in the historical record adds a later chapter: Huntington Beach, California-based Quiksilver was developing a group of new indie lines through a new Emerging Brands division in Newport Beach, including Moskova, a European-designed underwear line, and Summer Teeth, a capsule collection of T-shirts, beach towels and other products developed with surfer Dane Reynolds. Those 2011 plans are kept with their date and their source, exactly as recorded.

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