Surf industry paradox: Surfing, by its nature, contradicts basic capitalism
beachgrit.com
beachgrit.com
Most of the things that the big Surf brands make are not useful for the actual act of Surfing. Even boardshorts from the major boardshort companies, about half their range can't be worn surfing. They're made from non-stretch fabric and intended to be worn around on the street.
Google up a "surf shop" in a big coastal town, pick the biggest, most obvious one, and chances are you wouldn't be able to equip yourself to go surfing with the things you can buy there. It'll be wall to wall boardshorts and hoodies, with a hundred pairs of sunglasses along the wall and maybe half a dozen shiny new boards stood up in a corner for decorative purposes. Observe the looks the staff will give each other if you try to ring one of those up.
If you want to go surfing, you need to find the little hole-in-the wall shop off the beach a ways, which will be stuffed full of wetsuits and boards, to the point where you can hardly walk around without knocking half the store down. They'll also have a few hundred pairs of boardshorts there, but surprisingly these ones will all have stretchy fabric and crotches that don't tear apart if you sink to your knees.
The Big Surf Brands know that most of their business comes from selling sunglasses and flip flops to people who want to look like surfers. And they're doing fine.
This is more the classic “brand X is now bloated and failing because it forgot its roots when going mainstream” argument. Nothing to do with capitalism (author was a bit confused there, or clutching at straws), everything to do with losing view of your core values and value proposition.
Further, stability is not necessarily an overriding goal. A 50% shot at 100m is generally preferred over a 100k/year lifestyle business.
PS: I don’t think this is even a downside of capitalism. More people enjoy a Micdonads hamburger in a day than eat at a given 5 star restaurant in a year.
Revenue and Profit are intimately intertwined, with their cousin Cost riding shotgun.
But that's not the scenario at all. The scenario is about sales, not capital investment. The point is that its very unlikely (for retail at least) that you need to invest $X of capital in order to sell $X of merchandise. The question about returns here is not about returns on capital investment, but profit margins on sales.
So, after 1 week you have 20k in gas and 100 - 19 = 81k in cash. You need to spend 80k of that on more gas for text week resulting in a net profit of 1k or a 1% profit margin.
But, repeat that for one year and you bought 80k x 52 weeks of gas = 4.16 million even though you only had 500k in capital. Further your profit margin might be low but your ROI was 52/500 or 10.4% which is not bad.
You make the 20% with the 100k, and hopefully find similar opportunities with your other 9 stacks of 100k's.
Profit is the only driving force in the market.
The comparison is not about investing $X and making $Y profit. It's about selling $X with a given profit margin.
The actual capital requirements to sell $X are assumed to be roughly the same for both scenarios.
Massive companies also have low average profits, but it’s not low quality driving down profits so much as growing to the edge of unprofitability because high profit margins are not inherently as useful as total profits. If say Budweiser increased their price by say 10c a can their overall profit would decrease even if their profit margin would increase.
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That's not neccesarily the case. The ideal price point for maximum profits is ever-changing.
Would Budseiser's profits increase if they lowered the price by $0.10?
The answer is the same: it depends.
Yeah, that never happens with capitalism...
Trying to scapegoat a particular economic or political system as inherently corrupt is naive at best, and disingenuous or dishonest at worst.
And there's never been (and never will be) a 100% capitalist society, so even if they could be corruption free it doesn't help much.
Brainstorming a range of negative interpretations of my words then providing appropriate insults for each, isn't my idea of responding to the strongest plausible interpretation of my words. For that matter, if you can't imagine anything that isn't insult-worthy, you might simply ask me what I mean. The answer would be that I was arguing capitalism has a relatively unusual feature of actually channeling greed rather than trying to stamp it out. If "the new soviet man" makes a decision for personal profit versus that of society they are corrupting their communist system. Whereas a capitalist can do so completely within their capitalist system. It has nothing to do with name-calling or about who is and isn't "corrupt" as some inherent human or systemic flaw. Do you still not get my point?
By the 1980s the line was better suited to arduous treks across a muddy quad to the campus coffeehouse, though outerwear garments from that era may remain serviceable. Today any modest muscular development simply exceeds the tailoring tolerances of upper or lower-body garments.
The "brand" still trades, or tries to, off its century-old origin story. That is an absolute lie.
I'm not sure I'd say nothing to do with capitalism. Underneath many of these "bloated" brands you find the same pattern. A niche or well-respected brand purchased by a private equity firm. They proceed to hollow out the brand (move production, cut warranties and customer support, etc.) while simultaneously playing financial tricks to extract money (saddle the company with debt/management fees).
This pattern may or may not be one unique to capitalism, but it's surely one which occurs frequently in the US implementation.
The trick is that you first get popular among actual surfers. That's a tiny population, the population doesn't like to spend money, it takes expensive R&D, expensive materials, difficult manual assembly for the abusive and difficult environment: not a lot of profit or market cap there.
But the dark pattern that the 'surf industry' have discovered and exploited, is that you then silently pivot to the market of people who wished they looked cool like surfers. That's a much bigger population, they have more money, and they don't care about the materials or performance of the gear.
Starting out as an actual surf business is optional, but encouraged, as it will help you market the story that you make cool surf gear. Skip that step if people will come into your department store anyways, just make the logo look similar to a prominent manufacturer. Similar tactics can be employed effectively in selling just about anything: SUVs and sports cars, ski gear, health food, artistic furniture...
It just seems like a perfectly normal way that clothing trends evolve. Are you a poser if you wear Northface or Patagonia gear in the city, since it's made for roughing it in the outdoors?
Once I worked in an office that was absurdly cold but North Face gear kept me warm and comfortable. Many people, cool or otherwise, find Apple devices to be usable and reliable for very ordinary activities like sending email, writing documents, or making phone calls.
no, you are a banker or tech bro
It’s OK if there is no overlap but in practice that doesn’t really happen. When North Face switched to being a fashion brand it dragged other, previously genuine, manufacturers with it, because they couldn’t leave the money on the table. Basically, hipsters ruin everything.
Furthermore, it makes it difficult for genuine participants to cut through the marketing BS. Want to buy a lightweight backpack for some day hikes? Go to Walmart and you'll see rows on rows of "rugged" bags with 'biner accessory clips, "super-strong" zippers and "comfort straps". But don't try to take those up a mountain, you'll end up with gear on the ground.
Informed consumers make capitalism work efficiently. This pattern abuses consumer trust for a temporarily profitable scheme. That's what I'd call a dark pattern.
"But the best example of all and one of the greatest jobs of marketing that the universe has ever seen is Nike. Remember, Nike sells a commodity. They sell shoes! And yet when you think of Nike you feel something different than a shoe company. In their ads, as you know, they don’t ever talk about the product, they don’t ever tell you about their air soles and why they're better than Reebok’s air soles.
What is Nike doing in their advertising? They honor great athletes and they honor great athletics. That’s who they are, that’s what they are about."
not actually replying to this comment - was just trying to figure out a way to get in touch with you!
I just moved to Durham from NYC for work, and was looking through HN to see if there were any ongoing meetups, etc. in the area. Saw your post about an RTP meetup (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6754755), any luck getting this started?
Even if not, would love any tips you might have for meeting new people / getting involved in the tech community around here. Or even meeting up in person just to chat!
Thank you - hope you have a wonderful weekend
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...
Desire to secure their future resource/financial security really throws a wrench in “letting it all go”.
Consider the statement: "A true surfer would be surfing, not commenting on Hacker News." No True Scotsman is fallacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
This is actually completely true. I'm friends with a guy who owns a surf shop in one of the highest grossing areas for surfing equipment/clothing in southern california, his biggest gripe with the industry is that surfers spend no money. They won't pay for parking, won't pay for surf apps, won't buy a new board unless they have to, don't really buy the clothes, etc. It's part of the culture.
Edit:
To add to his perspective, it's not about getting wealthy from surfing. The guy has been surfing his whole life, is a lifelong lifeguard, surfs 20 foot waves.
He just wishes the industry could grow and innovate, but instead sees it stagnate. Sure the vibe and love for surfing is there, but I think he is frustrated that there is no wealth in the industry to foster further growth and investment.
But then again, the way I see it is surfing as a sport is extremely limited, you can only do it on coasts, and only some coasts are actually consistently good for it.
And some people what to look like a surfer. I am a surfer who wants to look like a normal person.
Who buys a new board if they don't have to? Madness. I choose my equipment carefully, it has to match my style. Standing on some clever foam out in the middle of the ocean is tricky and very personal.
I wouldn't say it's part of the culture, it's just being normal. I don't upgrade my PC to stay on trend. I don't upgrade my surfboard to stay on trend. They are tools.
By saying it's "just being normal", you're signaling that sensible frugality is normal to you. It's possible that value has some correlation with your identity as a surfer, no?
Folks who have wooden keelboats are about as into working on the boat as they are into sailing the boat. They spend money, but it's not on flashy gear. It's on another five gallons of bottom paint and another box of sandpaper because that varnish has to be redone again. Marketing and brand doesn't really help you sell these or increase margins on them, because a bunch of ratty guys are on the dock comparing how long they had to go between repainting the bottom with that manufacturer versus this one.
Folks who have big glitzy boats as a status symbol spend money, but generally you're not selling to them. You're selling to a designer or to workmen. And all the life jackets are still the same orange ones off the shelf from West Marine or the like.
It's interesting you chose that specific boat given the dust-up between the trademark owner and the builders over the past year, and the recent controversy in the 2024 Olympic selection committee. I've only barely followed it, but at least some of the controversy seems to be about the lack of innovation in the class.
Much of the attraction of the class is the lack of innovation. Innovation in racing sailboats tends to sacrifice other qualities like seakindliness, survivability, and versatility. Look at the Americas Cup boats for extreme examples. They're amazingly fast, but useless for anything but that one task. Having a boat that has persisted as a first choice for Olympic racing and taking your kids out for daysail means that it is happens to have been an incredibly good design, and allowing innovation in the class is more likely to end up with reducing that versatility, rather the way the American Kennel Club's focus on conformation has destroyed dog breeds.
It all came to a head because someone made a complaint to the EU that the way that Olympic sailing equipment is supplied is anti-competitive. World Sailing chooses equipment for some of the events which has a single or limited number of suppliers because the rules for that class require trademarks owned by those suppliers to appear on the equipment (true for the Laser, RS-X Windsurfer, Nacra 17).
All Olympic classes are having to change their model to allow anyone to become a builder/supplier of that equipment. The Laser builder who holds the trademark in the EU, Americas and most of Asia didn't play ball so the class rules were changed to remove the requirement for the trademark that they hold to appear on the boats and sails. At the same time they were in breach of a contract that they have with the class association to do with factory inspections and other governance matters relating to the supply of equipment and they have now been kicked out.
Not exactly the free and easy relaxing image that you might associate with sailing!
Interesting fact: Although lasers all look like they're all the same, the manufacturing tolerances are such that they're definitely not when it comes to the top level of competition, and the top sailors have to expend large amounts of effort to avoid duff boats and other equipment.
Source: I'm someone who sails a Laser competitively and has skin in this game.
That's really interesting. How annoying. Is there some tribal knowledge about what manufacturers are solid and what are not?
It's been well known for the last 10 years that the Australian manufacturer builds notionally "better" boats (stay stiff for longer, less likely to leak or crack etc), but there are still variances in key measurements which you need to look out for. The biggest ones are hull weight and mast rake (how upright the mast is in the boat fore and aft which has a critical effect on how the rig is tuned and the performance characteristics of the boat).
Boats come off the production line with fittings in slightly different places, different amounts of material in the layup, key parts of the hull not quite aligned the same etc.
There's significant variance between masts as well. The sections are extruded aluminium and over the lifetime of the extrusion die they go from having slightly thinner walls to slightly thicker ones. Mast manufacturers seem to end up with slightly different grades of aluminium as well. This affects the stiffness, a very important factor when it comes to how powerful the rig is with lighter sailors preferring thinner masts and heavier sailors thicker masts.
Competitive sailors will try and measure everything they ever use to keep track of what they think works for them, and then select carefully when they purchase something new.
All this goes against the ethos and values of the class, which is that there's no equipment advantage possible and it's all about the sailor. This is dealt with at the Olympics (and at World Championships for the Olympic categories) by having mandatory supplied equipment which hopefully has been selected so that it's all as identical as possible. For all the competitions you need to succeed at in order to get to the Olympics however, it's the wild west!
Surf apps suck, they're generally asking around $10 a month, and they do little more than provide prettified weather buoy data.
_Decent_ wetsuits are in the $300 - $500 range, new board $600 - $1000. I think it's pretty capitalist to let some kook buy it new and then snag it from them off craigslist for %30 - %50 of retail.
https://forecast.weather.gov/product.php?site=SGX&issuedby=S...
What does that even mean? If all of the surfers are happy, why does the industry need to innovate? Why is constant innovation always seen as a good thing?
I chuckled at this bit, because I grew up in a surf town and still live nearby. Every surfer I've every known has been an attention hog, and they will find a way let you know they surf within minutes of meeting you.
It used to be that if you were wearing Canada Goose, it was because you were on some kind of expedition to the Arctic. Then movie directors decided Canada Goose was the way to go to stay cozy while on an outdoor movie set. I think it was Sundance 2007 and all of the sudden all the cool kids had Canada Goose parkas.
Now middle class people wear Canada Goose parkas to signal to others their propensity for getting ripped off.
Isn’t their slogan now “built for urban winters”? They aren’t even pretending to be genuine any more, and that only makes them more appealing to posers, who think that “urban” means something else
They may sell a subset of their product to yuppies, but you can still outfit yourself for just about any outdoor pursuit with these companies and trust the gear they sell. TNF and BD tents are still high quality, TNF and BD and Patagonia jackets can be used on any trip. And Arcteryx is some of the highest quality cold weather clothing in the world. I would probably only prefer Western Mountaineering or Hilleberg to a combination of products from these 4 manufacturers. BD probably makes more money on selling headlamps to anglers and hunters than they do on yuppies buying climbing pants.
The brands are nowhere near the lowend lifestyle fashion grab-bags that Oakley, Hurley, Quiksilver or O'Neill are...
I think you have this backwards. They make their profit off the yuppies buying the latest product year after year. The hardcore users aren't buying new tents, jackets, snow pants, etc every year.
except black diamond?
And those yuppies may convert to hardcore outdoor users, and bring their brand loyalty with them.
If anything these companies are a pretty good example of a kind of principled capitalism, in so much as their operations are coextensive with both lifestyle stuff the commenter derides and their initial principles and commitment to quality.
And on top of that, if one thinks these are outliers, two of these companies where started by the same guy, in different times.
Similarly, it is intuitive that professional investors are going to want to try to buy companies like Hurley and Billabong amidst a societal trend of more people wanting to seem more surfer-like and buying T-shirts that convey the message "I'm into surf culture".
The anticapitalist tone of the linked article is especially ironic given that the popularity of surfing in the non-Hawai'ian world was driven entirely by the post-WWII economic expansion in the US mainland and AUS that gave teenage baby boomers spending money in the early 60's. Surfing has always been co-opted by capitalism; there are old dudes in the lineup at Dana Point who were bitching about the fakeness of the Beach Boys and Gidget when they were young men 50+ years ago.
None of this is new.
>...And, of course, we all know about Hurley by now
No I don’t. I even had to search myself and still don’t know. Just tell the reader, we don’t all follow surfer/skate news.
What happened to Hurley? They closing shop?
It's not capitalism, it's something else. On the consumer side, it's "mimetic desire," which is a whole complex thing.
On the creative side, when you love something, how do you find a way to make enough money at it that you can do it as a way of life? Then once you do, how do you compete with well capitalized people whose interests aren't divided and who specialize in selling empty symbols to rubes? (answer: teaching, performance, and elite competition)
When you are actually good at something, you don't buy symbolic things to represent it because representing it is hollow and absurd. It's not a paradox of capitalism at all. When you are actually good at something you love, you are above the fray. Paradoxes and criticisms are the noisy artifacts of people reconciling symbols, and not meaningful to people who are engaged in the moment.
So, I'd say there is no surf industry, just an industry that sells surf symbols, and to surfers its failure is necessarily meaningless.
The (now purely decorative) holes punched in wingtip (U.S.)/brogue (U.K.) shoes were originally there to let water drain out, as they were a sporting/outdoor shoe.
Basically they were the Crocs of their day.
Ironic, given the original utterly utilitarian origin of jeans.
Don't worry, Gov "King" Cuomo will require a surfing license very soon, that is unless he doesn't outlaw it like e-bikes first.
The man is a legend in the climbing community, and wrote a whole book on balancing professional vs enthusiast gear while following his own moral compass.
It's a fascinating and worthwhile read for anyone who wants to find your own internal balance on being true to yourself and your values, while dealing with the realities of running a business. The discussions on what do we owe ourselves and others is a refreshing take on what it means to be successful.
I honestly thought those brands made cool looking extremely casual clothes! Obviously, styles change and things go out of fashion.
Heck, I still own a pair of Volcom board shorts I accidentally bought 15 years ago because I thought they were a cool-looking bathing suit. I even wore them the one time I went surfing in Hawaii. I don't wear them often, because they don't have pockets, but when the occasion calls for them, (like spring skiing,) I love them.
Billabong also makes a line of khaki shorts (walk shorts I think they’re called) with the same material that are amazing for hot and humid tropical weather. Dry super quickly if they get wet, very light, and slightly stretchy.
Start with a brand that has "cool" factor, milk it for all its worth, obliterate the brand, and walk away with your CEO bonuses.
I wonder if this is a natural consequence of the drive for "growth"–whether that be in terms of more profit, more features, or anything else. You see it in the big tech companies, which have a tendency to expand into areas like social media, cloud, and self-driving cars, regardless of their original product line. Programming languages, where as a language ecosystem ages, it grows to acquire the features of every other language. Niche communities and countercultures online and off get diluted into meaninglessness once they catch on with too many people. Memes degrade. Information entropy increases monotonically.
I'm reminded of a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins called "God's Grandeur".
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
In the future one could also argue: tech industry contradicts basic capitalism: nowadays anybody has a smartphone, the phones cannot get any better, and everyone takes care of their smartphone because they don't want to pay alot money for a new one.
I snowboard and when I see other snowboarders I don't assume we share values beyond maybe finding the boots more comfortable than those for skiing.
Surfers can be considered to live their life like any spiritual individual. Their _god_ is the ocean, their pursuit is happiness in the moment recognizing risk and danger is a necessary component for a full life.
My initial thought is to the limited range to actually peruse the sport, leading to a closer knit culture. It's coastal dependent and coast culture always has a distinct identity in my experience, more so than Mountain culture in my experience.
I'll just note that what most people consider capitalism really consists of three components:
1) "free markets" in which what is sold and for how much is not (heavily) regulated 2) an entrepeneurial environment in which starting (and stopping) commercial enterprises is relatively easy and happens often 3) preferentially biasing the distribution of the rewards of commercial enterprises towards those who invest capital, rather than those who invest labor or IP.
There's no rule that says you couldn't have a system with just 1 or 2 of those 3. Either way, they interact to create a social system which does indeed tend to drive a society in certain directions, and inhibit its ability to move in others.
Replace a with basically anything people do.
The bigger lesson: Humans don't desire consumerist society.
How exactly is this the case? By all metrics, humans love consumerism and it, or rather capitalism, allow us to enjoy an exceedingly high quality of life.
Manufacturing and agriculture combine to less than a fifth of American GDP today; I say it would be better quality of life if Americans worked one day a week for the same material possessions, but the drive to consume ever more is the primary impediment to that. Similar arguments apply in the other G20 economies, but I’m not going to quantify them.
Of course, I’m not an economist, so perhaps I’m doing a gross disservice to the real value of the service sector…
Convincing them to voluntarily transfer their wealth to someone else is the goal of consumerism, hence the ridiculous money spend on propaganda convincing people they need more things than they want.
The point of consumerism is to act as a motivator for the working class to keep working. Once you have that plentiful food and safe & warm hut, assuming that's all there is to aspire to, it would be very tempting to stay home from work on Fridays.
The museums around here insist the two big problems were the secret police and the fact that production wasn’t very well matched to demand. Even if you ignore the literal Stasi, I think you may be understating the impact of the shops running out of various foods from time to time.