Board games: Hermosa surf shops prepare for Huntington challenger

Travis Wilkerson

Jack’s Hermosa Beach store manager Travis Wilkerson. Photos

This weekend, Spyder Surf will host a reopening party for its newly remodeled, 27-year-old, Hermosa Beach shop on Pacific Coast Highway. The party will feature free hats, hotdogs and hamburgers, live music and celebrity surfers signing autographs, including pro surfer and Surfrider Foundation spokesperson Tim Curran.

Next weekend, Jack’s Surf, a few blocks south of Spyder on Pacific Coast Highway, will host a grand opening party for its new store featuring rapper Mickey Avalon, celebrity surfers signing autographs, giveaways, and raffle tickets to the upcoming U.S. Surfing Championships in Huntington Beach. A portion of the day’s sales benefit the Surfrider Foundation.

No one in the Southern California surfing industry believes the timing of the two shops’ celebrations is coincidental.

Since learning of Huntington Beach-based Jack’s Surf’s plans to open a 6,500 square foot store in Hermosa, Spyder co-owner Dennis Jarvis has been waging an aggressive, preemptive offensive.

Last Friday, lines of gremmies, 100 deep, formed outside Spyder’s downtown Hermosa store to have posters autographed by Volcom surf stars Bruce Irons, Coco Ho and Alex Gray. A ticket raffle promised a trip for two to the 2011 Volcom Pipeline Pro contest in Hawaii.

Two weekends ago, Jarvis hosted an unprecedented, private surf contest in Manhattan Beach for the CEOs of Volcom, Quiksilver, Billabong and Hurley. The four brands account for over half of the surf industry’s $7 billion a year in annual sales. Contest winner Volcom CEO Richard Woolcott, a former pro surfer, won first rights to paint a surf mural on the outside of the newly remodeled Spyder store.

An unspoken statement made by the CEO surf contest was that surf industry leaders should first of all, surf.

Jarvis is a former pro surfer and still shapes Spyder boards. His store’s motto is “We live it.”

Jack’s co-owner Bobby Abdel, while acknowledging that neither he nor his brother Ron surf, pointed out in an interview in his new store last week, that their kids and cousins, a dozen of whom work for Jack’s, do surf and skate.

In an Easy Reader interview in November, Abdel said he was similarly criticized for not surfing by a Newport Beach competitor when he opened a store in that beach town about 10 years ago. The Newport competitor printed bumper stickers that read “We surf, do you?”

Abdel fired back with a stinging sticker that read, “I pay my bills, do you?”

“I am still in business and he is out of business,” Abdel said.

Josh Kearney

Spyder Surf manager Josh Kearney (who recently returned from the Van’s Warp tour with his band The Darlings) and former Mira Costa surf star Chris Bromden in the skate section of their newly remodeled Pacific Coast Highway Store. Photos

Cutting to the core

Despite surfing’s laid back image, the business side has been cutthroat from its beginning. Like Jarvis, most surf shop owners come from a competitive surfing or surfboard shaping background and the passion characteristic of athletes carries over to their business.

The very first surf shop, opened by pioneer Hermosa Beach shaper Dale Velzy was shut down by the IRS. Velzy suspected he was ratted out by fellow Hermosan Dewey Weber, whom Velzy had taken under his wing and taught to shape. Within days of Velzy’s shop being closed, it reopened as Weber Surfboards, with Velzy’s inventory. Weber Surfboards grew to be one of the sport’s most successful brands. Velzy’s business never recovered and he never spoke to Weber again.

Eddie Talbot, owner of ET Surf, Hermosa’s oldest shop, almost didn’t live to see his shop’s first anniversary. Shortly after he opened ET in 1972 a Molotov cocktail exploded at his front door at three in the morning. Talbot was sleeping in the back of the shop, which was filled with highly flammable surfboard blanks and cans of explosive resin. Fortunately, the breaking glass woke him, enabling him to save his life and his business.

Talbot was never able to prove who woke him that night, but he had his suspicions.

The economy was depressed and local surf shops were being undercut by garage surfboard shapers. The surf shops hoped to stop the garage shapers by refusing to sell them materials. Talbot wouldn’t play along.

Talbot became Jarvis’s mentor in the mid 1970s after giving the 13-year-old, fatherless store rat a job mixing resin. Within a few years Jarvis was a professional surfer and shaper with his own line of ET surfboards. He called them Spyderboards after his favorite comic book figure.

In 1983, Jarvis left ET to open Spyder Surf. Neither will discuss the reason for the breakup, but it’s generally believed Jarvis wanted a bigger role in ET than Talbot was willing relinquish. Three decades later, though the two speak fondly of one another – Jarvis dedicated an instructional book on surfing to Talbot – the two still don’t speak to one another.

For almost as long as Talbot and Jarvis haven’t spoken, Talbot and Becker Surf co-founder Dave Hollander didn’t speak. Talbot suspected Hollander of conspiring to block his shop from carrying one of the major wetsuit manufactures.

After years of the two ignoring one another at industry gatherings, Hollander walked up to Talbot at a trade show and said, “Hey, Eddie, this is silly.” Talbot agreed. They talked about their kids.

Meanwhile, Hollander’s and Jarvis’ relationship turned chilly when Jarvis and partner Dickie O’Reilly opened a second Spyder shop on Pier Plaza, between Becker’s Pier Avenue shop and the water.

Still, the tensions between the owners of Hermosa’s three largest and oldest surf shops are merely tepid family squabbles by comparison to the furious passions ignited by Jack’s expansion into Hermosa.

In April, an anonymously administered Facebook page appeared titled Keep Jack’s Surf Out of the South Bay. Within 48 hours the page had nearly 2,000 fans. The number has since reached over 3,400. Most of the postings called for boycotting Jack’s, frequently playing the localism card. Jack’s, they pointed out, is from Huntington Beach, Hermosa’s longtime rival for the title of Surf City. But others pointed out that competition is the American way. Hadn’t Becker opened a store in Huntington? The overriding characteristic of all of the posts is an underlying passion rarely expressed for retail outlets, with the exception of restaurants.

Becker Surf co-founders Steve Mangiagli and Dave Hollander sold their stores to Billabong, but kept their surfboard factory.

Why Hermosa?

Though Abdel denies it, surf industry insiders commonly believe Jack’s expansion into Hermosa was motivated, in part, by a comment Becker Surf co-founder Dave Hollander made about the Abdel brothers, which they took to be defamatory.

Like Jack’s, Becker Surf owns five stores. And like Jack’s, it markets beyond the hardcore surfer to followers of the surfer lifestyle.

Why else, the reasoning goes, would Jack’s open a store in a saturated market during a down economy? Hermosa Beach has seven surf/skate stores, nearly one for every 1,000 of its 9,000 residences. That’s two more surf shops than it has coffeehouses.

Surf industry sales, statewide, are reportedly off 30 percent.

During an interview last year, Hollander said the offending remark was not an attack on the brothers’ ethnicity, but on their business practices.

“It was three or four years ago, the first of December, they went 20 to 30 percent off in all of their stores, which amounted to declaring a price war,” Hollander recalled. “Surf retail relies on perceived value. At the time, industry leaders were trying to get everyone to hold prices, to stay together as a tribe.

“Would Apple let this happen? If surfing is hot, why is it on sale during the holidays?” Hollander said he asked.

“I sent an email to three of my sales managers that read, ‘Arabs 1, Industry 0.’ They went for extra sales at the expense of the industry’s perceived value, sucking us all into a price war that no one won.

“A little while later at a trade show I was told the Abdels were saying, ‘If Hollander wants a war, we’ll give him a war.’ They sent me a cease and desist letter, which I turned over to my attorney, who said ignore it.

“If I’d said, ‘Industry 1, Arabs 0,’ I can see why they’d be mad. But I was saying they won.”

Hollander said he phoned the Abdel brothers to clarify that it was their business practices, not their ethnicity that he objected to.

At the time Jack’s signed the lease for its Hermosa Beach store, a strategy to weaken, and perhaps mortally wound its chief Southern California competitor might have looked attractive.

The precariousness of the surf industry was demonstrated in March 2009, when Active, the state’s largest chain of surf/skate lifestyle stores, including one in Plaza El Segundo, filed for bankruptcy.

Because of the recession, now going on three years, Hollander had already cut the low-hanging fruit from his company.

In a May 2009 TransWorld Surf  interview, Hollander said that business began plummeting so quickly at the end of 2007 that, “I pulled all the numbers apart and I thought surf was going out of fashion, which I’ve always thought is a real possibility. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that can’t happen. There are a whole bunch of stores that were selling Izod and stuff that are out of business because they thought preppy was going to be around forever.”

By the start of 2008, Hollander told TransWorld, he recognized it wasn’t just the surf industry, but the entire economy that was spiraling downward.

He responded by cutting staff from 135 to 85, cutting his executives’ salaries and converting his Huntington Beach location to a Becker Basement outlet store. In January of this year, he closed the Huntington store and Becker’s 15-year-old Corona Del Mar store.

Compounding the challenges facing Becker has been roadwork strangling traffic on Pier Avenue through the summer.

But if knocking out Becker Surf was part of Jack’s Hermosa playbook, that page got crumpled up at the end of May. That’s when Hollander and partner Steve Mangiagli announced they had sold the company they co-founded with shaper Phil Becker in 1980 to Billabong for an undisclosed amount. Billabong is a $1.6 billion a year, publically traded conglomerate. Its brands included Von Zipper sunglasses, Honolua Surf Company, Kustom shoes, Palmers Surf wax, Nixon watches, Xcel wristwatches, Tigerlily swimwear, Sector 9 skateboards, Element skateboards, DaKine surf leashes and Billabong’s own apparel and wetsuit lines. Last week Billabong bought RVCA, another popular surf apparel line.

Billabong CEO Paul Naude has indicated the Becker acquisition will not affect Billabong’s relationship with Jack’s or any of its other retailers.

“Whatever entity owns a store is irrelevant. Each competitor will have to find its own place,” he said.

But the acquisition would seem to assure that Jack’s, which is known for its aggressive buying power, will not have an advantage in this area over Becker.

Responding to local suspicion that the Becker sale was triggered by Jack’s move into Hermosa, Hollander and Mangiagli have pointed out that the Billabong negotiations dated back five years and began in earnest in early 2008, well before the two became aware of Jack’s Hermosa store plans.

Becker and Hollander retained ownership of their surfboard manufacturing business and the right to use the Becker name for their boards.

Also coincidental to Jack’s arrival in Hermosa is ET Surf’s plan to increase its square footage by 50 percent. Next month Talbot plans to knock a hole in the wall between his Aviation Boulevard shop and the neighboring auto repair shop.

“I’ve been trying to buy the auto repair building for 33 years. Finally, last year, Mr. Drasen, the 98-year-old owner called me and said, ‘Eddie, do you want the goddamn thing?’ I said, ‘Yes, but not now.’ He said, ‘Take it, or I’m selling it to someone else.’ I said, ‘Okay.’”

ET Surf’s Shannon Dieringer on the store floor, which is largely unchanged since ET opened in 1972.

More or less

During last Friday’s interview at Jack’s, while workers were busy building displays and stocking shelves, Abdel said his new store will bring new customers to the area and not simply cannibalize existing surf shops.

His Huntington Beach store is surrounded by a similar concentration of surf shops, helping the area to attract shoppers from around the world.

Abdel diplomatically declined to comment on Hollander’s email, and denied suggestions that animosity toward Becker influenced his decision to open in Hermosa. He also said he is not concerned about Billabong’s acquisition of Becker.

He pointed to his Billabong display, noting it is the largest brand display in his new store. He said he began looking for a Hermosa Beach location two years ago, but was unable to find one large enough until the former PetCare building became available. Jack’s most recently opened store, in Irvine, is 9,000 square feet. He said that despite the economy the year-old store is doing well and he plans to open another store in San Clemente next year.

“When the sun is out, the economy is good. When the sun is not out, the economy is bad,” he said.

Abdel was born in Palestine and emigrated to the U.S. from Brazil with his family when he was 17. They settled in Huntington Beach because an uncle lived there, he said.

The family became close friends with the owner of Jack’s Surf Shop and acquired it in 1972.

“At that time, there were just four or five surf brands – OP, O’Neill, Hang 10… We grew with the business,” Abdel said. “Every time something new came up, we added it – Boogie boards, skateboards, women’s clothing… We wanted to make shopping easy for the customer.”

In 1989, during redevelopment of Huntington Beach’s downtown, the Abdels undertook a three-year long remodel of their flagship store, which is across from the pier where the U.S Surfing Championship is held each year. The 16,000 square foot store became one of the first surf superstores. It carries more than 100 different styles of Vans shoes, alone, as well as most other major surf and skate shoes.

At 6,600 square feet the Hermosa Beach store is small by comparison to Jack’s other stores, but still large by Hermosa standards.

“We don’t carry just one or two items from the different brands. We carry their whole line, from A to Z so people don’t need to drive around,” Abdel said.

The store’s hardwood floors, flagstone counters, themed departments and creative lighting are more suggestive of a Nordstrom than a traditional surf shop. The store also has an unusual amenity for Hermosa – ample, easily accessible parking.

Abdel described his new store as high end without high end prices.

“We don’t try to recoup the building improvement through higher prices,” he said.

Jack’s sponsors over two dozen surfers, including top pros such as John John Florence of Hawaii, and promising local surfers such as Peninsula High’s Ford Timberlake.

“If we don’t support young surfers we’ll never have another Kelly Slater,” Abdel said.

Spyder co-owner Dickie O'Reilly manages the upscale Pier Plaza store.

Counter punch

Spyder’s remodel is designed to allow the shop to expand its core surf customer base to a broader market. Jarvis is adding a “seasonal” department that will feature back to school merchandise in the fall and snowboarding in the winter. Like Jack’s, he will have a junior’s department.

To strengthen his claim on core surfers Jarvis has added a 550-square-foot board display room. In the room is a CAD work station where he’ll collaborate with surfers on their custom board designs.

“If you want another board just like the last one, we can call up the old board’s template. If you liked the old board, but it was pushing too much water, we can reduce the nose rocker,” he said.

A 52-inch-wide, wall-mounted monitor will allow customers to watch the designs develop.

Hollander, who continues to oversee the Becker shops, said he plans a “down to the studs” remodel beginning in late fall.

“We’re going to surprise some people, but we’ll keep the Becker flavor. Our Hermosa store is soulful, but a little tired. We’ve wanted to remodel for years,” he said.

ET Surf has remained unchanged since Jarvis was a shop rat there in the mid ‘70s. Merchandise hangs from the rafters and aisles require a guide to navigate. A sign on the side of the building says, “If you see it cheaper, holler.”

Talbot said that’s all going to change with the expansion.

“We’ve taken photos of Jack’s and are going to copy it, only give it more soul. Like Spyder’s new addition. We’re trying to have as much neon and make it as clean as possible,” Talbot said during a phone interview this week, while he was driving home from a surf trip “up north” with his 14-year-old son. It was his son’s birthday.

He was joking.

“We’re changing absolutely nothing. As far as the dust on the floor, there may be more in the new store. It has those old, green, triangular skylights, like you see in old warehouses.  We’re keeping all that stuff just the way it is.”

Talbot said he’ll use the additional space to display his collections of old surfboards and skateboards. The new space will give ET exposure to traffic on Pacific Coast Highway.

He said he’s not concerned about Jack’s opening.

“I’d tell them, ‘Welcome to the neighborhood. Let’s have some fun,’” he said. ER

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