Are there any industries that simply cannot become corporatized, that align too closely to anti-establishment sensibilities to ever sell out? If I were to pick one, I’d start with the giant upturned middle finger that is skateboarding. The whole attraction to skate culture is tied up with its outsider, nonconformist spirit. When Steve Buscemi says, “How do you do, fellow kids?” in the famous meme about awkwardly co-opting youth subcultures, he’s literally holding a skateboard.
Yet something so quintessentially anti-corporate has been torched by private equity buyouts that destroyed both leading brands and the relationships that kept the scene thriving, cool, and local. The very structures that built skateboarding into a multibillion-dollar industry are withering in a sea of financially engineered acid.
“These firms come in and buy up these huge players and there’s nothing left,” said Daniel Stone of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a former skate rat who authored a recent report on private equity’s skateboarding takeover.
The industry is currently dealing with this February’s bankruptcy of Liberated Brands, a conglomerate of numerous iconic skate and surf imprints (including Quiksilver, Billabong, Roxy, and RVCA) established after a 2023 rollup by Authentic Brands Group, owners of Reebok, Guess, Nautica, Aéropostale, Nine West, Juicy Couture, and more. Amid a series of private equity–fueled collapses afflicting the industry, the Liberated bankruptcy is the largest, resulting in over 1,000 layoffs and the shuttering of all its retail locations.
If these crashes came about because skaters simply rejected sellout brands, there would be a flicker of hope that the “fuck the man” ethos of skateboarding would pull through. But they seem mainly due to the familiar tactics private equity uses to extract value from companies and leave them as a desiccated shell. It raises the question of how skateboarding can go forward if every brand that gets a little success becomes a sitting duck for a financial vulture.
And there’s a larger lesson, too. “When you throw in that they’re doing this to hospitals and industries that have a lot more at stake for society than a plank of wood with four wheels on it,” Stone said, “it just doesn’t make any sense that we let this happen today.”
SUSPICION OF CORPORATE INFILTRATION in skateboarding is as old as the pastime itself. Corporate sponsorships of skateboarders from Nike, Adidas, and even automaker Audi were viewed skeptically. Skateboarding was always more of a bottom-up pursuit from the grass roots, with most of the leading brands coming directly from the skaters who used them.
World Industries epitomized this. Founded by Steve Rocco, it had a team of riders like Daewon Song, Rodney Mullen, and Kareem Campbell who set the standard in the 1990s, compelling graphic design on its boards, marketing muscle with Big Brother magazine, and an irreverence that matched the culture. They sold a run of jeans that were defective by adding a tag that labeled them “Fucked Up.” By the late 1990s, they were the top brand in skateboards.
Rocco developed practices that recognized skaters as the real talent selling the merchandise. He gave them health insurance, and a $2 royalty for every board with their name on it. Rocco also made World Industries a kind of banker to the hyperlocal skate shops that sold his goods. “He would provide them decks, clothing, soft goods on loan, essentially consignment,” said Stone. “They were able to put their boards in basically every skate shop across the country. And that’s what gave them the name recognition.” This boosted skate shops that hosted the local events, sponsored teams, and built skateboarding throughout communities, raising World Industries’ profits as more kids got interested in the scene.
“These firms come in and buy up these huge players and there’s nothing left.”
But in 1998, at the peak of skating’s popularity, World Industries was acquired for $29 million by Swander Pace Capital (SPC), the first of several leveraged buyouts of the company. In 2002, Globe International picked up World Industries from SPC for $46 million. Then i.e. distribution took it for $8 million in 2007. And finally, Golden Viking Sports grabbed it in 2014 for an undisclosed sum.
In all of these deals, the private equity firm made the purchase with borrowed money and then offloaded that debt onto the target company. World Industries had to use its own cash flow to service the debt, requiring it to free up funds that would otherwise be invested in new products or more skaters. In a culture that changes quickly, diverting funds to financiers is just poisonous for keeping core customers happy.
“In skateboarding, sustainability translates to being able to remain culturally relevant,” Stone said. “It really is community-based culture, and once you kind of separate yourself from that and focus on the profits, you lose your market share in terms of cultural clout.” World Industries is now seen as a relic.
Dwindle Distribution was the distribution arm of World Industries, and they rode along on the SPC and Globe International buyouts. Globe tried to turn Dwindle into a rollup platform, where it joined together skateboard brands like Almost, Blind, Enjoi, Madness, Darkstar, and Speed Demons.
But when Globe pushed off Dwindle to a subsidiary of Transom Capital Group for $1.5 million in 2019, longtime employees were fired, and the president of the company resigned because he was asked to fire more friends and colleagues. The skaters, seen in the pre-corporate days as the lifeblood of the industry, were seen as appendages. “They brought in all the skaters for a meeting and one skateboarder said, ‘Hey, what’s going on with pay?” Stone explained. “The TCG executive responded, ‘That is an unfortunate byproduct of the skateboarding industry.’”
The teams of riders predictably left, and by 2023 Dwindle effectively collapsed after abandoning the very people who drove interest in their brands. Today, the Dwindle website says only, “Making Changes. We’ll be back soon!”
Then there’s the Liberated Brands failure, which started when Australian skate and surfwear brand Quiksilver was purchased out of bankruptcy by Oaktree Capital Management in 2016. Oaktree turned Quiksilver into a rollup platform called Boardriders. Quiksilver already owned Roxy and DC Shoes, and when Boardriders acquired Billabong in 2018, its flagship brand came under the umbrella, along with RVCA, VonZipper, Volcom, Xcel, and Element Skateboards.
The same cycle of cost-cutting and debt service ensued, with layoffs focused on sponsored skaters and surfers, sometimes by cutting pay up to 90 percent to induce them to quit. Video street teams that filmed the raw material that drove interest in skating and surfing were also let go.
Authentic Brands picked up Boardriders for $1.25 billion in 2023, and continued to lay off hundreds of employees. The deal also established Liberated Brands to manage day-to-day operations while Authentic kept the licenses for the intellectual property. That funneled much of the profits into Authentic’s hands, while Liberated had to cut costs to manage multiple high-profile brands without reinvested capital.
The February bankruptcy revealed over $220 million in debt, including $50 million in unpaid royalties.
IT MIGHT SEEM STRANGE THAT REBELLIOUS skater culture could be so influenced by business dynamics. But the private equity–led brand meltdown has changed how the public interacts with skating, Stone’s report explains. Independent skate shops, supported by companies like World Industries, were once a key driver of skateboarding’s success. They would serve as community hubs, supporting skaters, sponsoring events, and building culture. But a giant has horned in on that space as well.
Zumiez, which Stone described to me as “the mall skate shop,” went public in 2005 after backing from private equity firm Brentwood Associates. It operates over 700 stores in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Australia, using its scale to undercut independents that do not get the same discount deals from suppliers for buying in bulk. Zumiez also now owns clothing brands Blue Tomato and Fast Times, which it sells in its stores.
In June, Zumiez announced a $15 million stock buyback, after $50 million in buybacks the previous year. It does none of the audience-building efforts of local skate shops, disconnecting the retailers from the culture. And while there aren’t good statistics on independent stores, Stone said that, anecdotally, he sees skate shops closing in large numbers.
Stone added that further pressure has been placed on local skate shops by CCS, an online retailer founded by skaters as a mail-order catalog in the 1980s, which was revived by Cohere Capital and is now “the Amazon of skateboarding.” This attempt to trade on the past glories of authentic products and distributors is seen throughout the industry, Stone said. Even Nike, once reviled by skaters, has been able to break through. “They’re able to sponsor big skaters for a lot of money,” he said. “There’s not a lot of money in skateboarding … so when you see that big check coming your way, that’s why Nike is so dominant.”
As one skate zine put it back in 2012, “Skateboarding is separating into two poles: one where a few businesses and a very small group of skaters are making lots of money, while everyone else is fucked.” And it has only grown more bifurcated.
This cycle of burgeoning interest, private equity capital, and collapse can be seen as well in the surfing industry, a close cousin to skateboarding. Some of the biggest PE acquisitions include VF Corporation’s purchases of shoemaker Vans (for $396 million in 2004) and streetwear company Supreme (for $2.1 billion in 2020). Even sport fishing is at risk from private equity. And lost in the tallying of dollars and cents is the authenticity that made these cultures grow into what they are.
Obviously, private equity’s role in industries that are literally responsible for life and death may seem more worthy of attention. But if financiers conquer something as culturally opposed to financialization as skateboarding, then it seems like no industry is safe.
I asked Stone what the antidote to all this could be. “The popularity of skateboarding has only increased since I was a kid, so obviously you’re gonna have people that want those short-term profits to get their own piece of the pie,” he said. “But you do see kind of a rebellion against this. There are local-owned brands, skater-owned brands that have popped up over the years to offer an alternative.” He cited WKND Skateboards and SOVRN Skateboards, as well as Last Resort Shoes, a skater-owned footwear brand.
Whether Last Resort is the literal last resort before Nike and private equity take everything over remains to be seen. “We’re definitely in some sort of a degradation process right now in the industry,” Stone said. “I would like to think that we still have this kind of anti-establishment ethos, where it’s still for the individual skateboarding, it’s still for the weirdos that don’t want to play football or soccer … Hopefully these skater-owned brands are able to uplift us and bring us back to kind of the golden age of skateboarding.”