The brands stayed. The businesses left.

Issue 01 — The business of outdoor & action sports

Walk into a surf shop today and pick up three things: a Rip Curl wetsuit, a Salomon shell, a pair of Vans. Three brands that helped define their sports. Not one of them is still owned by the company that built it.

This isn’t a story about brands dying. All three are alive, some of them thriving. It’s a story about what happened to the businesses behind the names — and why the logo on the product is now the last part of it that hasn’t changed.

From makers to owners.

For most of their history, the companies behind these brands did the whole job. They designed the product, manufactured it or contracted it closely, ran their own distribution, signed their own athletes, and lived or died by whether the thing they made was good. The brand and the business were the same object. If the product lost the plot, the company felt it directly.

That model is quietly being replaced by a different one. In the new version, the valuable asset isn’t the factory, the design team, or the athlete roster — it’s the name itself. Own the name, license it to operators who handle production and wholesale, collect a royalty on their sales, and let someone else carry the inventory risk. The brand becomes a financial asset to be held, not a business to be run.

You can see the logic in the numbers, and it’s genuinely compelling. A brand-owner that licenses rather than manufactures runs on higher margins, ties up far less capital, and earns a more predictable stream of royalty income instead of betting each season on a product cycle. For an investor, that’s a better business than the one it replaced. This is not a mistake anyone made. It’s a rational answer to a real question: why take on the cost and risk of making things when you can own the name and let others take it for you?

Authentic Brands Group (ABG) is the cleanest expression of this. When it bought the former Boardriders portfolio — Quiksilver, Billabong, DC Shoes and the rest — from Oaktree Capital in September 2023, it didn’t buy a manufacturer. It bought a shelf of names, which it then licenses out to operators. ABG doesn’t make the boardshorts. It owns the word on the label.

What the model costs

Here’s the part that doesn’t show up in the margin profile.

When the owner of a brand no longer makes anything, the loop that kept the product honest breaks. In the old model, the company that owned Quiksilver had to care whether Quiksilver boardshorts were good, because it made them and sold them and its name was on the downside. In the licensing model, the owner collects a royalty, and the licensee optimiscoutneres for volume. Nobody in that chain is paid to protect the brand’s credibility in the water. They’re paid to move units through wholesale.

That’s why the thing surfers have complained about for a decade — “it’s not the same anymore” — is not nostalgia. It’s an accurate read of an economic change. The product drifted because the incentive to keep it anchored was removed. Credibility in a sport is built slowly, by people who are in it, and it doesn’t survive being managed from a spreadsheet as a licensing line.

The fragility is not theoretical. In early 2025, Liberated Brands — the operator that held the license for Quiksilver, Billabong, and Volcom in the US — filed for bankruptcy, closed the brands’ US stores, and laid off well over a thousand people. The names survived; ABG, the brands owner, simply moved them to new operators. But that’s exactly the point: when the brand is an asset and the business is a licensee, the business can fail without the brand even breaking stride. The label is insulated from the thing that actually makes it. That’s efficient. It’s also how a brand becomes a ghost of itself while still posting royalty income.

The counter-example that sharpens the point.

If the story were simply “financial ownership kills brands,” it would be easy to tell and wrong.

Look at Amer Sports. The Finnish group — owner of Arc’teryx and Salomon — was taken private in 2019 by a consortium led by China’s Anta Sports and relisted in New York in 2024. By the logic above, foreign financial ownership should have hollowed these brands out. It did the opposite. Arc’teryx became one of the most desirable technical brands in the world, its jackets priced above $350 and selling out; Salomon turned a trail-running shoe into a fashion object. Amer’s revenue reached the billions, and it got there by pushing the product upmarket, not by licensing the names to whoever would pay.

So the thesis isn’t that ownership by capital destroys brands. It’s more specific, and more useful: financial ownership decouples a brand from the culture that made it, and that decoupling has a cost — unless the owner chooses to reinvest in the product itself. Anta reinvested. The licensing model, by design, does not. One owner treats the brand as something to build; the other treats it as something to rent. The label looks identical on the shelf. The businesses behind them could not be more different.

That’s the real question to ask about any of these deals — not “who owns it now,” but “does the new owner make money by improving the product, or by renting the name.” The answer tells you what the brand will become.

Where this goes next.

The most interesting thing about this shift is what it’s starting to provoke. Having watched their brands turn into assets, some of the people who came out of the industry are now trying to buy them back — explicitly framing it as rescuing the product and the culture from owners who treat them as line items.

That fight is happening right now over one of the biggest names in surfing. It’s the clearest test yet of whether “credibility in the water” is worth anything on a balance sheet, or whether the market has already decided these are just names to be traded.

That’s the next issue.

B. Rousselot

Sources: company annual reports and 10-K filings; acquisition announcements from Authentic Brands Group, Amer Sports, VF Corporation and KMD Brands; shop-eat-surf-outdoor.com