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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.” |
