Two Surf Companies, Two Different Skate Bets Two Australian surf companies spent the 1980s building global businesses on boardshorts and wetsuits, and when skateboarding's late-80s boom made a skate identity look worth having, only one of them tried to build that identity from scratch. Billabong launched Bad Billy's in …

The boardshorts came first, and they came out of a home workshop on Queensland's Gold Coast. In 1973, Gordon and Rena Merchant began cutting and stitching board shorts at home and selling them to local surf shops along the coast. Gordon, a keen surfer and board shaper, had a specific complaint with the trunks available …

When Billabong launched Bad Billy's in 1987, the decision was not accidental and it was not purely creative. It reflected a specific structural logic that several surf companies were working through simultaneously: if you want to reach the skate market without destroying what you have built in the surf market, you need …

Skateboarding did not emerge separately from surfing and then drift toward it. It emerged from it. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, California surfers facing flat spells nailed roller skate wheels to wooden planks and rode sidewalks as a substitute — the activity was called sidewalk surfing, and for a decade that …

Across the Pacific from Southern California, a parallel skate culture was taking shape in the 1980s — smaller in scale, thinner on infrastructure, but no less serious in attitude. The Australian scene that emerged during that decade was shaped less by skatepark design and industry marketing than by the same coastal …

Surf shops anchored the coastal retail economy of 1980s Australia in a way that had no direct parallel anywhere else on earth. From Torquay in Victoria to Burleigh Heads in Queensland, these stores were not niche curio outlets. They were the primary commercial interface between beachside communities and the hardware, …