The Anaheim Storefront That Became Vans On opening day at 704 East Broadway in Anaheim, the shoe boxes were stocked and color-coded — blue for men, orange for boys, red for kids, green for women — but the cash register held nothing at all. The owners had forgotten to put money in it. When customers arrived, they picked …

A Company That Called Itself the Bastard Children of Surf Culture "I positioned Mambo as an alternative to the big guys — I think we described ourselves as the bastard children of surf culture." That's Dare Jennings, years later, describing the company he started in 1984, and the line is a useful way into the whole …

Two Torquay Surfers, One Shaping Bay, and the Start of Rip Curl Gilbert Street in Torquay doesn't look like much today, but in March 1969 it was the site of a chance run-in between two surfing friends that turned into one of Australia's defining surf companies. Doug "Claw" Warbrick had just finished a summer shaping …

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 …

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, …

In 1987, Billabong did something unexpected. The Queensland surf brand — built on boardshorts, surf trunks, and the clean aesthetic of Australian beach culture — launched a secondary label aimed squarely at skaters. It was called Bad Billy's, and for a window of years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it represented …