My wife has never had gadget lust before, but the iPhone got to her. I was politely attentive as she gleefully showed off applet after applet she downloaded (“For Free!” she kept reminding me). But she got my full attention when she showed me one that allowed her to take a picture of a product bar code with the camera in the phone while standing in a store and use that picture, as you are standing in the store, to look for other prices for the same item using Google product search.

Yesterday, Quiksilver issued press releases outlining their results for the quarter ended April 30, 2009 and announcing some details of their financial restructuring. They also held a conference call to discuss these both. An 8-K I saw this morning summarized the new loan facilities and included copies of the commitment letters for two new facilities. You can view that here…

The only place I actually pay money on the internet to get information is from a group called Stratfor Global Intelligence. They sent me some information today that included the following table - Click here to view it.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking (which is now turning into writing) lately on the need to focus on generating gross margin dollars rather than sales increases because of the economic conditions we’re facing and are going to face in the future.

I’m assuming you’ve already seen the news. Billabong had predicted in February that earnings for the year ending June 30, 2009 would be six to ten percent higher than the previous year’s AU$ 176.4 million. They reduced that yesterday to between AU$ 160 and AU$ 165 million, blaming conditions in the US market.

Volcom is a really good company to watch if you want to see what’s going on in our industry. It’s not too big, and not too small. It’s public so we can see what’s going. Action sports are all it does. It’s apparel so it cuts across snow, skate, and surf and into the broader fashion market. So I read their filings with interest not just to see their numbers, but to help me think about what’s going on in general.

Adrenalina made its play for PacSun, then went away, and is now back with an unsolicited offer to buy West49. On May 5th West49 rejected the offer. The rejection was hardly a surprise given the information available on Adrenalina, and I thought it might be interesting to take a closer look at what we know about them.

An email from the Retail Owners’ Institute (www.retailowner.com) alerted me to a new strategy Kitchen Kaboodle has implemented. Obviously, they don’t do much with action sports brands, but faced with the same economic problems our industry’s specialty shops are dealing with, they decided to try something new.

There have been a bunch of retail bankruptcy filings in the last year or so, but with the filing of Active Ride Shop, it’s hitting a bit closer to home. What exactly is a Chapter 11 filing and how does the process work?

When you read Volcom’s 10K for the year ended December 31, 2008, you know immediately why they are successful. There are no wasted words or unnecessary complexity. There’s a consistent focus that makes their strategy clear and the coordination among the pieces obvious. You know it’s been carefully thought out. Even the Foreign Currency Risk and Derivatives footnote is easy to read. That never happens. Where do they find these lawyers and accountants with literary talent?