Liberty And The Pursuit Of Happiness

kailee bradstreet

• May 11 2007
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The early 90s was a great time to be in the skateboard retail business. The market wasn’t the bull it is today, but competition was much less aggressive and in many instances specialty retailers dominated territories sometimes 50 miles in circumference or more. Skate shops were killing it, and the market was wide open for young and ambitious skaters to make a business out of what they loved. Everyone, it seemed, was at liberty to pursue happiness and make a few bucks doing it.

Skateboarding and snowboarding is what the then twenty-year-old Matt Pindroh loved most when he opened Liberty Boardshop in the small community of Brea, California in 1993. At the time, his 2,000-square-foot shop was the only specialty skate and snow store in the area. He had the territory on lock and was making a killing. Today, Liberty still stands strong, but the surrounding market has changed. The once small community of Brea has grown and with it so has Pindroh’s competition. Skate and snow stores ranging from small shops, big-box action-sports emporiums, mall stores, and even non-endemic dealers like Sports Chalet have come to the area to claim their slice of the pie. “We went from being the only guy within twenty miles to having ten shops within five miles,” Pindroh recalls of the skate retail boom of the late 90s.

But Pindroh isn’t bitter, nor is he scared by some of his juggernaut competitors. Instead he stands by the old guard—staying true to his roots as a traditional ’core skate and snow shop. After all, he’s got business artillery that no action-sports emporium can touch—authenticity, heritage, and the ability to deliver excellent customer service.

You can feel it when you walk in the front door. Product is stacked from floor to ceiling—decks line every inch of the right wall, shoes from nearly every brand imaginable line the left, and apparel and everything in between is racked and stacked in the middle so deep there’s barely room to walk. You won’t find flashy company build-outs or P.O.P. at Liberty. Instead, you’ll find pieces of special skate memorabilia—a stack of bricks salvaged from the demolition of San Francisco’s legendary Embarcadero, bricks from NYC’s Brooklyn Banks, floor art custom painted by Lance Mountain, personalized decks painted and signed by Gonz, and even a memorial pair of Keenan Milton DVSes hanging in the window. All are fixtures serving as a testament not only to the company’s history and heritage, but to its genuine and ongoing love and respect for skateboarding.

When it comes to staying competitive, Pindroh says that customer service has always been his top priority—a practice he says that’s kept his business running even under the most harsh retail conditions. “My whole concept is to give people respect when they come in my store,” says Pindroh. “Customer service is number one. I go against all your basic principles of a retail business. I’m in a terrible strip center, I’m not on a busy street, I’m in a small community, and somehow I do an incredible business. The only thing I can attribute that to is customer service.”

Pindroh says keeping his employees stoked and happy has been another valuable tool in keeping his business running strong. “I’ve taught all my employees to treat everyone that walks in the door with respect, and we try to fulfill all their needs.”

Small skate shops are in a unique position to offer a kind of service that bigger stores can’t says Pindroh: “Customer service is so overlooked nowadays—especially with stores getting bigger and bigger. The turnover rate is so high. I’ve have employees that have been with me for ten-plus years. These guys know exactly what they’re talking about and care about our customers.”

But for Pindroh, customer service goes way beyond friendliness and product knowledge. He says making sure he has enough product to satisfy the needs of his shoppers is another major part of the equation.

Walking into the stockroom of Liberty is similar to entering to the back of a major footwear retail store—stacks of boxes so high and deep you’d almost need locator numbers to find brands and styles. “Stack’ em high and watch ’em fly is my philosophy,” says Pindroh as he navigates his way through the labyrinth of shoe-box stacks. “Sometimes we make orders on a daily basis just to assure that we have enough product and sizes for our customers. If you don’t have that one customer’s size, that’s one less pair of shoes you sell and one less satisfied customer. Retailing is a service business. We’re here to service the people who want to buy from us. If we can’t service them, we’re going to lose them.”

Skateboards, apparel, and footwear represent about 70 percent of Liberty’s business. The other 30 percent is occupied by the sale of snow hard- and softgoods—a product category Pindroh’s been invested in since the day he opened his doors. However, like all snow retailers he says seasonal snow buying is always a gamble. The 2006/07 season was exceptional harsh for the SoCal shop. “It was painful this year,” he says. “After fourteen years of doing snow business, this has been one of the most painful.” However, Liberty wasn’t the only shop getting pinched. Low snowfall levels put a serious damper on sales across the nation with SIA’s Retail Audit noting a fifteen-percent decline in dollars for snowboard equipment sales from August 2006 to January 31, 2007.

According to Pindroh, when it comes to snow buying you’ve got to roll with the punches and plan accordingly. “You plan on how you’re going to get rid of product that didn’t sell,” he says. “There will be years when you lose money, but then there’s years where you make it back.”

Like many single location boardsports retailers, Pindroh says one of his biggest challenges is trying to survive as a brick-and-mortar business in a retail market now inundated by giants. “The saturation of the market has put a little bit of pinch on us,” he says. “It’s a different game now than it was then.”

His biggest fear echoes the worries of small retailers across the country—that single door, independent skate shops will go the way of the dinosaur. “I hate to say it,” he says “but brick-and-mortar stores are going to be a thing of the past. With the cost of real estate nowadays and to be able to afford to have these storefronts with the kind of margins that we work off of, it’s really hard to grow unless you want to open it up to a mainstream audience. We’ve never gone that route. We want to nurture what we have. We don’t want to sell it out.”

But just like any player in any game, Pindroh and Liberty are in it for the long haul, and Pindroh has some survival tricks up his sleave. “I’ve never been afraid of competition,” he says. “I’ve got the biggest guys on the block—the biggest guys in the industry in my backyard—and we’re still doing fine.”

Liberty has an impressive pro team—a lineup that would be heavy for any major skate brand. A list pros like Stefan Janoski, James Craig, Tim O’Connor, and Danny Garcia all ride for Liberty and can be seen in the shop frequently. On the day of this interview, Garcia and O’Connor came into the shop to grip up their boards before going out on a filming mission. “You can’t put a price on that,” says Pindroh. “These guys do so much for us.”

Pindroh also has a new strategy he’s been developing to stay competitive. After two years of careful planning and lots of research, Pindroh has taken his business online as a way to stay viable. Seven months ago he purchased a 10,000-square-foot warehouse facility a few blocks away from his shop to serve as the shipping headquarters for his online business. “We want to bring our experience and expertise to Internet kids around the country who aren’t near skate shops,” he says. “It’s going to take a long time and we know that. That’s why we’re making moves now.”

Pindroh’s online retail philosophy is almost identical to that of his shop—customer service is paramount. “We want to offer the same service and expertise online that we offer people at our shop and that’s giving people the best possible experience” he says. “Everyone who orders from us online will have their stuff shipping out within twelve hours.”

So far, Pindroh reports that his online business has been strong. “We’re on track to be equaling our storefront sales by August,” he says. “Within one year we’ll be pumping out the same volume as our storefront.”

But online retailing is no walk in the park. More and more people are doing business online, and the marketplace is just as competitive. “Let’s be real. You can shop ten shops in ten minutes online. Why is a kid going to buy from you instead of the next guy?” he asks rhetorically. “Price has a lot to do with it, but if you offer some incentives like gifts with purchase and free shipping, people respond to that. Having that selection and having our customers know that when they order from Liberty it will be on the way that same day. We’ve seen a 30-percent re-order rate. That shows that they were stoked on our business.”

For all he’s done in the retail world, Pindroh is a remarkably humble guy. But he’s got some opinions about the future of skateboard retail as he knows it—factors he feels are putting businesses like his in jeopardy. “I hope that all the big companies out there realize there are a lot of little soldiers like me that they can help out in a lot of ways,” he says. “Retailing is putting a value on a product and keeping that value as high as you can for the end consumer. When you have discounters out there—the people bringing the products down to such a poor level—what they’re doing is telling the consumer that they’re getting a bad deal for paying full price. We’ve got to get away from that. It cheapens the brands. We have so many amazing companies and products our there. There’s no reason to cheapen them. We don’t have to turn this industry into Wal-Mart.”