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Slumping Surfwear Basks in Warm Winter

Slumping Surfwear Basks in Warm Winter

By JENNIFER BELLANTONIO





Warm weather in Southern California and elsewhere has been a pleasant surprise for surfwear makers and retailers facing an otherwise cloudy market for their wares.

“Our industry is based so heavily upon weather, and when the weather is nice people are shopping,” said Mike “Shooy” Schillmoeller, vice president of marketing at Irvine-based surfwear maker Rusty. “If we were looking at last year’s weather right now, with everything else compiled, it could be a drabby picture. Fortunately it’s not.”

For the past six weeks or so, Southern California has been basking in unseasonably warm and dry weather, broken only by last week’s rain. Other parts of the country also have seen drier and warmer weather than usual this winter.

But it’s in the Southland,the biggest surfwear market,where the sunny weather is being felt most by apparel makers and retailers.

“The summer crowd was here on Saturday. It was incredible,” said Aaron Pai, owner of Huntington Surf & Sport in Huntington Beach. “There were a lot of people walking around in shorts and bathing suits.”

Surfwear makers and retailers now say they’re playing catch-up to demand they hadn’t anticipated. Most tip-toed into the first quarter, uncertain about whether consumers would be buying and about what direction the economy would take.

Rusty has gotten a lot of reorders on its boardshorts,largely due to warmer weather here and in Florida, Schillmoeller said.

“We had to be sharp on our pencils,” Schillmoeller said. “With the weather and sell-throughs we’re having, our whole production team is working some long hours to make things happen.”

But warm weather alone won’t be enough to counter the industry’s overall slowdown. It didn’t seem to help Anaheim-based Pacific Sunwear of California Inc., which saw a 1% drop in same-store sales for February, after seeing a 0.4% increase in January and a 4% jump in December.

Even so, HS & S;’s Pai called the blip in business “a very nice surprise.”

“Business is always a matter of expect the unexpected,” Pai said. “Sure enough, summer business in the wintertime is unexpected.”

Sales at HS & S; were off double digits in September and October, Pai said, without divulging specifics. The store had a slow holiday season, he said.

Now sales are “warm to hot on a lot of our spring and summer items,” Pai said.

Shorts and T-shirts, he said, are up 20% vs. this time last year, when it rained in January and February.

T-shirt and shorts also are up from a year ago at Irvine-based Ocean Pacific Apparel Corp., according to Jim Stark, president of Costa Mesa-based The Rays Group, which makes Op clothes.

T-shirt sales are running about 25% ahead of last year, while shorts are up 10% vs. last year, he said.

“You can attribute that to the warmer weather,” he said. “That (business) usually won’t kick in until March or April for us unless the weather is friendly to us.”

Stark called the trend “very positive news” since “overall business was not trending ahead of last year.”

“It was tough in the fourth quarter,” he said. “This is very bright news that we’re able to get these increases over last year so early in the season.”

Op and others may have missed an early wave of swimsuit sales, though. Retailers overstocked with fall and winter goods put off swimwear deliveries until February instead of bringing them in around the holidays as in years past, according to Stark.

Swimsuits now in specialty stores, particularly for girls, are selling fast, according to Ron Razzano, West Coast account executive at Los Angeles-based Apparel Ventures Inc., an Op swimwear licensee.

“The junior customer is buy-now, wear-now,” Razzano said. “Once the weather gets nice, she wants her new suits now.”

Most of Apparel Ventures’ accounts “planned down for these months” and “they’re ahead because they didn’t expect to do this business,” Razzano said.

Pam Hubbard, owner of the Persimmon Tree swimsuit shop on Balboa Island, said she “ordered light” for the first quarter. Now she said she is “reacting and reordering” size ranges as needed.

The shop carries suits from many Orange County makers, such as Huntington Beach-based Quiksilver Inc., Irvine-based Billabong USA and Anaheim’s Lunada Bay Corp., which makes Becca, bebe and Lucky brand swimsuits.

“I was just trying to stay on top,” Hubbard said. “Most bikini stores are weather driven. If you have a warm spell, customers are out (shopping). It was one of the best February’s that we’ve ever had. I just hope it holds.”

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