Volcom LLC is giving you permission to ditch the daily grind and pursue your true passion, whatever that may be. Heck, it’ll even foot the bill for about a dozen winners of its #ThisFirst social media contest.
The Costa Mesa-based apparel brand is calling for video or photo submissions that answer just one question: “What do you want to put first in your life?” Winners will receive $5,000 and be matched with Volcom mentors “to help realize their vision.”
The contest is a prelude to the This First marketing campaign, which kicks off with a commercial on July 10 and will be “one of the largest ever campaigns that we’ve launched in the brand’s history,” said Chief Executive Todd Hymel.
It’s also intended to help it start reaching a much wider audience than its traditional base of surf and skate aficionados.
“With this campaign, and with this brand positioning that we will be rolling out through the summer, it’s really about … letting the people know that they too can … put their passions first, to empower them to know that there are companies like Volcom that support that kind of thinking,” said Global Head of Marketing Ryan Immegart.
Volcom’s marketing team spent the past 18 months sorting through consumer research it obtained with the help of innovation strategy and design firm Fahrenheit 212 LLC in New York and learning how its approach to connecting with consumers stacks against market trends.
The resulting brand campaign, developed in-house, is a step outside the brand’s core market, where its “narrowly focused message” was targeted at “just people that participate in a few select sports,” mainly skateboarding and surfing, Hymel said.
“Everyone is passionate about something … The primary strategy is to remain very true to our origins and the history of the brand—the DNA—remaining with our core, existing endemic market, but also looking to expand into new consumers and new reach where we haven’t been in the past.”
New Direction
Richard Woolcott and his friend Tucker Hall started the company in 1991, and took it public in 2005. Paris-based Kering S.A. acquired Volcom in 2011 for $608 million. The brand posted a $3.3 million loss last year on $256.8 million in revenue, down 13.5% from 2015 and likely a reflection of overall conditions in the surfwear and action sports market.
Several Orange County-based chains, including Pacific Sunwear of California Inc. in Anaheim, Quiksilver Inc. (now Boardriders) in Huntington Beach, had to shed bricks-and-mortar stores as they dug their way out of bankruptcy. Quiksilver is a competitor, but PacSun’s ordeal trickled down to Volcom, since it’s the brand’s “strategic distributor,” according to Kering.
“Against this backdrop, Volcom continued to implement the strategy it launched in 2013 aimed at containing the deterioration of its margins, improving distribution, and more effectively harmonising its offering,” the parent company said in its 2016 annual report, which showed the brand recorded a 14% decrease in wholesale sales, a 20% increase in direct retail sales, and a 43% jump in e-commerce.
Volcom, part of Kering’s Sport & Lifestyle division, which is dominated by footwear giant Puma, employs 745. It operates about 70 stores, including the newest location in the up-and-coming Bastille neighborhood of Paris, where it launched a women’s collection in May curated by Georgia May Jagger, fashion icon and daughter of Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger.
Jagger, along with surfer Noa Deane, is a new addition to Volcom’s brand ambassador roster that Hymel and Immegart trimmed last year. This year’s marketing budget is flat, though there’s a big shift to experiential “activations.”
“We did a pretty substantial reallocation,” Hymel said. “We are putting a lot more money into activations behind a more narrowly defined group of ambassadors, a group that has made it through a very strict checklist of why do we have them, what they represent, how do they represent the Volcom brand … We are seeing benefits of [the shift]—more visibility, better interaction with our ambassadors, and … our athletes have won a number of titles. It’s been a really great start for us in 2017.”
Volcom also plans to expand in key markets via brand experience centers it calls Volcom Gardens. The first opened in Austin, Texas, on April 21 as a cross between a boutique, an art gallery and a “creative space where we can have live performances and host movie premieres,” Immegart said. “We also bring accounts there to do special showings.”
New stores are also in the works, but there’s no specific quota for the year, Hymel said. “We are just finding the right stores as they come up as opposed to saying I want to open X number of stores for the year and then forcing the wrong store into the network … Paris, France, is one of our key markets in Europe. We need to grow our presence there, and finding the key location right at the heart of the city in Bastille, with one of the most upcoming streets for shopping, plus being in one of the biggest areas for skaters to spend their time, it was a natural opportunity for us to go.
“I think the retail environment has changed over the last couple of years. We don’t need to go open 300 stores in the coming years as brands had to do in the past. We have the luxury of an evolving landscape and picking and choosing the cities that make the most opportunities for us.”
