Volcom guts its team and turns fully into what it once despised.
Every movement has an end, I suppose. It is just a true bummer that our Volcom, our Youth Against Establishment, has turned fully and completely into Middle-aged for the Establishment. Not fun uncle middle-aged either. Depressed, penny-pinching, balding-due-stress middle-aged.
Shit and grouchy and smug middle-aged.
It has been whispered/rumored through the channels that the brand cut or released the bulk of its snow team, quietly dispensing of Mark Landvik, Dan Brisse, Gabe Ferguson, Christy Prior, Chandler Hunt and Brock Crouch over the past few months on top of key figures who have been with the Stone since the earliest days.
A brutal and heartless gutting.
And Volcom today represents the very worst of what has happened to snow and surf over the past decade. The dream was sold. Great for those who cashed out on IPOs etc but not for the labels left behind to groan under the weight of unachievable growth.
One by one the brands that have gone public or been bought by holding companies have faltered and Volcom has fallen all the way down, pissing its chinos on the floor. If you recall it went public in 2005 and raised $89 million. Six years later the French luxury group Kering tendered a friendly takeover bid essentially purchasing the Stone for $600 million.
It has since turned into a wheezing old bastard. A goofy invalid forced to do strange dances for its French overlords who neither know or care about anything but profit. “Why pay kids to slide on snow?” they ask and nobody has a good answer because there is no good answer. It was a miracle that anyone ever got paid in the first place but that’s what made it fun right? Snow, surf and skate are nonsensical! They are weird little kicks practiced by kids who aren’t team oriented enough to play real sports!
They are the fucking derelict dream!
And the riders always represented this better than anyone else. Cutting their heads off to save some money here might make fiscal sense on paper but it counters the essence of the dream. And giving up on the dream equals middle-aged cubicle bullshit. It equals the Establishment.
The main snowboarding media (Transworld, Snowboarder, etc.) are left keep the illusion that things are all good because they are trying to hang on to the last strings of financial solvency so leave the decapitations of Lando, Brisse, Gabe Ferguson, Christy Prior, Chandler Hunt and Brock Crouch hushed.
But things are not good.
Volcom is now officially what it was once against. It is true to nothing but greed. Fuck it. Not the 1991 version but today’s ugly French shell.
Fuck it good and all the way to hell.
