The Snowboarder's Journal • frequency 17.4 • BELIEVE IN SOMETHING: Tapping Momentum with Richard Woolcott

Words: Colin Wiseman and Richard Woolcott, Captions: Richard Woolcott 2020-01-23 19:59:27

It’s a mild late-July morning in Corona Del Mar, CA: 72 degrees, light drizzle. We’re loading up Richard Woolcott’s gray sprinter van—his “surf rig.” Next to it sits a Land Cruiser with a Mt. Baker Snowboard Shop sticker on the rear window. Both are clean, neither too showy. They blend into this neighborhood of multimillion-dollar homes. We’re at one of Richard’s two local houses, an airy ’60s-era beauty bathed in white. He and his family recently moved into something more modern a few blocks down.

Richard, who carries that California surf vibe in his stride, drives us to a seaside state park. There are porpoises a few hundred yards out. He says it’s a good sign. A cliff abuts the south end of this quiet strip of sand, and small waves roll off a corner of what he calls “Elevator Point.” Inland sits open country as far as the eye can see, a rarity in Orange County.

“I’ve made every big decision in my life right here,” Richard says. “Going public, selling the company, marriage, starting a family—I sit down and look at this cliff.”

By “the company,” Richard means Volcom, the DIY clothing project turned boardsports megalith he and Tucker Hall started in 1991 after a fateful trip to Tahoe. And this is ground zero in the development of the brand’s punk art visage of those early years. Richard lived in a trailer here for more than a decade. The trailers are gone now, replaced by a campground. Here he worked with Dave Seoane, Terje Haakonsen, Troy Eckert and others churning out iconic flicks like Subjekt: Haakonsen to support Volcom’s disruptive program, which tapped heavily into the restlessness of the 1990s youth movement. It’s a brand that defined snowboarding’s transition from the neon façade of the ’80s to the skate-driven, counterculture vibe of the ’90s.

Under Richard’s direction, Volcom blew up, went public, then eventually sold to European luxury group PPR (now known as Kering) for $608 million in 2011. After spending half his life at the helm, Richard finally left, on good terms, at the end of 2016. At 54 years old, Richard is still processing his departure from Volcom. He’s comfortable with his current day-to-day operations, which include regular trips to enviable locales like Mexico, Fiji and Montana, often with his wife, Cari, and their son, Wolfgang, along for the ride. But it feels like something’s still missing—like more ideas are waiting to explode out of this surfer-turned-CEO. Richard doesn’t seem close to done.

We catch a few waves, grab breakfast to go, and return to Corona Del Mar. Cleansed by the ocean, we settle in. Richard tells me his story. The nexus is here, by the beach.

EAST TO WEST
My parents, Rene and Eloise, met in Europe then made their way to the East Coast, where I was born in New Jersey. I have a brother and sister—Rene Jr. and Susan—who are about 10 years older than me, and a younger sister, Rachel. My dad’s from Switzerland and he graduated from New York University, went on to Harvard Business School, then entered the finance world. He was a big part of Volcom as an adviser, board member, investor and at times chairman. He is very business minded.

We moved to Los Angeles when I was 5 years old and my parents divorced a few years later. I didn’t have any real connection to action sports yet. My mom, who is from Washington state, raised Rachel and me and we moved to Redondo Beach. My grandmother, Frances, moved to Redondo then, too. I started spending time at my grandma’s house and that was where I first saw this California lifestyle. It was the early ’70s and I was looking around going, “Wow! What are these guys doing? These surfers, they’re skateboarding, they’re dressed really cool.” That got ahold of me. I told my grandma, “I want to surf—I want to do what those guys are doing.”

The music in the ’70s was also important to me. I couldn’t wait to get the new Led Zeppelin album; Aerosmith, Pink Floyd, Neil Young, the Rolling Stones—those bands had a huge impact later creatively. Volcom was rock ’n’ roll. You can see the influence of Pink Floyd in the early Volcom movies.

My dad introduced me to the mountains. We traveled with him every summer to Switzerland. We’d go hiking in Grindelwald and take the train to the top of the Jungfrau. We moved inland to Anaheim Hills when I was 9. When it was cold and raining in the winter, I would wake up before school and hike up Noel Ranch Road for 20 minutes to where I could see the new snow on the San Gabriel mountains. They were like a magnet. The next question would be, “When are we going there so I can go skiing?”

My dad took us to Snow Valley, CA for a week during Easter break and that was when I really got into skiing. After that, we had some friends who had a cabin at Green Valley Lake. The local hill there had one single-seater chairlift and my mom would drive us up there on the weekends.

We lived in Anaheim Hills for five years and there was a skate park nearby called the “Big O” that I skated all the time. I remember being there telling my dad, “I want to be a pro skateboarder.” I was following the Dogtown scene. Guys like Stacy Peralta and Tony Alva were my idols. Guy Grundy attempted to set the downhill speed record on a skateboard on Noel Ranch Road right in front of my house. Then I tried to bomb the hill and crashed hard.

I could skate, ski on the weekends and, if I was lucky enough, get a ride to the beach and get in the ocean.

When I first showed up at the beach, I asked my grandmother, “Would you get me a surfboard?”

She said, “First, you have to become a better swimmer. Until you swim around the jetty”—which was in front of her house—“I’m not going to get you a surfboard.” She was a top swimmer and swim coach. Jetties are dangerous, especially when waves are around, so grandma made sure I knew how to handle myself in the ocean. I was a determined kid, so I practiced until I swam around that jetty, and she bought me a board. It was pretty wide, so it was hard for me to carry. I was 7, and I was a small kid. That winter I asked my dad for a custom board for Christmas and we had one made at Rick Surfboards. It was 15 inches wide so I could carry it under my arm. I still have it today.

I learned to surf by watching other people. It took a long time, and I didn’t really figure it out until I moved to Newport the year I turned 14. I showed up as a skateboarder and was like, “Wow, everybody surfs here.”

I told my mom I needed to get better at surfing before I went to school. We lived in a community called East Bluff and it took 40 minutes to ride my bike to the beach. On the second or third day living there, I was riding to the beach at 10 a.m. with my surfboard and I got pulled over by a cop. He said, “Hey man, aren’t you supposed to be in school?” I’m like, “Oh no, I just moved here, it’s all good. My mom knows I’m going surfing and she said I could surf for a week before I jump into school.”

He put me in the cop car, drove me back to my house and told my mom, “I’m sorry, but you have to put your kid in school.”

At school I tapped into a very welcoming group of surfers, who introduced me to contests and to the surf industry in Costa Mesa. Quiksilver was there. It was young, just over from Australia. I went from wanting to be a pro skateboarder to wanting to be a pro surfer and decided to put everything I had into it. Within a year I was making some finals in local contests, then doing the ASA (American Surfing Association) events, then the NSSA (National Scholastic Surfing Association), which was the premier amateur organization. I was in the men’s division at 15, and by 16 I had made the NSSA national team. I continued to improve and did well throughout high school. My goal was to do one more year as a freshman in college, win the NSSA California rankings title, then go on the pro tour. My dad supported it, so did my mom, and so did my grandmother—she was there, cheering me on at contests, in the water up to her waist, screaming. It was a little embarrassing, but it was awesome.

I did one final year on the amateur tour. I’d placed third in the world contest and second in the nationals that previous summer. I was in the lead for the year-end rankings going into the back half of the year. The dream was set. The sponsors were set. I was 19 years old and right where I wanted to be.

Then I was on a photo shoot with Breakout Magazine on an island off Baja California and I hit the bottom and broke my neck in five places. It took nearly 30 hours to get back to the hospital in San Diego. I caught a ride in an old military plane to Ensenada, then rode across the border in the back of a pickup truck. They took X-rays and said, “You have a hangman’s break; you had a 2 percent chance of surviving.”

They shaved my head and bolted me to the wall. I was hooked up to all sorts of machines and eventually in a halo brace. That changed everything. I was mad and frustrated. I didn’t win the rankings. It took the wind out of my sails competitively. I ended up finishing college at Pepperdine University with a degree in business and put all that competitive focus into working in the surf industry.

Some people take a year off before getting a job after college. I couldn’t wait to get to work. I was sponsored by Quiksilver when I broke my neck, then I coached their amateur surf team through college. After college I became their promotions manager. Eventually I wanted to run Quiksilver—realistically that wasn’t going to happen, but I wanted to be an executive and I wanted to make big decisions creatively.

I’ve had a bit of an entrepreneurial spirit since I was a kid. It came from my dad and it was natural. I loved working; I wanted to do it. My mom also gave me the creative instinct. I remember being in Redondo Beach when Cadillac Wheels had just come out. They were the first urethane wheel for a skateboard and I wanted them. I was like, “Mom, can you buy me these wheels?”

We went to Baskin-Robbins and collected the discarded five-gallon ice cream tubs, washed them out and papier-mâchéd stories onto them from old magazines—it could have been about sailing; it could have been something about animals—then I’d varnish them and sell them for five bucks a pop as a custom trash can. That was mom’s idea. We didn’t have a lot of money back then and her main job was to raise us kids, but she was just making ends meet, working in an office, whatever she could do to supplement the income she was getting from my dad. She always had a creative side to her, so she suggested those tubs. I made enough money to buy the wheels.

When we moved to Anaheim Hills, we lived right on a golf course. People would hit balls into the rough off the first tee and wouldn’t be able to find them. So I would. I’d clean them up and resell them on the second tee. I worked construction for a summer when I was 12, laying concrete and building brick walls for a company where my mom worked. Through high school I worked at surf shops, and that was around the time that clothing sections made their way into the shops—they became boutiques in a sense. Watching Stüssy and Quiksilver blow up from behind the scenes had a big impact on me. One of the shops I worked at, Surfside Sports, would become one of the biggest accounts for Volcom. There was another shop called the Frog House in Newport, right on Pacific Coast Highway. Our parents used to drop us off and leave us there all day. When Volcom started, I lived behind the Frog House and they became our first account.

All the projects I did at Pepperdine were about Quiksilver—they were public, so I could get all this information about the company. After working at Quiksilver for two years, I had gained so much exposure to the business side of the surf industry. From marketing, to building a brand, problem solving and sales meetings, I soaked it up and loved it. But I wanted to be more creative. Quiksilver was so big by then that a lot of my ideas might not have made a difference, but I wanted to do more stuff for the core customers and team riders.

One time I was in Quiksilver cofounder Bob McKnight’s office and a sales manager was there talking about an issue with a retailer. I was sitting in the corner, listening to Bob come up with solutions, and thinking, “I want to make those kinds of decisions.” At that moment I thought I might like to do something on my own, at least in my subconscious.

The other thing that was really the springboard to Volcom came from Kelly Slater. Quiksilver had just signed him—he was this young, relatively unknown kid that had all this talent. At Pepperdine, I’d made friends with Jon Freeman, who was making little surf movies—he went on to make the Creatures of Habit snowboard movies, then the Crusty Demons of Dirt motocross movies. I’d already worked on a couple movies with Quiksilver—Gen X and the Eddie Aikau Big Wave Invitational—and film grabbed me. I figured I could do a Kelly movie super-cheap with Jon, who was in Malibu.

I pitched it to my boss Danny Kwock and he gave me the green light. We made Kelly Slater in Black and White with a tiny budget and it ended up being a big success. That was our breakout—it was the first step for all of us in taking our careers to the next level.

One day this invoice came across my desk and it was using my Quiksilver marketing budget to cover somebody who had grabbed a bunch of product out of the back of the warehouse. I was like, “Wait a minute. I didn’t OK this.”

The guy’s name on the invoice was Tucker Hall. Danny said, “He’s a sub-rep in L.A. He works for Willie Morris—we’ll put it on Willie’s budget.”

I was like, “That guy’s trying to pinch my deal—I’ve never even met him!”

Then at a trade show there was this big Quiksilver dinner—it was pretty loose. The next thing I know this guy jumps up on the table, he’s got his shirt off, yelling something. I looked over at Danny and asked, “Who is that guy?”

I was just learning to snowboard, and Jon was in Tahoe filming with Andy Hetzel and his crew. Quiksilver surfers Nathan Fletcher and Mark Gabriel were with him too, so they invited me. Just before I left, I was at a party—it was 1991, and we were in a recession. For the surf and skate industry it was a bad one. I ran into Tucker. He was sitting there by himself. He goes, “I just lost my job. Sales are down—Willie can’t afford me.”

He was super-depressed. We started talking about snowboarding—he’d just gotten into snowboarding too, and neither of us had ever ridden powder. I said, “I’m going snowboarding in two days to hang with these guys. Jon Freeman’s working on this movie—do you want to come?”

It ended up being an insane week of snow. We got a taste of powder, rode Kirkwood every day, met all these snowboarders. The Tahoe scene was so different from the SoCal scene. The surf industry was doom and gloom. The fluorescent fashion phase had faded, business was bad, people were getting laid off and there were no new trends in surf—it felt dead, stagnant. Then we got up there and you’ve got Shaun Palmer, the Hatchett brothers, Tom Burt, Dave Seoane, Steve Graham, Shawn Farmer, Chris Roach, Noah Salasnek—this whole mix of skate and snow. It was happening.

Throughout that entire week Tucker and I were talking about life—“What are you going to do, Tucker?”

He was throwing out all sorts of ideas. Then he said, “Maybe I’ll start my own company. I want to make outerwear.”

And I’m like, “Tucker, it’s so hard to make outerwear. Maybe start with T-shirts and sweatshirts.”

Then I started thinking about it. “Wait a minute, maybe this is a good time for me to do something new.”

Quiksilver had raised me, and they were so good to me, but I wanted more. By the end of the trip, we were sitting in the parking lot at Kirkwood going, “Let’s start our own company based on this new energy. There’s something going on here and maybe we could take the snow/skate and mix it with the surf and put it all together…”

And what if we did it from the start of a company? No other brands had the three sports in their DNA from the beginning. Especially from America—most of the big companies were from Australia like Quiksilver, Billabong and Rip Curl.

We kept getting snowed in, so I called Danny and said, “I need a couple more days up here. I’m stuck.”

We rode out the whole storm and I quit my job two weeks after I got back from the trip. I was thinking, “I’ve got to start my own company and I’m going to do it with this guy Tucker that I don’t even know, but he’s a sales guy and I’m a marketing guy, which is what you need.”

Tucker’s an awesome salesman. We had different connections and ran in different circles. Tucker was living in Huntington. He became good friends with Steve Graham, which was an entrance into the snow scene. We were friends with the Anderson brothers—Billy and Jeff—and Ronnie McCoy in Mammoth. We just wanted to snowboard.

My friends were going, “Dude, you’re crazy! You’ve got a great job at Quiksilver.”

I’d just gotten a little raise. I had an Isuzu Trooper that was paid for. But by starting a new company, I could regroup and be creative; I could go snowboarding and start from scratch. I’d gone straight from college to Quiksilver, and this would allow me some time to decompress. I wasn’t married, barely had a girlfriend, and didn’t need much money to live—there were no attachments.

When the Slater movie came out there was a big article in Surfing Magazine about our trip to Tavarua that was in the film. I got the opening spread in a nice barrel. A gal in our marketing department said, “Budweiser is looking for stuntmen for a commercial they’re shooting at Cloudbreak in Fiji. You should try out for it.”

I got the job with this other surfer, Rick Isbell, who became an owner of Tavarua Island Resort. David Nuuhiwa was the star. The commercial came out right around the time of our Tahoe trip, and I started getting checks in the mail every week for a few hundred bucks from the residuals. This money would help with expenses and pay for trips to Mammoth during the first years of Volcom.

That was the spring of ’91. We got back from Tahoe in March, I quit my job in April, and on May 6 we incorporated Stone Boardwear Inc. We wanted to have a logo with the name, and we were working with this guy Thom McElroy who I’d worked with at Quiksilver. He let us come to his studio, McElroy Designs in the evenings and do the creative for Volcom after hours. He helped us with the graphics, the T-shirts, everything art related.

We were trying to figure out a logo, and in this rock book was a picture of the center of a diamond that had been cut in half. We started playing with it on the computer and it looked like the diamond was squashed. We stretched it and flipped it upside down. It ended up being a strong, recognizable logo. I think it worked because I’ve seen those same shapes in the mountains, in nature. I’ll look at a mountain and think, “There’s a Volcom stone in that peak.” A lot of times you see it in rocks. I have many rocks that people have found and given to me over the years because they look like the logo.

But when I went to trademark the Stone Boardwear name, there were already so many Stone-somethings. We turned to Malcom, which was one of my nicknames. We couldn’t register that either. Then, if you look at the word Malcom, there’s a V within the M. We went, “What about Valcom?”

Tucker said, “Oh man, that’s kind of like ‘valley guy’”—and he was from the valley.

We put the O from the com in the front: Volcom. We were like, “That sounds kind of cool—let’s sleep on it, see if we can trademark it.”

Then we made a poster. That was the start—a poster and a name we could register. We didn’t even have a location for the brand—part of it was in my bedroom in Newport, and Tucker ran sales from his bedroom in Huntington. We went right to Mount Hood, OR with posters, stickers and T-shirts that summer. We were going to hang with Nathan and Gabriel, and we got to the Ratskeller Pizzeria for breakfast, walked in, and everyone was bummed out.

They said, “Fuck, man! I think we’re getting kicked out—all the snowboarders. There was this party last night. Someone threw a television out the window.”

It still ended up being an awesome trip. When we got back, we hired this 18-year-old kid, Troy Eckert, to surf for us and be the marketing director under me. He was a ripping surfer and snowboarder; he could skate; he could play drums—he was our first athlete and he helped a ton with brand building and remained with the company for many years.

Volcom became this creative canvas for all of us to paint on. We could do whatever we wanted, we could control our destiny, and we had total freedom in our decision-making. There was no separation between work and play. It was all one big crazy salad that was 24 hours a day and we fed off it. That creative freedom became a driver for other guys who joined us down the line.

It took time to get the product off the ground while we were trying to open retail accounts. We scraped together whatever money we could and drove from Southern California to San Francisco visiting accounts along the way. In San Jose we stayed at this warehouse, skated all night and woke up in a dark room at noon, went to Daly City and saw Nirvana, Pearl Jam and the Red Hot Chili Peppers at the Cow Palace on New Years Eve, 1991.

The next year we drove north again, this time to Seattle for a meeting with Snowboard Connection. Tucker’s saying, “I got this! We’re going to get this account.”

So, we’re talking to SnoCon owner John Logic in the parking lot of his apartment on the river. Tucker pulls out a blanket, puts it out on the pavement and lays down our product. Tucker’s talking clothing, I’m talking about the company, and John said, “Guys, I’d really like to help you out, but I just can’t do it right now.”

We were crushed. We had driven all the way up there to the premier account in the Northwest and we didn’t get in. Later, they became a great account of ours. But at that time, it was hard to get denied.

I went to Hawaii with little money, made it to Maui, and our new rep Clint Moncata said he had a place for us to stay. It ended up being in a house that was under construction. There were no windows, nothing. He pulled some blankets out of the bushes and we slept on this dirty floor with nails and sawdust all over it. The next day, we went to a shop called High Tech and the owner, Kim Ball, said, “OK, I’ll try some stuff.” Some of it was too edgy for him, but it worked.

Those early days were bare bones—I had another trip where I went to Hawaii with just a duffel bag full of T-shirts to sell. It was crude, and we really didn’t have great product. It was all made locally, though. The T-shirts were from Costa Mesa. We made our first real cut and sew product—a skate short that had the “horny toad pocket” on the back—in Oceanside at the Sewing Company.

One day I was driving down with Tucker to get the shorts so we could deliver them to our accounts. Suddenly, all the cars stopped on the 5 Freeway. Military tanks were heading north because of the Rodney King riots, when L.A. went crazy and started burning down. We got our product and we made it back home; people were panicking even in Orange County. We had just rented a 250-square-foot office in a warehouse with one rack and five people working in it. We were talking to our landlord, this big, bearded NRA supporter. He went, “They’re burning the house down. It’s over here in Santa Ana.”

The guy had his rifles out with a bunch of ammunition. He goes, “We’re going to war!”

And I’m thinking, “This probably isn’t a good time to be delivering the shorts to our L.A. and Orange County accounts. I don’t think they are going to want product right now.”

There was the Gulf War in Iraq, the riots in L.A. and the recession while we were trying to build our company. There were so many things that were out of our control and we just had to roll with it.

There were times when I second-guessed myself. Once, early on, we drove a U-Haul to a trade show in San Diego. We didn’t have enough money for a booth, so we decided to walk around the show with our T-shirts, then take accounts across the street to show them our little line of clothes in the U-Haul. It ended up being a big party in the U-Haul for two days. All the snowboarders showed up and all the samples were given away. By the end of the show, we had one big Volcom sign on top of the truck but nothing inside of it. I was sitting on the windshield looking across the street thinking, “Man, I really wish we could be in there. Is this even going to work?” We only showed a couple of accounts the line. Everybody was stoked, we had momentum, we were doing something cool, but at the end of the day it’s a business and you’ve got to make it work.

The trailers at Elevator Point were there for decades before I moved to Newport in 1979. During high school I spent a lot of time there in the summer surfing and hanging out. It was a special place.

I was living in Newport in a little apartment where we made The Garden (1994) and there was a party down in Laguna at a friend’s house one night. I spent the night there and the next day, while I was driving back home, I said to myself, “I need a change.” I was thinking about my life and I looked over and I was right at the trailer park. I pulled in and there was a trailer for rent. I thought, “You know what? I want to live here.”

It was 1995—I was 29 years old. I got a nine-month lease and ended up spending the next 11 years living in the park. I would be there today if it was still around. It was the most amazing place to live in Orange County—you’re out in the wilderness in the middle of suburbia. Everything about it was clean and alive. There’s still a natural spring that runs to the beach. There are open hills and animals and fun little waves. I moved around in a few trailers until my landlord offered me one on the corner, on the bluff overlooking the ocean.

They finally kicked us out because they tore down the trailer park to build a state park facility in 2005. There was a season that Guch (Bryan Iguchi) and Jamie Lynn had a trailer below me. I had a room for Terje Haakonsen in my second trailer for when he came to town. We made Subjekt: Haakonsen (1996) in there with Dave Seoane. We’d run down and surf and come back to edit. We could go at our own pace. If we wanted to work all night, we’d sleep in, get breakfast, surf, edit, come up with more ideas. Troy and I made a surf film based around Bruce Irons, Magna Plasm (1998) in there. The trailer was eclectic, stuff all over the walls, and a high-end Hollywood film crew came in, set up lights and shot high-speed cameras. The trailer became the DNA of the movie.

There were single- and double-wides, maybe 1,000 square feet max, nothing fancy. The neighbors were cool—everybody was there for the outdoors. It was the right environment for me from a creative standpoint. When I was on the trade show circuit for six weeks I would come home to the trailer and recharge, get back to normal. It was a Shangri-La.

I still go there to clear my head and make big decisions. I sprinkled my grandma’s ashes there.

In the beginning we were strong brand builders, but we didn’t really know how to build a business. Our first movie, Alive We Ride (1993), featured surfing, skateboarding and snowboarding—it helped people understand our message. Then we made The Garden in 1994. That was the introduction to our snow program with Terje, Jamie, Guch and the rest of the crew like Mike Parillo, Ryan Immegart, Janna Meyen, Joel Mahaffey, Billy and Jeff Anderson, and Bryan “Little B” Hartman. That was the first movie when I said, “I want to do everything. I want to learn how to shoot film. I want to be behind the camera, and I want to walk it all the way through and do it by hand.”

Troy and I shot all the footage with Super 8 film, spliced and glued our A-reels together, and it was a great, challenging project. I’m proud of that movie not only for what it did for Volcom, but personally too—it pushed me creatively.

We followed it up with a high-end surf movie, Stoney Baloney, the next year. We had a lot of buzz, but we had to deliver. Nobody was taking big salaries, we were frugal, but we also couldn’t get a proper bank loan. My dad had invested in the company and in the mid-’90s, he came to us and said, “You guys need to get your act together. I’m not going to keep funding this thing. You’ve got a bunch of receivables out there. You’ve got cash flow issues. If you don’t turn this boy’s club into a business, you’re going to go out of business and I’m not going to bail you out.”

We heard it from accounts too. “If I order a dozen T-shirts in these colors, you have to ship me the right colors in the right sizes. Don’t ship me a bunch of pink, medium T-shirts. I can’t do anything with that.”

That was four or five years in. We had product, we had a team, we were making movies. We had momentum, but we needed to get better at running a business. Toward the late ’90s, all that momentum started to turn into sales. We brought in some experienced people, whether in design, production or a top sales manager. Then we were able to take all that wild energy and put it into a presentation we could actually deliver into stores that connected with the kids. Eventually, we started selling out of product. Volcom took off. By 2000, we were turning into a real business. We had growing revenues, good margins and our expenses were in line—we were beginning to make money.

It was time to start asking, “What are we going to do with this company? We’ve risen to this level where we have the number one sell through at retail. We’re beating out X, Y and Z brands and our financials are looking good.”

The tipping point was in 2003—we won Manufacturer of the Year and Print Ad Campaign of the Year from the Surf Industry Manufacturers Association, and I won Individual Achiever of the Year. We’d hit $75 million in sales. I’m glad it didn’t happen overnight. We had to grow up. We started Volcom when I was 25, and I was one of the oldest guys involved. We had a bunch of kids running the company. As we got into our 30s, we started to really appreciate what we had. The message was, “You’re lucky. Your company has momentum. So what are you going to do with it?”

There were people who wanted to buy us and there was a real opportunity to go public. Some of the other, bigger companies we were competing with were public companies. We needed more capital to grow, to build our business in Europe. Going public sounded better than taking on debt because we were debt-free. We’d not only raise capital, but also take care of the people who had invested in Volcom and have more means to take care of team riders and employees with incentives and stock options.

We went public in 2005. Becoming the CEO of a public company was like a fast-track MBA. I learned a lot. It was gnarly. I’m a surfer, you know what I mean? My dad was a big supporter of it, but I was nervous. We were on a roll and I knew it wasn’t going to last forever. When I look back at what happened to the industry, that was our window of opportunity. By 2009, the window was gone. Do I regret anything? I don’t because we always made decisions thoughtfully and nothing was ever rushed. If I have one critique of myself, it’s probably that I moved too slowly with my decision-making process because I am a thinker.

We started Volcom during a very conservative time in surfing. Those first snowboarders we met were all punkers. From Palmer to Matty Goodman on down, it was a rowdy bunch of guys—they were having a great time. That energy really helped the industry. It wasn’t anything thought up by marketers—it was just the lifestyle of snowboarding. You saw this in the films and the way everybody dressed and colored their hair. Just look at the music of that time: Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, and on and on—they were rebelling against something. All of us, as the youth, were rebelling against something, and that’s where that disruptive punk attitude came from.

The youth was tired of the established ways, government politics, and they wanted to break out and have their own voice. We felt that if we’re going to make the world a better place, we have to get involved. We can’t let somebody else do it. We’ve got to believe in our own creativity and trust ourselves because we are the future. Listen to Nirvana’s music—they hit the core of how young people felt and that’s why it worked. In Southern California you had Pennywise and the Epitaph scene, and Rage Against the Machine literally yelling at the establishment. Snowboarding had that same kind of DNA and it was natural. We had it right in our tagline, Youth Against Establishment; “We’ve got to rise up and believe in ourselves.”

This attitude carried into our business, our marketing and our movies. Maybe it didn’t go over well with some people. I’m sure we crossed the line at times, but it wasn’t intentional. We were just this ball of energy.

You could see it at trade shows—we got kicked out of a few. We got kicked out of some hotels and blacklisted. But we weren’t trying to bum anyone out. That trade show scene was gnarly, and the energy was wild. The industry was booming. The movement was happening globally. The popularity of snowboarding and skating brought surfing along. We were all in La La Land and having a lot of fun. We’d have parties at our booth: “The band will play at 3; let’s get 20 kegs.”

That turns into 400 people in front of your booth and that didn’t go over well with other exhibitors. The people running the show would tell us, “Hey, you can’t have the band,” or, “Turn down the music.” We would do what we could, but when you have a full-blown rager in front of your booth you have to let it go. We weren’t the only guys doing it. Those trade shows were crazy.

One time in Japan, we were partying with Terje and our Japanese distributor in our hotel room. After a karate-kick fight that destroyed the paper walls, Bruce [Irons] grabbed a fire extinguisher and wanted to see what would happen if he turned it on in the room. It wasn’t a good outcome. The next day we apologized and had to pay for all the damage. There was stuff like that, but at the end of the day you are running a business. You want to be respectful, but that snowboard scene was wild. How do you bottle that energy and make it work for you, and at the same time stay out of trouble?

From 1992 to 2007 were the golden years of the industry. Snowboarding came on strong, skateboarding had its ups and downs, surf eventually became hot again, but in general, there was a 15-year boom of the youth market. It was driven by an explosion of teenagers. At that time, there was a set way of how to market to them through television, mixed-media and print. It wasn’t easy, but the formula was there. Whether Burton or Volcom or Quiksilver or DC, we were all tapped in and connected.

Then you had the recession that started in 2008. It was brutal. During the recovery phase there was a major shift in technology. Suddenly, the phone became this vehicle for information and a place to shop. Coupled with the recession it had a major impact on our industry. Let’s just talk about distribution. Before, it was all about wholesale. There was some direct-to-consumer business, a bit of mail order, but wholesale was king. Then wholesale became challenging and a lot of retailers went out of business. Now you’ve got the Amazon effect and the landscape is 100 percent different. The biggest question for people today, whether you’re a retailer or a manufacturer, is: Can you stay in business? Before, if you committed to the market and ran a tight ship, you had a pretty good chance of success. There was so much demand and momentum. Now that’s harder to tap into—it’s hard to connect in a fragmented space. You’re not going to just throw the net out and catch all these different customers. That’s not how people are living these days.

There are companies who have figured it out. Look at Patagonia. They’re asking, what can I do to give back? What can I do that’s going to be good for the environment? How do I have less impact? That’s a huge piece of the puzzle when you start thinking about where we are in the world today. From a global perspective, how do I run a business in a world that needs help?

There are a lot of challenges, from environmental to social issues. It’s a different time and maybe that’s the reason why there isn’t the same kind of fire and spark as before. The way we need to approach the world is changing. We’re at a tipping point. It’s not as wild—it’s more connected and the consciousness is different.

I feel fortunate that we were able to build Volcom at the time we did. People resonated with what we were talking about and it motivated us to do more. The thing that is unifying us now is the need to save ourselves from destroying our planet. It’s scary. What is important to a 20-year-old person today? It’s about the environment. It’s about where we get our products made and who makes them. It’s about challenging the global status quo and being disruptive in a totally different way. I’m glad to see people like [environmental activist] Greta Thunberg taking a stand and rallying the youth around climate change and saving the Earth. That is the new punk rock and I hope it makes a difference.

Having the three sports helped because you’ve got winter months, you’ve got summer months, and then you have a global landscape that you’re trying to do business in. And not all three sports are all working at the same time in the same area. First and foremost, snowboarding drove our business in the beginning because it was exploding. We had an insane snowboard team and the snowboard movement was really strong, particularly in Japan. Our distributor there would pay a deposit up front, which allowed us to fund manufacturing without taking on debt. They were on it and business was good. Japan was driving the snowboard industry.

Next for Volcom was skating. We picked up Chet Thomas early on, along with [Hawaiian underground legend] Kale Sandridge and Remy Stratton, who still works for the brand. Eventually the surf business started to come back. We had Gavin Beschen, Ozzie Wright and Bruce Irons, who really helped our surf program. We added skaters Dustin Dollin, Geoff Rowley, Mark Appleyard, Ryan Sheckler, Rune Glifberg, and snowboarders Shaun White, Bjorn Leines and Seth Huot. Later the team grew to include Mark Landvik, Gigi Rüf, Pat Moore, Elena Hight and so many others. It was a dream come true to have all these talented team riders.

When you look at Europe, surf was limited. It was more snow and skate oriented. Those sports gave us access to new territories where a single-sport brand might not have been as successful. So, having three sports was a huge benefit from a geographic standpoint. And even if we weren’t finding huge success in one of the three categories or in a certain market, we’d just focus on the core. If you put your time and energy in the areas that really matter, you’re going to be okay.

Look at Vans. They have grown a lot, but they have always stayed focused on the fundamentals. Whether it be the skate parks or their contests, their products, team riders and movies, they’re always giving back, and that keeps them connected. It’s challenging when you only have so much to spend and you’re going after higher volume or a broader market or a different customer. But you have to take care of the core customer to maintain relevance. They’re the ones who will always be there.

I’ve heard people say, “Oh, snowboarding’s dead.” It’s not dead. Maybe it’s not the flavor of the month or maybe it’s not on everybody’s radar with the big marketing agencies, but that doesn’t mean it’s dead. I still go to the mountain. All these kids are still snowboarding. It’s still there. Just focus on the core heartbeat and you will keep moving forward. It’s when you walk away from it that you get into trouble.

Going public does change a culture. It puts a lot of pressure on the business to grow when you’re being reviewed quarterly, which is not always the healthiest thing for a company. A lot of people will look back and go, “All these public companies probably weren’t the best thing for the industry because there was so much pressure to grow revenue.”

Now it’s not about revenue growth, it’s about healthy sales. Some of the growth that companies were going after in the 2000s wasn’t realistic. Today, I don’t think being a public company in our industry is the right thing to do. You need to grow at the rate that the business allows. You can’t force sales. If you do, you end up in a situation that isn’t healthy for the business or the industry.

I think we burned the industry out. As a group we wanted to be bigger, but there was a certain limit. It’s only going to get so big and our companies only got so big—that’s the lesson. There are a couple exceptions—look at Vans and Patagonia. Who would have thought they would be as big as they are?

When we went public, I started spending my time on different stuff. I was focusing on conference calls every 90 days, dealing with corporate issues instead of brand building, hanging with the team or just being creative. The whole reason I started Volcom was to be creative. I’d turned into the CEO of a public company. But I wanted to do a good job as CEO. The biggest challenge for us was figuring out how to maintain the Volcom culture while fulfilling the responsibilities of a public company, making the best decisions both short term and long term. It was another challenge, and I put all my effort into it, but it was a hard one. I think we did the best we could.

In 2011 we were approached by several companies interested in buying us. We weren’t trying to sell the company, but our fiduciary duty to our shareholders required that we look at all serious offers. We were recovering from the recession and we thought, “It might be better for Volcom to have a big brother—somebody that can help us.”

We were bought by Kering in June 2011 and gave it our all to make that next step a success. In the end, it didn’t work out and Kering sold Volcom in 2019 to focus more on the luxury side of their business. They were good partners and meant well. I’m thankful for how much effort they put into it. I stayed on for a year and a half as CEO after they bought Volcom because I wanted to help and be part of the transition. At the same time, I was getting burned out and starting to want change.

At the end of 2012, I stepped down as CEO and took on the role of executive chairman. This allowed me to stay involved with helping figure out how to move the business forward without having to deal with all the daily pressures. As we regained some momentum, there was still the bigger issue of how to operate in this new market. We were still trying to sign team riders, make great product and create exciting marketing campaigns, but it was tough. Eventually, Kering started to make changes within the organization. Some of them I didn’t agree with and they were difficult to accept. I don’t have hard feelings about it now, but at the time, I was frustrated and felt lost. Budgets were getting cut and employees and team riders were being let go. I stayed on as long as I could, but I needed a break. In December of 2016, I left the company. It was all good and I’ve stayed friends with the Volcom crew—I hope only the best for Volcom.

I’m still working through the change. It’s been tough trying to figure out who I am now, but it’s been a healthy process, too. My focus has been on my family—my wife, my son, my parents. I’ve been focused on surfing and snowboarding, and those two sports are my driving force—I need them to keep me energized, balanced and clearheaded.

In terms of business, I’m not sure what I’m going to do next. I have an urge to be creative, but I don’t have an urge to build another Volcom. I’m confident that at some point I’ll be working on something that’s fun, that’ll be fulfilling. And part of this process is not knowing what that is yet and I’m OK with that. I’m still relatively young, I’ve got a lot of experience and I still have creative drive, so we’ll see.

The biggest thing I miss about Volcom is the family aspect—we had a great group of people through all stages of the business, and there is still a great group there now. When we started out, we were all really young. We became close friends. We had holiday parties and went to each other’s birthday parties—we did everything together, through thick and thin. I would fly to a trade show with 30 of our troops. We knew what we had to do. We all had each other’s backs and had this camaraderie, and it was important to me. When you’re in it, you almost take it for granted. Maybe you’re worried about something, but you’ve got this great group of people around you that are supporting one another and that’s what gets you through everything. That original group has fragmented; people get married, have kids, and move on. I don’t have that camaraderie anymore and that’s OK, but I think that’s what made Volcom so strong to begin with: We were all walking in unison together.

The team riders were important from day one. I wanted Volcom to be a rider-driven company. Everything we did was around the riders and that was probably the strongest thread throughout my time with the company. Ryan Immegart was our first official snowboarder on the team. He was 15 years old at the time, from Big Bear, CA. Ryan is still at Volcom today as the global marketing director. It’s cool to see some of the early guys still involved with the brand. And it’s not just Volcom; it’s that whole scene from back when we started. You see brands like Vans supporting the legends, and what Burton gives back to the sport—I take my hat off to Jake Burton. He welcomed us into snowboarding, and we shared a lot of team riders for a long time even though we made some of the same products. It worked out for both companies and helped in building the whole culture. Thank you, Jake.

I met my wife Cari in 2006. She’s an acupuncturist. I strained my Achilles while trying to keep up with Jamie and Terje snowboarding at a Zumiez event at Keystone, CO. My physical therapist was like, “Hey man, I can’t fix this. Let me recommend you to an acupuncturist.”

I started going to Cari. Eventually I healed and we developed a relationship. She came around at a time when I needed somebody like her in my life—very grounded, calming, a perfect match. Volcom had just gone public. I was 40, and it was a whirlwind. I needed certain things to help ground me and support me as I went on this journey as a CEO of a public company, which can be a lonely place. I ran into her and thought, “Wow! This girl is great.”

We hit it off, and five years later we got married. We’ve always had a lot of fun together. She’s a real natural gal who loves the ocean and the mountains. She lived in Sun Valley, ID, and she’s a ripping skier. Not long after we met, she told me she skied. She was going to Mammoth a lot at the time and I said, “I got this place at Mt. Baker, up in Washington.”

I took her up there and, in my mind, it was go time—no worries. We started to hike in from the parking lot to get first chair and she said, “Wait a minute, I’m hiking in ski boots. Where are we going?”

I said, “Oh honey, we have to get first chair. Here, you need a backpack, a beacon, a shovel and a probe. We might pop out of bounds.”

She’d never done that before. So, I geared her up, we got on Chair 5, got off, ducked under a rope, and rode down to a chute. She was like, “What are you doing? Ducking ropes?”

I looked down the chute, it was early season, and a little rocky getting into it. I dropped in, stopped, and yelled up, “You can totally do it! Point it!”

The next thing I knew she was headfirst down the chute with her skis stuck up in the rocks.

We hadn’t been dating six months. She was pissed. It was our first run of the season, her first run at Baker. The snow was heavy, we rode a few more lines, but she was used to the dry snow in Idaho—she wasn’t so sure about Baker. Over time, it really helped our bond on the mountain. We’ve been back to Baker a few times and she’s gotten comfortable in that Pacific Northwest powder. Now, when we go to the mountains, we laugh about Baker, but that first day, it was pretty touch and go.

She’s become a great partner. She’s a great friend. She’s a great wife. She’s a great mother and I’m lucky to have her in my life.

Through all my effort building Volcom, I always made time to snowboard and surf—I never lost sight of that. These days, I’m trying to simplify my life so my family and I can spend more time doing the things we love. Over the past 15 years I’ve accumulated a lot of stuff and I’ve found out I don’t need all of it. It’s like, “How can I make life easier and not be bogged down with a bunch of distractions?”

It’s been a couple years now of cleaning house, reducing clutter. Extra surfboards, snowboards, clothes, property, cars—whatever I don’t need, I find a good way to get rid of it.

Today, I’m trying to figure out the next chapter. I spent 25 years at Volcom and gave it everything I had. Now what? I don’t know yet. I want to keep things simple. I want to keep focusing on improving my life—how do I become a better person? How do I take better care of myself? I always need to be improving. The ultimate goal is to be happy. I want to be calm. I want to be content. I just want to be peaceful and I think that’s what many of us are looking for.

Family, health, surfing and snowboarding—if you focus on those things, you’re going to be OK. Wolfgang is 6 years old. He needs his father and I’m having a lot of fun being a dad and a husband. We love traveling, surfing, skiing and snowboarding, and that’s what we do. In the summer, we’re chasing waves. In the winter, we’re chasing snow and we’ve built our life around that. We ride a lot together. We have a great time. Wolfgang is a fine little dude. He started skiing at age 2, so he’s a good skier. He’s not surfing that much yet, but I’m not going to push him. I want him to do what he wants to do. He likes the trash man, he’s into recycling. We were just down in Mexico and he got some waves, did some body surfing. He was picking up trash on the beach. Watching a kid grow up and being a part of that process is heavy. We had him when I was 47, so I’m trying to keep up with his energy.

Family is key. It needs your attention. If you make family the priority, then everything else seems to work. It can be that simple.

Looking back, I have no regrets. I feel lucky to have been a part of the Volcom journey. I’m stoked for the company, and I’m excited to watch it continue to evolve.

The biggest thing I’ve learned is when picking a path in life, go with what you’re passionate about and what your heart’s telling you because passion gets you through everything. There’s something inside of you that is a driving force—maybe you’re good at math or writing or art or film. If you choose to follow that, it’s going to be a great ride.

I look at my own passion, and it started at my grandma’s house. At 7, 8, 9 years old, the stuff that was grabbing my attention is still here right now, stronger than ever. It’s what’s driving me. It’s what stokes me out. Today, when we went surfing, that was it—there’s nothing more that’s going to cleanse me or wake me up or help me when I’ve had a bad day. I walk down the beach, I paddle out. I go to the mountain, I strap in—that’s it. And everybody has something like that. If your job aligns with your passion, you’re stoked.

If you want to be successful at whatever it is, it’s going to become a big part of your life. If you like something and you’re passionate about it, focus on it and commit to it. You’ve got to commit for a solid period of time, then it’ll start to give back to you. It doesn’t matter how much money you’re making. You’ll get by, you’ll figure it out. And who knows, you might become really successful at it.

Photo Caption: I’ve spent more time in quality waves at Tavarua, Fiji than anywhere else. It’s been a part of my life since 1989 and I’ve gone many times since—seen here at Cloudbreak reef in 2008. Photo: Scott Winer

The Snowboarder's Journal - frequency 17.4

BELIEVE IN SOMETHING: Tapping Momentum with Richard Woolcott

Issue List

frequency 16.1

frequency 15.4

frequency 15.3

frequency 15.2

frequency 14.1