The founder of Quiksilver, Alan Green, died of cancer on Jan. 14, we have learned from Surfer magazine and others. He was 77.
An Australian, Green founded Rip Curl in 1968 in the town of Torquay, with partners Dough “Claw” Warbrick and Brian Singer. The next year, at age 22, he borrowed $2,500 from his father and founded Quiksilver. Fateful experiments with boardshorts ensued.
The “yoke” waist, higher in the back than in the front, was distinctive and functional. “Surfers seemed to like them,” Green once said. But the shorts’ snaps and the velcro flies he owed more to convenience than to innovation. Green had a supply lying around from the manufacture of Rip Curl wetsuits.
Quiksilver hit the States in 1976, thanks to a licensing deal worked out by Jeff Hakman, a Californian surfer who had moved to Hawaii and co-founded Quiksilver USA with Bob McKnight.
In 1998 Quiksilver became the first surf brand to be listed (under ZQK) on the New York Stock Exchange, but those days are over. In 2008 it merged with the Rossignol Group and in 2015 filed for bankruptcy protection. Three years later, as Boardriders, it acquired all of Billabong International, for about $298 million. Boardriders was in turn acquired in 2023, by Authentic Brands Group (ABG), which then hired Liberated Brands to handle retail and e-tail in the US and Canada for Boardriders brands.
ABG has now terminated these North American licenses, as we are reporting in a separate story.
