Billabong International began its operations in 1973, thanks to the inventive of the founder, Gordon Merchant, who wanted to create new kind of surfboards for better enjoying is favorite activity (Billabong 2009).
From the North Burleigh factory the company grew exponentially: during the 80’s Billabong went international, during the 90’ it consolidated its position in the international scene and from 2001 it began a series of acquisitions that expanded Billabong products from surfboards to wetsuits, snowboard, outwear, watches (Billabongbiz 2011).
The strength of Billabong it has always been its brand. For example a 2008 research of the firm BrandFinance, evaluated the worth of Billabong brand equal to $1.6 billion, 41% of the company’s value (SmartCompany 2008). That it explained with the fact that Billabong operates in the highly competitive and very brand-conscious surfwear industry.
The surfwear industry exploded in the 80´: when it comes to garments, all the major technical brand began to be available not only to the specialists, but also to the rest of the consumer population This created a big opportunity for all the mayor competitors alongside with Billabong, but also put pressure on them, since they were force to find a balance between two different direction, one leading to the basic market of surfers and the other to the secondary market of the emulator.
This is a tricky combination, because, while the dedicate surfer is more interested in the utility of the garment, for the follower is more important to make a fashion statement.
There is no doubt about the fact the consumer capitalism had an huge impact for the growing popularity of surfing garments and all the commodities related to it: equipment and clothing are not now only available in specialized store, they can now be found in K-mart, for example.
In our opinion this has been an important element for the definition of the strategies of all the main actors in the surf-wear industry and Billabong among them.
The new consumer market differs from the original market of ”genuine” surfers, and in order to capitalize on that the company did not decide to expand the product line in addition to the professional one. This , in our opinion, would have been a mistake, since all the companies involved in the surf-wear industry tend to use the mystique of the surfing world (Bergin et al. 2006) They rather decided to pursue a strategy of multi-branding: in this way they prevent a single brand to become too massive in the market and in therefore push away the core segment of their costumer: young active people who tend to be suspicious of big corporate.
A company like Billabong gained its credibility by the fact that the original product was developed by someone into surf and also the competitors of Billabong want to be perceived not just any company that sell surf to anyone, but rather a companies of surfers that make surf for themselves and for other