Everything on this page is about Roxy and how it became well, Roxy!?! LOL! The original text can be viewed at http://www.geocities.com:0080/SouthBeach/Bay/2946/roxy.html.
Roxy has captured the imagination of a whole new generation of young women. Quiksilver launched ROXY in 1991 in America, initially with a range of swimwear. In 1992, the swim line was followed with the introduction of sportswear, denim and snow-wear.
In 1993, the ROXY logo, two Quiksilver logos mirrored to form a heart shape, was born, along with the ROXY signature girl's boardshort. Inspired by the women's outrigger team and the women's surf team in Hawaii, ROXY became the answer for girls who were looking for a boardshort cut for them, that achieved the same levels of flexibility and fit that men's shorts offered.
In 1994, the ROXY surf team was created with Lisa Anderson who won her first world title in the same year. In 1995, ROXY introduced accessories and eyewear. This was the first year the ROXY Quiksilver women's pro was held in Hawaii. This is the crowning event on the women's world championship tour circuit.
Quiksilver in Australia has continued this tradition by announcing the ROXY Quiksilver women's pro, to be held annually on Queensland's gold coast. In 1996, ROXY made its fashion week debut at the Girls Rule show in New York. Watches and footwear became immediately successful new lines. The ROXY surf team was expanded to include not only young women surfers, but snowboarders, and wakeboarders as well.
1999 sees ROXY being launched in Australia the birthplace of Quiksilver, at the inaugural ROXY Quiksilver pro, and the introduction of ROXY "hula scent" continues an unfolding tradition of innovation and sales growth. A soulful, spiritual and youthful vibe defines ROXY and the heart logo.
How did Roxy became a HUGE hit!?!
Marketing Roxy ...
It all began six years ago with a run on boys boardshorts. Quiksilver kept hearing from their rep in Hawaii that girls were buying up the shorts in sizes 26-27 and wearing them. "Yeah, so what?" they thought, smug in their maleness. "That's great, you want this stuff? Yeah right." It finally took a trip to Hawaii, with a design team of women, before it sunk in. All of a sudden they realized these girls were serious! It wasn't just a fashion trend.
These girls were wearing the shorts--baggy, hanging off their hips--because that's what you wear surfing. They were hardcore--in the water everyday, not asking permission, doing what they wanted. They were simply surfers.
From that stumbling start, girls surfing, and the fashion trends it's spawned, has made huge strides. So much has been written about the women's surf movement in the 1990's, that for the last couple of years it seems you can't open a magazine--fashion, athletic, even business--without some reference to it being made. They are a respected part of the surf culture now, drawing fans and admirers and hosting contests of their own. But what was the impetus behind this relatively sudden embracing of the athletic/aesthetic woman? Did the boys wake up one day and say, "Hey, you know, chicks aren't that bad"? Was it a question of the outside world shaping our perceptions about what is acceptable? Or was there a more practical design behind it all? Talk to enough people and three primary catalysts seem to pop up again and again.
Timing ...
The 1990's was a good time to be a teenage girl. Something during this time seemed to awaken in the collective national consciousness and suddenly it was cool to be young, opinionated and female. A sense of "If I want to, I can" pervaded the schools of America. Let's go back to around 1994. Courtney Love is on her first cover of Rolling Stone for the album Live Through This, a move that, in effect, single-handedly swept away the vestiges of grunge rock. Uma Thurman is on the big screen calling the shots in Pulp Fiction. The number of women in the United States Congress is at an all-time high, having just experienced the greatest leap in U.S. history. Roxy has introduced their signature line of surf wear and created a woman's Boardrider Team. And Lisa Anderson has just won her first World Title. In other words, the time was right for a change. Things in and around the surfing world were beginning to take on a particularly "girly" hue. No longer subjected to the dire predictions bequeathed to Generation X, young women were flexing their budding muscles and demanding equal print time. Savvy marketing guys were waking up to the fact that teenage women had voices and money of their own. The world saw that surfing doesn't just have a past, it has a future.
And this future seems to lie in the hands of women. All of a sudden, a whole new market was opened up to clothing manufacturers. Jodi Young, Media Manager for the ASP, recalls the early days of women in the water: "Relatively speaking, it's been such a short amount of time that things have done such a complete directional change. I won't say women's surfing, but more this sort of whole marketing move--lifestyle packaging. The thing is amazing. I grew up in surf shops and my mom managed stores before I was even born and I can recall her saying back when I was like 8 or 9 years old, 'I can't believe no one's doing more with women's clothing.' It seems like forever and a day all you could ever guy was a pair of boys boardshorts and an oversized t-shirt. Nothing that fit you. Seems like everyone has always known that women are the consumers, yet somehow surfing, with its male ego, never managed to get its mind around it. I mean women surfers, no matter how good or how bad they were, could never get sponsorship or even product. And the excuse was, 'Well, we don't even have a women's line so there's no point in sponsoring you.' Now they must look back and think, 'Jeez, we could have been making a lot more money a lot sooner.'"
Lisa Anderson ...
Like it or not, Lisa was the right girl at the right time. Beautiful, aggressive, and stylish--with enough natural ability to make most surfers cringe--who could resist this perfect rages to riches story? Lisa, having run away from home at 16, because her parents condone surfing, struck out for the West Coast and made herself into a champion. She was the epitome of the American Dream, and it worked. Then she hooked up with Roxy who packaged her as the ultimate surf goddess, and that worked too. Ask Randy Hild, Vice President of Roxy, about it and he gets almost philosophical: "Lisa, from the sport of women's surfing, to me, was the single biggest kind of icon to help things. She was from the U.S., she was attractive, she was straight...which I think previous to Lisa was kind of a controversial subject to touch on in surfing. The sexuality of the girls was such that, you know, a lot of them were gay and it was kinda known that they were gay, but the surf scene in general is real homophobic and they couldn't go there and talk about it. So Lisa showing up, it's like, she's cute, she's for sure straight, she's got a baby, she rips--it was like, that's kind of a cool story. And also, she's American too, which previous to that, the last 5 or 10 years, (surfing) was really dominated by Australian girls. I remember going to one of the first contests seeing Kelly Slater and Rob Machado watching the girls heats. That alone was a big thing, and they were cheering for Lisa. And it was like, god the guys are watching her and they're cheering for her. And I see her come in and they're all hanging and complimenting her. Lisa kinda broke down the barriers. She was cool, she was fun, she hung--she was one of the guys. There was some mutual respect there."
So what you had in Lisa was a woman you could admire for her guts and drive, someone respected by her peers--women and men alike, and a prodigious talent who looked really good in the boardshorts she helped design. "Rightly or wrongly, I feel that a lot of credit is owed to Lisa," says Jodi. "Of course, Roxy picked Lisa up in the first place, but she has been a major asset to their company. Because she's a great-looking woman, she has a lot of style about her, she's a great surfer, and she just carries herself well. She looks good in anything and she has the style that suited the time and the moment to carry the clothing that was fashionable and so reached a lot of people. And I can't think of another woman on the tour who could have done for the lifestyle part of surfing what she has done. I really can't. She's such a complete package. You could pick any one of those top women. There's no one that offered the package at the exact right moment that Lisa could offer. I think that the world has its way of having its great timing and having people come along at the right time and she was definitely one of them."
Roxy ...
Not that there weren't others before. Op has a successful juniors line in the 1970's. Body Glove was making wetsuits for women and sponsoring the California Golden Girls surf team in the early '80's, and companies like Jamaican Style and Rasins have been putting out swimwear lines for years. But boardshorts, clothes for women to surf in, well, that's another story. And that story has been of Roxy. So, you might say, they made a boardshort, what's the big deal? The difference was, Roxy didn't just make boys clothes for girls, they packaged a whole way of cool--an active lifestyle. When Roxy started putting out promo books with a beautiful blonde Lisa leading a pack of nubile young girls, a mythical story was born. Some have criticized the company for selling an idealized image, something the average girl can't live up to. Is surfing really so girly--about flowers, skinny bodies and huge smiles? Hild readily admits that Roxy is intentionally selling a certain kind of look, pioneered by Lisa, and targeting a specific market. But even if the "Roxy girl" isn't the demographic average, she's what the demographic average wishes they were.
With Lisa, Roxy knew it was on to a good thing. When they decided to make the plunge into girls surfwear, they did the only sensible thing--they called Lisa. Says Randy, "Our designer finally clicked and said, "Yea, I see how it is. Let's get Lisa in here." At that time we really didn't have a team. Lisa was the team. So we got Lisa in here and we said, 'Do you like the but long? Do you want them down to your knees?' And she said, 'No, I want my butt fitted, I want to show off my figure. I want them a little bit shorter, I wanna get a tan.' So we kinda had her help us fit the whole thing and that's where the boardshort came from." Even the name comes from an interesting source, "I got it from the Roxy Theatre in Los Angeles," says Danny Kwock, Vice President of new lines for Quiksilver. "Bob (McKnight) wanted me to come up with a name and that was on my list. I thought it's happening, punk, cocky--it's got a rebel type feel. And that's what we were like then." They had to be. Randy tells of how when Roxy first came out, few of the guys who worked for Quiksilver wanted anything to do with it. "When we first started Roxy 5 years ago," says Randy, "It was like a guy's company and it was like, 'Hey you're not using our boardshort pattern, you can't use our prints, you can't use our designs. No, that's a chick thing. We're hardcore.' And I was just like, 'OK, we'll just do our own things, forget you guys. We'll have our own photo shoots, our own team, our own booths. Forget it.' So we kinda had to do that. But we've done that and everything's great. Now Quiksilver's secure and they're all kinda coming back and it's like we're one big old happy family."
What's next?
Things have come along way since '94. With the success of things like Lilith Fair and mail order catalogs like Delia's, your average teen in Duluth is as on the cutting edge of trends as someone in Los Angeles. Surf fashions are turning up on international runaways and club-goers alike, as well as on 40-year-old-men. And Malia Jones, an original Roxy girl, is one of People Magazines Most Beautiful People in the World. "There's girls in the lineup," says Randy, "that are comfortable. They have role models, they've got the Lisa Anderson's and the Layne Beachley's and the Rochelle Ballard's -- They've got these attractive girls with normal lives that they can now look up to. Give it another five years, can you imagine where it's going? It's crazy." Will Roxy continue to own the teenage market? There's a lot of people looking for a piece of the pie. This year practically every major surfing company, including Ruxty (second in the market only to Roxy), O'Neill, Volom, and Girl Star, will put out at least one full line geared toward women; a glutton of swimsuits, boardshorts, clothes and wetsuits. This spring will also see the launch of Water Girl, a clothing line from surfer/entrepreneur llona Wood, who started the first women's surf shop in Encinitas in 1996.
And we haven't even mentioned Billabong. Seen by many as the direct competitor of Quiksilver/Roxy in Australia, this year marks the introduction of Billabong Girls in America. "I know in Australia," says Jodi "Billabong Girls are becoming huge. I'm sure they're going to come out with a great package now they've got the world champion in Layne. It'll be interesting to see what kind of an impact she has. Layne will bring along her own style with it, and that could enter a new phase. Whatever the outcome, all the attention from the marketing divisions has brought positive change. Following Surfing Girl's lead, new magazines are cropping up for waterwomen and surf schools like Surf Divas make learning easy. As for the sport itself, more and more girls are out in the water, having fun and ripping. Longboarding sales continue to rise, as do the girls entering competitions. The cross over into skateboarding and snowboarding is huge, with girls getting a lot of respect from the guys. And all of this means that, at the close of the century, it's easier than ever to be a girl who does what she wants, how she wants. And the future? Wait and see.
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