Active Ride's Guide to Mixing and Matching
One of the cardinal rules of merchandising is placing the most fashionable brands in the front of the store. But when Active Ride puts top contemporary casual names such as G-Star and Ben Sherman at the front of the store, people do a double take, said Tom Goodwin, manager of Active Ride’s store in Burbank, Calif.
“People assume Active Ride is a snowboarding and skateboarding store,” Goodwin said. “We let them know that we have more diversity than you’d think.”
The unique mix of fashion and skateboarding apparel has put the privately held 11-store chain on a building spree. The Ontario, Calif.–based company recently opened a 10,000-square-foot store in Riverside, Calif.; a 3,000-square-foot store at The Camp shopping center in Costa Mesa, Calif.; and a 6,000-square-foot store in downtown Burbank, which had a soft opening in December.
According to Shaheen Sadeghi, owner of The Camp, Active Ride has its finger on the pulse of the current mix-and-match trend, the reason why people are blending fashion and surf clothes.
“No one does it as well as Active Ride,” Sadeghi said of the new aesthetic. “They’re doing it in an authentic way that has to be earned, and that’s why they get the core authentic product.”
Manufacturers are not satisfied with having a mere place at Active Ride. Costa Mesa, Calif.–based RVCA, Matix Clothing and Los Angeles–based Grn Apple Tree have designed special-edition, cross-branded T-shirts that use Active Ride’s logo alongside designs by the manufacturers’ graphic artists.
Active Ride’s Burbank store does well with Orange County brands such as Obey, Paul Frank and LRG, but Goodwin said his store’s top sellers are T-shirts manufactured by RVCA. The shirts have been popular despite their relatively high prices: $24 to $30, compared with $16.99 for the average T-shirt sold at the store. Goodwin said his customers like the shirts for their body-hugging fit but love them for the wild graphics produced by RVCA’s Artist Network Program. “It’s artist-driven, rather than logo-driven,” he said. —Andrew Asch
