Jack’s Surfboards On The Move: First Skatepark, Next Up, Santa Monica
Jack’s Surfboards has fantastic real estate karma.
The Jack’s flagship started business in 1957 across the street from the Huntington Beach Pier in Orange County, Calif., just as Huntington Beach was beginning to stake its claim to being the center of the burgeoning surf lifestyle.
On March 19, Jack’s opened a location for its skateboard concept, Jack’s Garage, in a place that seems like a natural for a skate shop—a skateboard park. The city of Huntington Beach and Vans, manufacturer of one of the original skate shoes, opened the Vans Off the Wall Skatepark at 7471 Center Drive in Huntington Beach, located off of the Beach Boulevard exit on the 405 freeway and adjacent to the Bella Terra retail center.
Residents of the boardsports-obsessed Huntington Beach have long petitioned for a municipal skatepark. The 42,500-square-foot Vans Off the Wall Skatepark will be open seven days a week and will mostly serve youth ages 6 and up.
For Jamal Abdelmuti, a Jack’s co-owner, opening the 2,000-square-foot Jack’s Garage marked a chance to serve his city and to give skate and streetwear brands a higher profile.
In 2011, the city of Huntington Beach asked Jack’s to help it find skate-industry partners to build a municipal skatepark, for which residents had been asking the city since the 1990s. Jack’s found Vans as a partner to develop the skate park, which features a SoCalSole of Fame, honoring Huntington Beach’s skate legends, such as Christian Hosoi.
While Vans shoes are getting more popular across the globe, Doug Palladini, Vans’ general manager and vice president of the label’s Americas region, said it was crucial to maintain the Cypress, Calif.–based label’s Orange County roots and support the local skateboarders.
“It’s the same reason as why we invested in the Vans U.S. Open of Surfing,” Palladini said of the annual professional surfing competition in Huntington Beach. “We always want to give back to our backyard. Our heritage is so much of who we are as a brand. Our credibility hinges on our willingness to stay connected to our roots.”
The Jack’s flagship, located at 101 Main St. in Huntington Beach, features big displays and shops-in-shop for major surf brands such as Quiksilver and Hurley. “In the surf shop, [skate brands] get overwhelmed,” Abdelmuti said. In 2012, Jack’s opened the first Jack’s Garage a couple of storefronts away from the flagship to create a different venue for the skate brands. Both the original Jack’s Garage and the new skatepark Jack’s Garage will offer brands such as Huf, Altamont, DC, Element, Krew and Primitive. The shop also hosts a 300-square-foot shop-in-shop for Vans products.
At the original Jack’s Garage, the breakdown of the shop floor runs 25 percent footwear, 25 percent hard goods and 50 percent clothes. At the skatepark, demand for hard goods such as skate decks has spiked to almost 50 percent of items sold at the store.
The Jack’s surf chain will continue to expand in 2014. In May, it is scheduled to open a Jack’s Surfboards location in Santa Monica, Calif., near the intersection of Lincoln Avenue and Pico Boulevard. Santa Monica only has a few high-profile surf shops, Abdelmuti said, compared with cities such as Huntington Beach and Newport Beach, where the competition among surf shops is friendly but fierce. “It’s an underserved population,” Abdelmuti said of Santa Monica
