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Active Ride’s Assets To Be Sold
Active Ride Shop, an award-winning action-sports and skateboarding retailer based in Ontario, Calif., which ran more than 21 shops, is being sold by its lender.
Gem Cap Lending will sell Active Ride’s intellectual property and assets in a sale scheduled for Jan. 22, according to a public notice from the lender, which was published in the Los Angeles Times on Jan. 9. A phone call to a Gem Cap representative was not returned by press time.
It seemed the retailer’s business was winding down. There was no e-commerce activity on the retailer’s website, activerideshop.com. A message on the site read, “Be Back Soon, Sign Up for Our Email Newsletter.” Phone calls to several of Active Ride’s bricks-and-mortar shops went directly to the stores’ voicemails.
The news of the sale might be the coda to a skyrocketing rise to prominence when Active Ride won the Men’s Retailer of the Year SIMA Image Award presented by the Surf Industry Manufacturers Association in 2008. The following year, Active Ride filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Entrepreneur Issa Ladha acquired the retailer out of bankruptcy. In 2014, Tengram Capital became a majority partner in the retailer and intended to open more shops. In 2018, Chatsworth, Calif., manufacturer APS Global acquired Active Ride for an undisclosed amount.
Fashion-business chiefs and consumers were mourning the demise of the shop. Bobby Kim, co-founder of The Hundreds streetwear label, tweeted on Jan. 12: “RIP Active Ride Shop. Thanks for the years.” Kenan Bell, a musician, tweeted that the retailer was a pioneer, writing, “Before Utility Board Shop, before Cellular, before Diamond and Supreme, there was Active.”
Active’s demise comes at a time of relatively good business in the skate market, said Patrik Schmidle, president of the market researcher ActionWatch. “This year, we’ve seen a tremendous uptick in skate,” he said.
Sales for skate hard goods such as skate decks increased 20 percent from January to November 2019 compared to the same period the previous year.
“We’ve seen an uptick in anything related to skating,” Schmidle explained. “But it’s a situation that must have come too late for whatever transpired at Active.”
