What happens when your brand ambassadors bail out

Kelia Moniz has left the building. A true female surf icon, Moniz threw a grenade behind her as she walked away from a brand partnership that had spanned more than half her life.

Kelia Moniz is ‘Hawaiian surf royalty’ and was a Roxy brand ambassador from the age of 13, maybe the quintessential Roxy ambassador. She put in 17 years as the face of the Roxy brand, but that all just came to a smashing end with a scorching instagram video in which she laid out that she was leaving the brand - and the reasons why.

Roxy is the totemic female surf brand, but like many other surf brands, it has been dashed on the rocks of late. Times are hard. Roxy and troubled surfwear marques like Billabong and Quicksilver were struggling to turn a profit and were scooped up by the ironically-named Authentic Brands Group. (Rip Curl, one of the big remaining brands, was bought by Kathmandu, Hurley by Blue Star Alliance)

The new ‘authentic’ appropriators of surf culture promptly set about shafting many creators of the culture, like Moniz, who provide the foundation for what they sell, to boost their profit margins.

After ABG completed their purchase of Roxy, Moniz’s contract was terminated and she offered the ‘opportunity’ to return but at a 90% pay cut. She didn't take much time to say no. Said Moniz:

After years of fighting for fair pay and equality, there was no way I was signing that deal, especially knowing I wasn’t the only athlete that this was happening to. I’m not about to be strong-armed by some corporation that knows nothing about the sport and doesn’t give a shit about it. If you’re wondering why I’m leaving, it’s not because I don’t love what I do… I’m leaving because if I sign this deal I’d be setting the industry standards for the girls who look like me and surf like me and I simply want nothing to do with that.

Acquisition is the dream scenario for a lot of company owners, it's the payoff, the reward for all the time you put into building it. But it almost always comes at a cultural cost. Private Equity firms or publicly-listed parent companies value financial metrics way above that gritty original authenticity – the two don't often coexist.

If you've been part of a company that has been bought by a much bigger company, you'll probably have experienced this. The early promises that the culture will be retained are largely worthless. The clock immediately starts ticking on how long that culture has left. SHOW ME THE MONEY is the new culture.

In culture-driven sectors, like surfing, there has always been a tension in efforts to monetize that culture, that authenticity, especially where the culture has evolved over decades. That tension, the push-and-pull resistance to full corporate takeover is what has kept and continues to keep grassroots surfing authentic and appealing, but it has also made it harder for big corporations to extract margins. Now, it appears, is their time to really try, and Authentic Brands is well-practiced at buying and milking well-established brands for profitability. Since the Boardriders deal of which Roxy was part, they’ve also acquired distressed nautical shoe brand Sperry for $130million (Its previous owners paid $1.2billion for it ).

You build your brand from the ground up largely on authenticity. Surfing’s inner-circle influencers are deeply connected to that culture and don't care about EBITDA. They live the values and the surfing lifestyle totally, so it's no surprise that Moniz and others are bailing out. Moniz again:

This shit is real, so real that many brands are often trying to replicate what we had, but have a very hard time doing so because you can’t replicate really shit, you can’t replicate authentic friendship, you can’t replicate authentic stories.

This kind of flame-out is always a risk, and almost always a calculated risk on the part of the purchasing parent company. Moniz's vocal departure may make waves, the question is will those waves smash into the brand like a tsunami or roll off it like water off a duck’s back?

Only time will tell.