At the beginning of October, Marc Roca, the CEO of Inversal, a company that “find[s] high-potential distressed e-commerce brands… acquire[s] and perform[s] a cost-cutting turnaround to each distressed brand, and make[s] sure lenders are paid accordingly,” made an announcement on LinkedIn.
During the 70-hour labor that culminated with the birth of my daughter Aurelia on September 28th, our team worked relentlessly on the final diligence and transition items of a deal that would change the future of skateboarding forever.
Lakai Limited Footwear will be the world’s number-one core skateboard brand.
Okay… A lot is going on there. Following that very LinkedIn-coded TMI, Roca explained that Inversal had acquired Lakai, one of the last surviving endemic skate shoe brands. Well, sort of.
It has been a rocky road for Lakai over the last decade. After struggling financially, HUF, then flush with cash thanks to an investment from Altamont Capital Partners in the mid-2010s, would “merge” with the former Crailtap company and, according to the late Keith Hufnagel, “[help] them operate and be a stable business.” When HUF was acquired by Japanese brand management concern TSI Holdings in 2017, Lakai went with it and stayed there until last month.
In an interview in the October 28 edition of The GuiriKnowsPost, a Barcelona-based newsletter, Roca, who is now CEO of Lakai, appeared to make an effort to assuage the worries of those who might be concerned about a company that “find[s] high-potential distressed e-commerce brands… acquire[s] and perform[s]… cost-cutting turnaround[s]” bringing Lakai into the fold. Inversal is also a company, as Roca says (via Google Translate), where “Lakai would be the biggest and best-known brand we have; the rest are small brands of household products, wellness and underwear. They are practically unknown brands, but they sell very well.”
Roca, who “used to skate” but says he remains immersed in the culture, told The GuiriKnowsPost that his plan for Lakai includes “[reducing] the catalogue and make it a bit more core… with the intention of making a ‘head-to-toe Lakai.'” In his vision, that would involve a clothing line “by and for skaters” and a more competitive price point to appeal to their “real” “core demographic.”
When asked about the involvement of Rick Howard and Mike Carroll, Lakai’s co-founders, Roca said, “They never really left [the company], but it is true that now they will have a greater presence in the day-to-day running of the brand… especially in product creation. Lakai cannot be understood without Rick and Mike.”
Regarding Lakai’s roster of athletic talent, Roca went on to assure that “the American team is not to be touched. And the idea is to expand [the team] both in Europe and in other parts of the world. Paying salaries and doing things right.”
As if those reassurances weren’t enough — and not a bit of egregiously obvious foreshadowing — Roca hammered his message home.
“There is a story that we have already experienced before… new owners arrive, come in with everything and destroy the team, restructure and fire people who really understand the brand… This is not the case [here]. In fact, the banks told us that the first thing to do was get rid of the team. We told them they were crazy. The team is the brand itself, the soul.”
That soul seems to be in jeopardy. On Tuesday, rumours started swirling on the SLAP Messageboards that the entire Lakai team had been laid off, along with Howard and Carroll, with one poster claiming they’d spoken to a sales rep and a team rider who confirmed the news.
I emailed Roca on Wednesday to ask if there was truth to the rumours and, if so, if he could offer some clarity around Inversal’s decision-making and what changed since his interview with GuiriKnowsPost last week. I’ve yet to hear back. I also reached out to Carroll and a few Lakai team riders, getting only one response, with one team member saying that they couldn’t share much at the moment as they were still waiting to learn more themselves, but they’d keep me updated.
But, for those looking, there were signs that things weren’t well. The team page on the Lakai website, which was there as recently as October 3, according to the Wayback Machine, has been removed. Roca’s LinkedIn announcement of Inversal’s acquisition of Lakai also received a glaring edit. When the news of the sale hit SLAP on October 1, SLAP Pal “shannamal” quoted Roca’s post:
“Today, October 1st, 2024, 25 years after the brand was founded by Mike Carrol [sic] and Rick Howard will be more involved with Lakai Limited Footwear moving forward. I am lucky to have been entrusted with their support to lead Lakai as the new CEO to make the brand by skaters for skaters again”
That section has since been deleted. However, I was able to find it in some stubbornly cached preview text on Google.
Things then came to an awkward head on Wednesday evening when Roca posted a five-slide-long “statement” to the Lakai Instagram page. For Roca, this was an opportunity to clear the air on the “industry rumors going around.”
Reality: Lakai has been losing $1,000,000 per year and was weeks away from being shut down. Lakai had been sold twice before due to lack of profitability and Rick and Mike haven’t had ownership in the brand for a number of years. The company was for sale for over a year and there were no buyers who wanted to take on the challenge of rebuilding this company.
After buying the company in an effort to save it, Marc (the new owner of Lakai), offered 10% ownership to Rick and Mike with no strings attached, just to be a part of what they created. In addition to equity, they were offered the same compensation as the new leadership team.
The only change we requested in exchange was to reduce the current skate team budget by 23% to prevent the company from falling into another near-bankruptcy, as the cost of the skate team was greater than the total cost of employees working at the company.
Most team riders did not have an ongoing contract with previous ownership. Our plan was, and always has been, to offer the riders a full year contract, starting on November 1st, 2024, to continue working together as we had done in the past, while the new ownership works to correct the business.
The new Lakai ownership had no plans to remove the skate team, and due to recent events we are now in the process of offering 90-day transitional contracts to the skaters via Rick and Mike as they specifically told us that they alone should be the ones in contact with them. We are unsure whether these contracts were offered to the team and as of today, we are actively reaching out to team members in an effort to correct this situation.
As far as we’re concerned, we are still at the negotiating table and are open to Rick and Mike potentially buying back the company. The process and situation is ongoing and our goal is to make sure that everyone involved feels whole.
-Marc Roca, just a dude trying to save Lakai with his own money
So what’s going on here? Were Roca’s good intentions stymied by unwilling partners in Howard and Carroll? That’s certainly how he’s framing it when he bills himself as “a dude trying to save Lakai with his own money” and Lakai as a languishing company with “no buyers who wanted to take on the challenge of rebuilding” it, however true the latter may be. His statement also positions the 23% cut of the “skate team budget” as the sticking point for why, presumably, Howard and Carroll, and by extension, the team, are not cooperating.
But Roca’s message is muddled, as it’s still unclear on his end what exactly the issue is. If the new ownership “had no plans to remove the skate team,” why did they delete the team page with such haste? And where was that proposed 23% cut of the “skate team budget” to come from? Was the whole team going to be paid less or would some riders be let go? Roca says that Inversal is offering “provisional contracts” to riders because of “recent events.” Are those “recent events” the news of Inversal cleaning house breaking containment from hushed industry whispers to online forums and social media?
In his interview with The GuiriKnowsPost, Roca said that Inversal planned to do things differently with Lakai.
“There is a story that we have already experienced before… new owners arrive, come in with everything and destroy the team, restructure and fire people who really understand the brand… This is not the case [here].
But according to industry folk in the comments of his Instagram statement, Inversal did just that.
Were Roca’s original LinkedIn post and The GuiriKnowsPost interview all a way to sell himself and Howard and Carroll’s “involvement” to the purchasing public and his business pals online, even as he knew the guillotine was about to drop? Or did things legitimately turn sideways and was this simply Roca’s bungled attempt at saving face? I can’t say with confidence without hearing from both parties directly (FYI, my inbox is still open), but Roca’s bizarre attempt at damage control via the official Lakai Instagram isn’t encouraging and doesn’t paint him as a terribly sympathetic figure, even if he isn’t the only one at fault.
That said, it also bears repeating that Inversal’s business is buying businesses and executing “cost-cutting turnaround[s] to… distressed brand[s].” This mess would fit that bill. If that’s the case, this is just another brutal and clumsy corporate takeover in the skateboarding space and certainly not an example of “doing things right.”
Frankly, a result like this should’ve been obvious from the jump. For Roca to proclaim Inversal’s acquisition of Lakai would be “a deal that would change the future of skateboarding forever” is a level of hubris reserved for Zeppelin pilots and Titanic marketeers.
Even Roca’s pronouncements of what Lakai’s media output would look like under his leadership were suspect, as they were not merely idealistic but flatly unrealistic. He told The GuiriKnowsPost that we could expect “…at least four short movies a year. The idea is also to launch one long video per year and a lot of short content per month for [social] networks.” That would be a staggering amount of content and betrays Roca’s lack of understanding of the effort that goes into making a skateboarding video and skate culture in general.
In his Instagram statement, he promised the company would soldier on despite the turbulence.
Our plan has not changed. Lakai will be a brand focused on grassroots skateboarding, putting our efforts and energy into empowering the next generation of skaters. Our main goal for 2025 is to create a new way to build up the skateboarding community.
1. Build a skate team with skaters from all over the world
2. Release full-length films and travel videos
3. Create a Hometown Hero Program for talent scouting and
community buildingWe are optimistic that with our new direction, Lakai will be able to
better support both local skate communities and skate shops
around the world.
It will be hard to support “grassroots skateboarding” without, allegedly, any staff, and just as difficult to release all of that proposed skateboarding content without a team. While the status of the entire roster is unclear, Riley Hawk announced on Thursday that he was leaving the company and effectively retiring from professional skateboarding, while Cody Chapman was wearing Converse in his Instagram Story on Wednesday, and James Capps and Tyler Pacheco appear to have removed mention of Lakai from their Instagram bios.
Can this situation be fixed? Can Roca come to terms with Howard, Carroll, and the rest? It doesn’t seem promising.
Roca’s five-slide appeal is most offputting because he would’ve been fine. He could have ignored the rumblings online while attempting to work things out behind the scenes and just kept quiet, whatever the outcome. Yet, he decided to air this all out publicly in a failed attempt to defend his personal brand, no matter the detriment it would have on the brand he purchased or the morale of those under him. It’s not hard to imagine that if this ordeal hurts his feelings enough, he’ll just strip the company for parts and sell the remains, if that wasn’t the plan to begin with.
Roca announced on LinkedIn on October 8 that Inversal had acquired “several” businesses from Thrasio, a failed Amazon aggregator, which is a type of company that, as TechCrunch explains, “buy[s] up and restructur[es] dozens of smaller brands and third parties selling on marketplaces like Amazon in a bid for better economies of scale” — which is what Roca does. To him, businesses and those who make them run are merely opportunities to capitalize on.
“The team is the brand itself, the soul,” Roca said of Lakai. That’s correct, but he doesn’t seem to understand what that really means, that those are people, not assets.
Simple Magic is a weekly newsletter about skateboarding, the internet, and other means of escape. It’s written by Cole Nowicki and comes out every Friday. Sometimes on Wednesday. Pretty sure there was a Monday post one time, too. Be sure to click on the following link to subscribe: https://simplemagic.substack.com/
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