It’s 2023, which is basically the future. Billabong, as you may or may not have noticed, has a little “Since 1973” attached to its logo. I always wonder how many years needs to have passed by before a “Since” can be added. Five? Ten? Anyway, it’s been 50 years since 1973, which means that Billabong is celebrating its golden anniversary. And in those years, it has attached itself to surfing so strongly that it’s basically part of the culture.
Surfing is a weird thing. More than most other sports/activities/whatever you want to call it, there are a handful of brands that are pretty much synonymous with it. You know the ones — Quik, Billabong, etc — but they’re all owned by Boardriders Inc, which is in turn owned by the Authentic Brands Group, which was founded by a fella named Jamie Salter. He’s worth around a billion dollars and, according to LinkedIn, worked at a sporting goods store before acquiring the snowboarding brand Kemper, just as an aside.
Anyway, none of that stuff matters all that much. It’s all just meaningless industry stuff, but the fact remains that Billabong had a hand in shaping surfing. It pumped out surf films that played endlessly on VHS tapes in surfers’ rooms around the world. The brand had a team made up of some of the most influential surfers ever. Which is why the brains at Billabong asked the surf team to rank their top five Billabong surf films and explain why. Starting with Surf Into Summer from 1987 and going all the way to 2022’s Interlusion, the crew did just that. The winner? Pretty cut and dry: Taylor Steele’s Trilogy; Parko, Andy, Taj.
