This morning, I emailed Jeff Berg, the majority owner and co-founder of Swell, to find out why he agreed to sell the online retailer to Billabong.
Jeff also recently sold Foam Magazine, and I wanted to know if he was shedding his action sports investments. Jeff also is an owner of Surfline, which made me wonder – could a Surfline sale be next?
Here’s what Jeff told me:
“Decided to sell (Swell) because the deal with Bong is a great fit and opportunity to scale the business a lot faster, for a number of reasons.
“The sale of Swell and the sale of Foam are totally unrelated.
“Neither is a call on ‘action sports,’ a moniker which doesn’t capture well the unique attributes of the different sports and lifestyles, not to mention the different mediums that the businesses are involved in (Foam primarily print; Swell primarily online retail).
“I’m very content with Surfline. It continues to grow in all aspects of its business and is actually accelerating market share gains as the size of its audience, and the amount of time (the audience) engages with the site are growing rapidly.”
