Photos from Day 1 of Skate Summit

The IASC Skateboarding Summit got underway Tuesday with speakers discussing the state of the skate industry, retailer and manufacturer panels, a speech by the co-founder of Stone Brewing Co., a keynote interview with Alien Workshop co-founder Chris Carter, and more.

We’ll have more details about some of the individual panels in coming days, but one person and company that kept coming up again and again is Steve Lake of Sector 9.

Speaker after speaker mentioned how Steve created a new skateboard category with cruiser boards against all odds and after the idea was dismissed over and over again by the industry.

Cary Allington of ActionWatch included some eye-opening data during his presentation about how longboards performed in 2010 in the ActionWatch panel.

On a same store sales basis, sales of long completes rose 48%, sales of long decks rose 37%, sales of short completes rose 14% and sales of short decks declined 14%.

The average margin on short decks was 40%, while the average margins on long completes was 46%.

Long complete inventory is also turning more during the year – an average of 5.2 times vs. 3.1 times for a short deck.

Because of the higher average price points for long completes – $187 vs. $40.19 for a short deck – revenue from long complete sales in core stores on the panel is nearly equal to the revenue generated by short deck sales.

The Summit continues today.