We’ve been hearing good things about the brand The Critical Slide Society, a.k.a. TCSS. Their design collaboration with Penny Skateboards, a new women’s line, and their men’s apparel and accessories have been generating buzz globally, especially in the fashion-forward streets of Japan.
The Australian-based brand was started by surfers Jim Mitchell and Sam Coombes in 2009. Since then, TCSS has designed and teamed with artists of various mediums to build a brand “from the sand up.”
Jim Mitchell has roots in Australian surfwear as a key art contributor for Mambo for roughly 10 years. Jim and Sam met during Sam’s five years at Mambo, while working across graphics, menswear and marketing.
Here’s a glimpse into their company with co-founder/co-owner, Sam Coombes.
Who are the owners and people behind The Critical Slide Society?
Sam Coombes: The owners are Jim and Suzie Mitchell and I. Jim Mitchell is the Team and Art Director managing all artistic contributions and the surf team, I am the Managing Director, and Suzie Mitchell is the Director of Operations.
We’ve financed the whole thing ourselves from day dot. We started the business with a $10,000 loan guaranteed against our personal cars, and we’ve juggled funds ever since.
How are you marketing? How many doors are you in?
Sam: Marketing is very much focused on both video and photographic content distributed and shared across our own channels. We have worked with some print, Monster Children, STAB and most recently, What Youth.
We’re in roughly 250 doors across the globe. So it’s a relatively limited distribution at this stage. The business is still a very small team with six of us in total, so handling any more than that at this point would be a stretch.
We work with great retailers and partners. Many of which we’ve worked with since our first range dropped in the U.S., including Thalia Surf, Icons of Surf, Huntington Surf, Hobie, Aloha Sunday, and Swell.
We’ve also stocked with Urban Outfitters and Hawaiian South Shore for the last few seasons. Japan has been a big focus − we love the country and the people, and we have insanely good stores supporting us there such as Beams, Journal Standard, Ron Herman, Freak’s, and Cher Shore. It gives us a great reason to visit a couple of times a year.
At home in Australia, we work with more forward stores, not your traditional core stores. Something interesting with TCSS is the percentage of online retailers versus brick-and-mortars. Online represents over 50% of our total sales, which is reflected from our marketing strategy.
We’ve also just launched our women’s line, Society by TCSS, so we’ll be starting to work with women’s and swim retailers going forward.
See Page 2 for TCSS’s plan for U.S. market, more on women’s
For U.S. market, are you going direct?
Sam: We go direct in the U.S. We work with a single agent and travel across for key shows such as Agenda Long Beach, which we recently attended. We’re going to be working pretty hard over the coming 12 months to build the profile and sales in the U.S. The market’s a great fit for us, and we’re at a more mature point in our business where we can now support bigger sales.
How would you describe the company’s aesthetic?
Sam: We never really set out to slot into a niche or aesthetic… I guess it’s best described as coastal lifestyle. So it’s boardshorts, walkshorts, tees, and woven shirts. We’re waterman… just surf whatever you want to surf. Be it single fins, twin fins or no fins…
Our most recent line is titled Fauxwaii, which is a fair bit of Hawaiian influence with surf and pop-culturally relevant icons that have all been given a contemporization. Like overdyed traditional Hawaiian prints and images like The Finz (The Fonz with a fin shaped hairdo.) We kind of just hit a theme and run with it. It needs to be fun and entertaining.
Women’s line is for Spring ’14?
Sam: Yes, and it’s our first women’s line. We’ve called it Society by TCSS. It’s a small collection, and the same ethos that ground our menswear is true for Society – coastal lifestyle, artistic collaborations, and a quirky personality with a lot of fun thrown into the mix. We’ve had a solid response to the first range, so we’re really looking forward to growing it. We feel there’s a lot of potential and opportunity there.
