September 2015. Quiksilver files for Chapter 11 in Delaware, carrying something north of US$800 million in debt, and the surf press writes it up like a death notice for the whole boardshort industry. Billabong was already wobbling. Volcom had been swallowed by a French conglomerate. The story everyone wanted to tell was that surfwear’s moment had simply passed, that teenagers had moved on to something else and there was nothing a management team could do about taste.
That’s a tidy story. It’s also mostly wrong, or at least it skips the parts that actually explain what happened next. Quiksilver didn’t die. It came out of bankruptcy within about four months, sold to Oaktree Capital, and by 2018 it had rebranded as…