And yet another professional sailor without a sponsor...
www.facebook.com/100044501466749/posts/pfbid021wuKC6ghBS2ZY8max2iZgBX7dPMjEWia4X4hMDMB7xZbLvf6j26Xfhqrmpk489RUl/
Let's see what he does next.
So sad to see a once proud company go down, taking talented people with it
On the flip side Brandon Scheid recently joined Naish, taking over their wing program.
Thats madness...nice one bean counters ....take a brand and business thats taken decades to build and has massive heritage and respect, then destroy it in nano minute, no respect to the brand, the sport and the people and it all came to be.
Playing with spread sheets is dead fkn easy .. building a brand and a business thats worth something long term that naturally generates sales is difficult.
Accountants tend to forget they are there as the result of other peoples work, passion, product , services, ideas and effort ..that generates the numbers for them to play with on a spread sheet, its not the other way around.
Sadly it looks like Naish as a windsurfing brand is dead:(
So I wonder how long it will be until we see an announcement that Robby has left the team to join Quatro...
Then we will know they are really history
It may be your hobby, but it's the naish owners business, they will and should make commercial decisions, of which we dont have sight of the numbers to criticise.
Is naish the manufacturer selling enough kit to warrant paying a pro sailor? Is he earning his keep? Does being in the top ten make you a financial asset to your sponsors relative to your costs? Looking at other pro sailors being dropped lately and/or reductions in their deals it seems that the equipment manufacturers dont think that being a top ten sailor is enough. What would you rather these companies do? Keep paying too much to finance pro sailors until they go bankrupt?
I bet a million dollars Naish's windsurfing % of the windsurf market is a fraction of what it used to be ..... , one look at current Naish Website and Naish offering suggests they are not interested in windsurfing .. all points to Kite and Sup bring in the money so thats where the energy and investment of $ is, its been that way for quite sometime.
The accountants look at windsurfing as bad share in the portfolio and would rather it wasn't in the portfolio at all.
I bet the head marketing person convinced them to keeping windsurfing in the range to help give the kite and sup range a sense of heritage, history, kind of a birth place of where the others came from, it has some brand leverage that still flows a little into the other two sports, the name and brand has a good story that feels food and has good emotional value...emotion buys.
The marketing team have missed out here as Campello is a pretty handy Kitesurfer also , some of his kite videos in his homelands are awesome, pretty sure he's on Core Kites, no doubt he's good on a SUP also ...
I would of had him promoting all three and getting a better ROI on my investment across the range .
If someone purchased 'Naish Windsurfing' and set up 'Naish Windsurfing' as a stand alone niche brand in niche sport they could leverage that name and make it a profitable standalone 'small' business.
Campello always seems to be moving around these days.
I'd look to him first as the issue.
Could be that brands don't see value in the pwa and as an extension sponsored riders.
Campello is going to take a break from competing in the PWA.
It's really a shame as I like watching him during his heats. Unpredictable, radical and full of surprises...
