Bob McKnight and Quiksilver: surf shorts, stock exchanges, and bankruptcy

Abstract

Detailing Robert “Bob” McKnight’s contributions to surfing and action sports entrepreneurship is impossible without retracing the history of the surfwear brand Quiksilver. And in spite of surfing purists’ critiques of the surf industry’s rise to an estimated $13-billion industry,1 Quiksilver and McKnight are inseparable from the history of modern surfing. Alan Green, who founded Quiksilver in 1969, once claimed that McKnight was one of “five or six people who … rule the brand through rough consensus.”2 However, McKnight’s 1976 American licensing of Quiksilver alongside Jeff Hakman and his subsequent rise to the helm of the global brand has long rendered McKnight the front office face and voice of the company, even after his retirement.3 After taking the helm of Quiksilver USA and outlasting veritably all of the company’s founders and initial investors, McKnight became nearly as recognizable as some of the legendary competitive surfing champions and freesurfing trendsetters once supported by the brand.4 McKnight eventually became so prominent in the sport that he was deemed “the most powerful man in surfing.”5 And understandably so as McKnight has been a mainstay in Quicksilver’s top tiers of governance, management, and investor relations for over four decades, masterminding and surviving serial acquisitions and investor buyouts that consumed even the company’s founders before its 2015 tailspin into bankruptcy.6