My thoughts:I've always loved BBG as a brand. When I was young I...

My thoughts:

I've always loved BBG as a brand. When I was young I felt proud in a pair of BBG boardies or t-shirt. I'm a little old now to go and spend big bucks on a BBG t-shirt but since I bought in two weeks ago I've been keeping my eye out for its products and have seen a couple of kids wearing BBG shirts (I live in SLovenia).
In my town of Ljubljana we have a population of 250,000. THere are both a Quicksilver and a Rip Curl shop in the centre of town, we are over an hour from any beach and the shops never seem full. Looking in these shops I can understand why BBG failed when buying up big in retail. It doesn't feel right to buy a piece of surf culture in a big city shop that feels commercial and unsurfy.
Another cheap feel is when I went to Croatia and saw stalls by the beach selling BBG boardies. It would be fine if they sold kite boards and wetsuits too but these stalls were cheap and the sort of places you could buy blow up lilos, postcards, fridge magnets and shells. It made me wonder if the products were rip-offs but I think they were overstocked items elsewhere (as the had a $ pricetag and then over the top was the Kuna pricetag). It made BBG feel cheap and very uncool. A bad image to have in a generally new market.
I remember telling my brother a couple of years a go how I read an article about a reporter who went to Rio and on the beaches there were many many kids in BBG shorts and that BBG was what you had to wear to be cool. Brazilians were spending a months wages to buy a pair of shorts and they did the beer to boardies ratio. BAsically you could buy an aweful lot of beer for the price of a pair of boardshorts.
BBG is on the verge of losing its cool. And cool is important.

I think Vonzipper has great sunglasses, I think my wife doesn't like me looking at the Tigerlily website for too long and I don't care much for Nixon but if it's profitable, way to go.

As an Aussie, BBG touches my heart like Vegemite and QANTAS but I never saw the value in investing in it until it hit these low prices. I'd hate to see it sold off cheaply and $1.45 is way too cheap.

As an investor I'd take $1.75, anything less and I'd rather see how it went on it's own under the new CEO Launa Inman.
I also like to see my big gains held for a year to minimise Capital Gains tax.

That's my two cents.

Tronbirk.