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Saint Louis

BB’s Jazz Blues and Soup

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Went to the BB’s Jazz, Blues and Soup at 700 South Broadway, which is quite a blast. This is my first time to a Jazz bar, although I have listened to the Jazz on NPR in the Sunday evenings for a long time. I thought about going to New Orleans, which is the birth place of the Jazz, but never made the trip. I heard St. Louis has the Jazz and Blues traditions especially in the 50s, the scene I saw at BB’s confirmed this. There are quite a good turn out at the bar. Although I may not be the best person to comment on the music, I enjoy it very much. Life is more than work, computer, stock and other cold hard stuffs. Music and friends should be a big part of it, especially in the holiday season.

Categories
Fun Stocks

Heelys Sold Out in Sports Authority?

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I went to the SA store at Brentwood, and I saw they emptied half of the shelf which was originally for Heelys (they put on some Under Armour socks instead). Is that a sign they are sold out? I don’t know. But one thing I do know SA usually have all the available shoes on the shelf, in other words, a customer can try the shoes without asking help from the associates. This is opposite to specialty stores such as Journeys: in Journeys a customer would tell the size he/she wants, and the associates will go back to the warehouse and bring up the shoes. I guess that’s one reason Journeys’ shoes are fully priced.

There are some negative comments on Heelys, both the shoes and the stock. Barron had this article on the weekend paper. It mentioned two things: Heelys is not only faddish but aimed at a notoriously fickle customer (kids); there is also product-liability risk (kids got hurt when skating on Heelys). While these are both legitimate concerns, here is a parent’s comment I saw from fatwallet “Kids crack their heads riding bikes, skateboards, and scooters. Kids crack their heads on the playground. Heelys get your kids to turn off the TV and be active and there are health benefits to that.”

While the stock could take a hit from the Barron article, I believe ultimately it’s the sales and profit number that will matter. Interestingly, when I was about to leave the SA store, I saw a guy bought not one, but two Heelys shoes for his kids. Maybe they are really sold out?

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Business China

eBay’s New Strategy in China

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eBay’s China effort took a big hit today, or use eBay’s own term, they are adopting a “new strategy” in the China C2C market: they are going to team up with Tom Online on the online auction site. Whatever the term they use, the real story is they were losing market share ever since they acquired the eachnet, and put it under eBay China umbrella. There are many external factors to their failure:

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Categories
Fun Life

Are Human Beings Usually Over Worried?

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“Over-worry” is probablly not a good word to describe the Americans because if you go to malls these days, you know why: people are shopping like everything is free. Just kidding. I do think the consumer spending of developed nations especially the US is a big driver for the economy growth in developing countries such as China. Holiday shopping in the US means millions jobs in China: from engineers to migrant workers; from Fedex to UPS; from iPod to Shoes…America is an optimistic nation and American consumers will put everything on credit card. This is good, except everything should have a limit.

But I am talking about the other extreme today: the over worry or over reaction to some new unknown phenomena. I remember before year 2000, we were all so worried about the “Y2K bug” in computers and put billions of dollars into information technology, software upgrade(a lot of Indian IT firms grew out of this Y2K scare). When Jan 1 2000 finally arrives, the planes still fly as usual, and eBay still works,…but no one questioned whether the money spent on Y2K is worth or not.

A few years ago, year 2002/3, the US economy was in recession while the real estate was flying high, people started to get nervous: housing bubble! Sell your house now! Well, the bubble last at least until 2005/6, and the real estate bubble is only seen in over heated area such as CA, NY, Boston, Vegas and Phoenix.

Back to my favorite topic, the stocks. This Feburary, Crocs, the funky footwear (for summer) company, did IPO and some “experts” started saying “stay away from the stock CROX, it’s a fad won’t last”. Well, the stock almost doubled in Nov. When I went to malls these days, I saw people buying this thing like crazy.

This remind me the word at the tower of UT-Austin: you shall seek the truth and the truth will make you free. To be honest I worried about my stocks after I bought it from time to time, the only thing I am doing now is learn more about the financials, business of the companies.

Categories
Fun

Heelys Report the Week ending 16Dec06

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I got my Heelys on Friday. Have not tried to “heel” yet because I don’t want to hurt myself before Christmas. But I did some store visits for Heelys and found the buzz is still there. I also did some check on eBay, which I think is a better indicator than the local store numbers. Here are my findings on eBay:

Date    #heelys #faked 

12Dec06 1628 178
13Dec06 1300 128
14Dec06 1294 119
15Dec06 1270 81
16Dec06 1250 100
I visited Sport Authority, Journeys (those two counts the 11% and 11.6% of Heelys domestic sales for the first 9 months of 2006), Nordstrom, Dick’s Sporting Good, FinishLine, and Kids Footlocker.

1) Jouneys: every mall in St. Louis has this store. It seems selling well. I saw two instances people are looking or buying the Heelys. On a separate note, I was really impressed by Journeys’ efficiency in such a small space, their sales revenue per square footage should be very good. In a way I think kids like to “learn the fashion” from each other, in other words, the kids are helping Jounneys marketing the shoes, for free. Also, I found the associates in Jounneys are interesting young people, by “interesting” I mean they ususally have tatoos, strange hair style (young guys), and wear jeans with holes.

2) Sport Authority: while Journeys is a specialty store (it does not do discount very often); SA is a super market for sports goods (it gives discount for more stuff). I found the SA in Manchester Rd. is taking $10 off for all the kids’ Heelys. I am not particularly concerned on one instance. But if they continue to mark down the price (and in other stores), I will be concerned.

3) Other stores: Nordstrom is still the premier store (full price); FinishLine is a sports shoes store and it seems is not selling too many Heelys.

4) Knockoffs: I saw the knockoffs kiosk in the South County Mall yesterday. They are exactly same as the ones I saw on eBay. It starts from $49.99 after “30% off”. Again I questions the Parents/Grandparents’ mentality on buying knockoffs: I think they are just dumb, will you give your kids faked cars to drive?!

Categories
Fun

Cool Xmas Gifts and Stocks

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The malls are packed with people these days, and finding a parking spot is not easy. While online shopping is becoming a norm in this web 2.0 era, it seems to me the joy of windows shopping can not be replaced by the mouse click. OK, here are the list of things I considered to be cool in this holiday season. Note I am not affiated with any of the following companies, i.e., I won’t get paid if you click on the link. These are just from my objective view. With that in mind…

1) Gadget: iPod nano (AAPL, the stock ticker), yes, they are not new (generation two now), but with the Nike Shoe kit, you can record your jogging data with nano and upload it to your PC/Mac, isn’t that cool?

2) Shoes: Crocs (CROX) for summer and Heelys (HLYS) for other seasons.

3) Sports Apparel: Under Armour (UARM), although they don’t have endorsments from Lebron, Dywane, Tracy, Kevin, Tim or Yao, they are much cool than Nike, Addidas and Reebock.

Of course, there is something money can not buy, for anything else, there is MasterCard (MA) or Google (GOOG) Checkout.   

Crocs Shoes

Categories
Fun

Check out Heelys from eBay

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Did more “Heelys” search on eBay since now I am Heelys stock holder. (12Dec06) There are 1628 results using keyword “Heelys”. They include the shoes, safety gears (helmet, wrist, elbow, knee pads), and accessories (caps, T-shirt). There are both new and old items (for the shoes). It seems used ones are also sold well if they are in good condition.

Here is my concern, the knockoff or copycats. I found out they ususally have “heelys style” in their title. But some authetic Heelys also have those words. So I did search on this “heelys style -authentic”, which means exclude “authetic” in the titles. I noticed some sellers put “authetic” in the title to make sure buyers know those are real ones. While this is not 100% accurate, this gives 178 results. In other words, about 10% of Heelys items on eBay are knockoff or faked ones. I looked at some of the knockoff shoes. There are not too much discount if you consider the shipping cost. Say, an authetic Heelys costs $60, a knockoff on eBay sells for $30 plus $15 for shipping, the total would be $45. Besides the small price difference,  there are other reasons why there won’t be a big market for knockoffs.

1) Parents want the peace of mind from the authetic Heelys because in some way they kids well beings depend on the quality of shoes. What if the wheels fall off during skating?

2) Kids also have their self-esteem. Won’t a knockoff Heelys embarass the kid when he/she compare it with friends’ real ones in school? It’s probally better off not wearing the fake ones at all.

From investor point of view, I think a little bit knockoff activities are probablly a good thing. It means the product is popular and it’s generating a lot of buzz in the consumers. Now the key question is will Heelys’ buzz last for long. Or in other words, will it stay or will it just be a fad? That’s a million dollar question.

Last but not least, here is a positive report from hitwise, yes, finally something positive. 

Categories
Fun

Heelys and Web 2.0

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I did a little “Heelys” search on couple web 2.0 sites. First the flickr, it has 70 pictures; interestly, I searched “Crocs shoes” and it has about 670 photos. I noticed Crocs are everywhere in the stores and malls these days.

(Update 09Feb07) Flickr has 119 pictures as of today.

MySpace, the popular teen blogging site, has a team heelys page. I think this is sponsored by the market dept of the company. The user can join the demo team if he/she is real good. The page has 873 “friends”. This is my first visit to MySpace by the way.

(Update Jan23, 2007) Team Heelys Friend has 1021 friends.

(Update Feb27, 2007) 1104 friends.

YouTube, which generated lots of noise couple months ago when being bought out by Google, has this cool video to demonstrate what you can do with Heelys.

I also saw some knockoff products on eBay. Here is one. Note it titled “heelys style”. It seems to me easier to copy Heelys than Crocs because Crocs uses a special material, while people can copy Heelys mechanism just by analyzing it.

More about knockoff, I read an interesting comment at Zappos, a parent said”my kid worn off the heelys very quickly when learning to heel, should have bought a knockoff one for practice before buying the real stuff”. The real one is at least $59.99. I had to admit I have not bought sports shoes at/above that price…

Categories
Saint Louis

Check out Heelys HLYS in the Stores

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I loaded some Heelys HLYS stocks at its IPO yesterday: pulled the trigger a little early and I am under water for now. Since I can’t do anything about the day to day stock price, I decided to check out it in the real world…Please note this is by no means a substitute for the fundamental or financial analysis of the company, this is just my informal reality check of heelys in the market place.

I visited some retail stores which carries Heelys in the area. Here is what I found:

1) Sports Authority: I visited three stores, one in Brentwood, one in St. Charle Rock Road, and last one at Ballwin. They all put the Heelys in the main aisle; but they don’t have a nice display like Nordstrom’s. I saw some action about Heelys: one customer exchanged her son/daughter’s shoes at the Brentwood store. SA sells about 11% of heelys in US domestic market (from its S1).

2) Nordstrom: St. Louis only Nordstrom is at West County mall, it has a good display for the product, although not extensive. As I mentioned before I happened to see a customer buying a pair for her grandson. I noticed the Nordstrom did not offer as many styles as Sports Authority, and they don’t have any discount (SA gives 10$ off for a few products).

3) Dick’s Sporting Good: this is a big outdoor sports gear store. But it has a small display like Nordstrom. Not very impressive.

4) Finish Line and Journeys. The former is a sports shoes store, the latter kids/teenager shoes store. I am impressed by Finished Line’s display (see the photo below). But from S1 we know Journeys sell 11.6% which is even higher than SA. This is the first time I went to the Journeys, it seems a very popular place. I saw the Converse shoes, which sponsors Dwyane Wade. One of my coworker told me his son likes his Converse all-star shoes very much (it costs more than 100, although it’s not good for his foot), and eventually he hurt his foot by wearing them. I think that’s a typical phenomena in American teen’s spending: fashion is much more important than substance.

I still have not seen kids skating in the malls or streets, according to its road show presentation, I heard it just started getting into midwest market. From Heelys web site I saw they have a demo team and here are their calendar. It seems to me their focus is the two coasts (east and west), and southwest for now. Like many other things, the trend starts from California or NY 🙂 

IMG_4459

I also searched “heelys” at flickr and found there are 70 pictures. Some are pretty cool.

(Update 11Dec06) I went to Galleria on Sunday. Besides Journeys, I found Kids Footlocker also has Heelys. I went to Chesterfield Mall this evening, both Journeys and Finishline have Heelys, again Finishline puts the Heelys in a more obvious location.   

Categories
Life

Taekwondo Kids

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I remember there is a movie called “Karate Kids”, but I am not talking about that; I am going to talk about the kids in my Taekwondo classes. Since I joined the local Taekowndo club, I have seen many kids, and what impressed me most is not the kid who got black belt at the age of 8; on the contrary, I remember the promotion testing the most. Every two months the school will have a promotion test, during which the white belt will test for yellow belt, yellow for green, and so on. One of the testing requirements is “breaking the board”, for the kid it’s a very thin and small wood board. But sometimes some kids are scared about this and just could not break it; the instructor would come up with all kinds of encouraging words, and helped the kids. Sometimes I felt even if a kid just touch the board a little, the instructor could fold (and thus break) the board. Although I have not tried it.   

Today I saw a little girl did exactly that. Her kick is “jump side kick”; she would run, and then just stop when she reach the board, in other words she does not have any speed or power when she get there. My instructor, did the usual thing except “fold” the board. Finally the kid made a touch and break it.

I think similar to the “breaking board”, a lot things are not  as hard as they look when we try. Sometimes all it takes is just a “touch”. On the other hand, if we don’t try to “touch”, we don’t have any chances.  

Tae Kwon Do