New Balance/Warrior to acquire Brine (confirmed)

[mholtz]

In our last buyout, the incoming company actually made the old owners fire all the execs/sales people the day before the deal so that they wouldn't have to pay unemployment.

It doesn't make fiscal sense for them to operate them as seperate companies. Companies will tell employees anything to keep them around until they don't need them anymore, but when push comes to shove, it's really all about the bottom line.

[Sonny]

sounds like they are pretty bummed about this over at E-Lacrosse.

Brine Gets Bought But Look Who's Selling Out

By Michael Spinner

We got your e-mails. To answer the question I've been asked by so many of you during the last two weeks, yes, I do have an opinion regarding the recent acquisition of Brine by New Balance. I have a very strong opinion. I have a descending opinion that, so far, has not been voiced by any other lacrosse publication and likely won't be. This is a serious matter worthy of serious scrutiny, a matter that will affect you in the lacrosse stores, on the field, and in your wallets.

This is a big deal, and I wrote a long, detailed, impassioned column expressing my opinion on the uniting of two great American lacrosse equipment manufacturers, who now, in the words of the great Owen Wilson, can challenge the Klingons for interstellar domination. The Brine/New Balance matter is that serious, and, as I have done for the last five and a half years, I planned on telling you what really matters, how it affects you, and what it means for the bigger picture of our sport.

Unfortunately, my friends, you're not going to read that opinion. The column will stay buried in my hard-drive forever and The Latest Spin will continue to be published as if all is right in the lacrosse world. You see, I'm selling out. I'm not going to challenge the powerful authority of an equipment manufacturer that is basically swallowing up the competition with the exponential power of an unfettered and unchecked financial backer. I'm not going to stir the pot with the woeful truth about how this merger affects industry-wide standards for advertising, quality control, and innovation within our sport. I'm not doing it … because I care.

There is one reality I can share with you concerning the acquisition of New Balance by Brine, and that reality is that we're getting smaller. Lacrosse was a pretty small world at the beginning of the summer with only a handful of manufacturers and only three or four that really mattered. The lack of true competition within the manufacturing industry has made it awfully hard to make a buck in lacrosse. With Brine and Warrior essentially merged into a big corporate conglomerate, what remains are a mere few manufacturing companies on the landscape. That's less advertising dollars for teams, camps, leagues and publications like E-Lacrosse. It pretty much puts a ton of power into the hands of the big boys in the manufacturing industry, especially Warrior/Brine. It's a special-interest circle of sorts, one we see in the news industry everywhere. Basically, when it's corporate dollars that allow a publication to make money, the corporations will directly or indirectly determine what news is reported and how opinions are offered. Often, when a controversy arises, a major news entity has to make the decision as to whether they want to stop accepting advertising dollars from a corporation in order to remove a conflict of interest, or report the news as is and risk losing the advertising money. And these are hard news organizations, which we are not. This is just lacrosse, right?

Rest of the column on E-Lacrosse here:
http://www.e-lacrosse.com/2006spinpac.html