Bob Hurley to Headline Agenda Emerge Conference Next Month

Hurley Founder Bob Hurley will headline a list of iconic creative directors, industry leaders and entrepreneurs in the youth marketplace attending the Agenda Emerge creative and brand building conference on the last day of the Agenda Long Beach Show next month.

Agenda Emerge, which is powered by Group Y, will be held Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2015, from 6-9 p.m. at the Long Beach Convention Center’s Theater.  The list of speakers for next month's event includes:

• Bob Hurley – Founder of Hurley: For Bob Hurley, it all started with the desire to make a better surfboard. Working closely with the best up-and-coming surfers in Huntington Beach and world champions like Rabbit Bartholomew, the Hurley label quickly became synonymous with the best high-performance shortboards on offer. Combining youth energy with a relentless drive to make surfing better, Bob seamlessly ventured into the apparel business, growing Billabong USA in the ’80s and ’90s to $100M before starting his own brand – Hurley – in 1999. For Bob, Hurley was more than an apparel company – it was an innovative, inclusive hub for every young creative mind with an affinity for the ocean. After partnering with Nike in 2002, Bob continues his mission of making Hurley the world’s most forward-thinking surf brand and a global Microphone for Youth.
• C.R. Stecyk III – Multi Media Artist: Stecyk is a multimedia artist widely acknowledged as a major influence within the genres of graffiti and street art. He has participated in numerous international exhibitions and his work is included in a number of public collections. A surfboard shaped and painted by Stecyk resides in the permanent archive of the Smithsonian. He was also a writer and production designer on the Sundance award-winning documentary film Dogtown and Z-Boys. C.R. is one of the founders of Juxtapoz art magazine, and has written for many different periodicals, books and catalogs. Stecyk was involved with the founding of the Zephyr surf shop in Santa Monica, California where the boards he painted helped to establish the graphic styles of both surfing and skateboarding. He also created characteristic icons of surfing and skateboarding such as the Zephyr moon, the “Vato Rat”, the Dogtown cross and the “Skate and Destroy” marks.
• Lyndon Cormack – Co-founder of Herschel Supply Co.: Cormack was born in the foothills of the Rockies, and he hasn’t stood still since. His childhood was spent on bikes, skateboards, snowboards, skates, and in pairs of shoes that were inevitably worn through from hiking and exploring. A few days after his eighteenth birthday, Lyndon’s desire to explore reached a global scale, sending him through Australia and all over Asia. Travelling aligned him with other individuals cut from a similar cloth, a few of which got him involved with the sales side of skateboarding, snowboarding and biking. Eventually Lyndon found himself in Vancouver, Canada, where he called a different set of foothills home. Lyndon is one of two founding brothers of the Herschel Supply Company – a key influencer in the importance of the backpack as an everyday fashion accessory. Named after a small town in Saskatchewan, Canada, where three generations of the Cormack family grew up, the Herschel brand was founded in 2009 and hasn’t stood still since. Now positioned as a global accessories brand, Herschel Supply products are designed in Canada and sold in the foothills of the Rockies, as well as Australia, Asia and other countries around the world.
• Mike Ness – Singer / Guitarist of Social Distortion: Ness is an artist that encompasses the true essence of an Americana Original. Known as a legendary member of the early Southern California punk movement with his band Social Distortion, Ness has become a Rock ‘n’ Roll Icon that has had an impactful career in music that spans four decades. Ness has truly evolved to portray a variety of musical styles that reflects his soul in each of his albums. A passionate songwriter and storyteller, Ness crafts authenticity, depth, humanity and raw emotion into his profound lyrics. His symbolic style and allusive image have gained him loyalists of all generations. Always staying true to his self and core values Ness continues to breathe panache into everything this ambitious, true working class hero encounters.
• Ryan Hurley – Creative Director of Hurley (co-moderator): From a young age Ryan Hurley has been at the cross roads of design and surfing . From the birth of Hurley’ s Phantom board shorts to the working with the Nike Innovation Kitchen Ryan’s has always had a strong connection to innovation and problem solving throughout design. Ryan is currently the creative director for Hurley where he leads all innovation and design.
• Shepard Fairey:  In 2003, Fairey founded Studio Number One, a creative firm dedicated to applying his ethos wherever art and enterprise intersect. Building from Fairey’s approach to design striking, thought-provoking work, the company has since evolved into its own creative entity and become one of the top boutique agencies in the country. Fairey’s art reached a new height of prominence in 2008, when his “Hope” portrait of Barack Obama became the iconic image of the presidential campaign and helped inspire an unprecedented political movement. The original image now hangs in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. In addition to his guerilla street works, as of 2014, Fairey has painted 40 large- scale murals around the world.
• Tinker Hatfield – VP Innovation & Creative Concepts at Nike: After 33 years at Nike, Tinker Hatfield is the most recognized sneaker designer in the world. While applying his architectural talent to designing performance shoes and using his entrepreneurial flair to market them, he has experienced and leads the charge in evolving footwear design innovation. Inspired by motorcycles, race cars, rock concerts and more often than not, just talking to people on the street, Hatfield believes good design is appropriate for its time and place, as well as represents a little futurism too. During his three decades at global sports brand Nike, he’s turned athlete connection into an art form.