TOP TO BOTTOM 4PRL7HYPSSVHUKTL^P[OV\YTPUPH[\YLTV]PLWYVWMVY  c;»Z The Garden 4PRLI\PS[[OPZI`OHUKIHZLKVU HWHPU[PUNOLKPKMYVT[OLJHTWPUN[YPWH[[OLTV]PL»Z UHTLZHRLZWV[ 7OV[V!>VVSJV[[*VSSLJ[PVU >P[OTVTHUKKHKH[=VSJVT»ZÄYZ[HUU\HSZOHYLOVSKLYZ TLL[PUNPU*VZ[H4LZH *(PU[OLZ\TTLYVMc; 7OV[V!>VVSJV[[*VSSLJ[PVU ENTREPRENEURIAL SPIRIT Some people take a year off before getting a job after college. I couldn’t wait to get to work. I was sponsored by Quiksilver when I broke my neck, then I coached their amateur surf team through college. After college I became their promotions manager. Eventually I wanted to run Quiksilver—realistically that wasn’t going to happen, but I wanted to be an executive and I wanted to make big decisions creatively. I’ve had a bit of an entrepreneurial spirit since I was a kid. It came from my dad and it was natural. I loved working; I wanted to do it. My mom also gave me the creative instinct. I remember being in Redondo Beach when Cadillac Wheels had just come out. They were the first urethane wheel for a skateboard and I wanted them. I was like, “Mom, can you buy me these wheels?” She said, “Well, you need to earn some money for those.” I went, “What am I going to do?” She said, “What could you sell?” We went to Baskin-Robbins and collected the discarded five-gallon ice cream tubs, washed them out and papier-mâchéd stories onto them from old magazines—it could have been about sailing; it could have been something about animals—then I’d varnish them and sell them for five bucks a pop as a custom trash can. That was mom’s idea. We didn’t have a lot of money back then and her main job was to raise us kids, but she was just making ends meet, working in an office, what-ever she could do to supplement the income she was getting from my dad. She always had a creative side to her, so she suggested those tubs. I made enough money to buy the wheels. When we moved to Anaheim Hills, we lived right on a golf course. People would hit balls into the rough off the first tee and wouldn’t be able to find them. So I would. I’d clean them up and resell them on the second tee. I worked construction for a summer when I was 12, laying concrete and building brick walls for a company where my mom worked. Through high school I worked at surf shops, and that was around the time that clothing sections made their way into the shops— they became boutiques in a sense. Watching Stüssy and Quiksilver blow up from behind the scenes had a big impact on me. One of the shops I worked at, Surfside Sports, would become one of the biggest accounts for Volcom. There was another shop called the Frog House in Newport, right on Pacific Coast Highway. Our parents used to drop us off and leave us there all day. When Volcom started, I lived behind the Frog House and they became our first account. 070 THE SNOWBOARDER’S JOURNAL
The Snowboarder's Journal frequency 17.4: Page 72
