4`ÄYZ[ZWYLHKPUHTHQVYW\ISPJH[PVU ZOV[ K\YPUN[OL;H]HY\H[YPWMVY Kelly Slater In Black and White �f;  HUKW\ISPZOLKPU Surfing Magazine . 7OV[V!+HU4LYRLS INCORPORATING THE STONE When the Slater movie came out there was a big article in Surfing Magazine about our trip to Tavarua that was in the film. I got the opening spread in a nice barrel. A gal in our marketing department said, “Budweiser is looking for stuntmen for a commercial they’re shooting at Cloudbreak in Fiji. You should try out for it.” I got the job with this other surfer, Rick Isbell, who became an owner of Tavarua Island Resort. David Nuuhiwa was the star. The commercial came out right around the time of our Tahoe trip, and I started getting checks in the mail every week for a few hundred bucks from the residuals. This money would help with expenses and pay for trips to Mammoth during the first years of Volcom. That was the spring of ’91. We got back from Tahoe in March, I quit my job in April, and on May 6 we incorporated Stone Boardwear Inc. We wanted to have a logo with the name, and we were working with this guy Thom McElroy who I’d worked with at Quiksilver. He let us come to his studio, McElroy Designs in the evenings and do the creative for Volcom after hours. He helped us with the graphics, the T-shirts, everything art related. We were trying to figure out a logo, and in this rock book was a picture of the center of a diamond that had been cut in half. We started playing with it on the computer and it looked like the diamond was squashed. We stretched it and flipped it upside down. It ended up being a strong, recognizable logo. I think it worked because I’ve seen those same shapes in the mountains, in nature. I’ll look at a mountain and think, “There’s a Volcom stone in that peak.” A lot of times you see it in rocks. I have many rocks that people have found and given to me over the years because they look like the logo. But when I went to trademark the Stone Boardwear name, there were already so many Stone-somethings. We turned to Malcom, which was one of my nicknames. We couldn’t register that either. Then, if you look at the word Malcom, there’s a V within the M. We went, “What about Valcom?” Tucker said, “Oh man, that’s kind of like ‘valley guy’”—and he was from the valley. We put the O from the com in the front: Volcom. We were like, “That sounds kind of cool—let’s sleep on it, see if we can trademark it.” Then we made a poster. That was the start—a poster and a name we could register. We didn’t even have a location for the brand—part of it was in my bedroom in Newport, and Tucker ran sales from his bedroom in Huntington. We went right to Mount Hood, OR with posters, stickers and T-shirts that summer. We were going to hang with Nathan and Gabriel, and we got to the Ratskeller Pizzeria for break-fast, walked in, and everyone was bummed out. I’m like, “What’s wrong?” They said, “Fuck, man! I think we’re getting kicked out—all the snowboarders. There was this party last night. Someone threw a televi-sion out the window.” It still ended up being an awesome trip. When we got back, we hired this 18-year-old kid, Troy Eckert, to surf for us and be the marketing director under me. He was a ripping surfer and snowboarder; he could skate; he could play drums—he was our first athlete and he helped a ton with brand building and remained with the company for many years. Volcom became this creative canvas for all of us to paint on. We could do whatever we wanted, we could control our destiny, and we had total freedom in our decision-making. There was no separation between work and play. It was all one big crazy salad that was 24 hours a day and we fed off it. That creative freedom became a driver for other guys who joined us down the line. RICHARD WOOLCOTT 073
The Snowboarder's Journal frequency 17.4: Page 75
