George Powell’s Ventura Skateboard Factory: How One Man Shaped Skateboarding

The original story. I'm George Powell and this is Skate1Corp. I had a master's degree in product design, which is a combination of mechanical engineering and art, basically design. I worked several jobs. I started out with Hewlett-Packard, which was right next to Stanford. It was an easy transition. Shout out for Hewlett-Packard. They treated their engineers and their employees really, really, really well, and it gave me my first introduction to how you should run a company if you ever employ people. I took a break to go travel, sail from the Panama Canal up through the San Francisco, and we stopped in the Galapagos Islands for six weeks. That was one of those things where you start your career, you go, I'm going to build my career, and then you get this opportunity to do a once-in-a-lifetime trip. It's a hard decision, but I decided I needed to go sailing. Eventually, I ended up in Los Angeles learning more than just design. While I was there, my son got to be about nine years old and started wanting to skateboard. And so I pulled out skateboards that I had bought for my wife and myself to skate around Stanford. We skated the Pacific Palisades, rest in peace, for about six months. And one day he came in and said, Dad, everybody else is getting yellow wheels, and they're really good. I proceeded to explain to him that yellow wheels don't make any difference, and the color doesn't affect the roll of the wheel. To which he said, no, Dad, no, they're really better. So he hustled me over to local hobby shop, and I looked in the cabinet, and my eyes went, whoa, polyurethane wheels. Oh my God, of course. And I had just finished working on a project utilizing urethane, so I knew what it was. And that got me going, wow, if we use urethane wheels, we're not going to slide out every time we go around a corner. We're not going to skid to a halt every time we run over a twig. That's good. And I got some, and I went, oh my God, this suddenly is the one part of the skateboard that was missing. And the reason why it would continually fall out of favor is people love it because it's fun to do, but it doesn't really quite work as a product. And being a product designer, I went, duh, let's work on urethane wheels. So I started designing urethane wheels and looking at what was available and testing different ones and building skateboards in my garage. Being a product designer, I had some Sears Craftsman table saw and tools in my garage, like those young guys. And I started building skateboards, trying to make them better because the way they were at the time, they'd been mass produced and they weren't really working on trying to make something optimal. As a product designer, you always make the best you possibly can. Started building decks, putting them together with wheel designs. I'd bake the urethane in my kitchen and build decks in my garage. We'd go to the local junior high schools or high schools to test the products. In so doing, I ran across Stacy Peralta, Tom Sims, and some other young kids that were becoming pros or were pros at the time and were involved in skateboarding. And I would ask them to test my products and my son and I would test them. I got to the point where I had a product that was something that Tom Sims needed in his line. And so I developed what's called a Quicksilver, which was a flexible slalom deck. I produced it and he marketed it. And I moved from Pacific Gallisades up to Santa Barbara, where my wife was from. And we rented a tiny little first factory and bought some used equipment and started making Quicksilver decks, which lasted about a year. And then my wheels were beginning to come along and I was starting to develop my wheels at the same time. So that was really the transition from being a young engineer into starting your own company. In the late 1970s, when Stacy and I first got together, everyone that was filming skateboarding was doing it with basically surf cameras and film Super 8 or 16 millimeter, if you were high end. There were no videos really available to consumers at that point in time. After a few years of fishing around with film cameras and filmers, what happened was that the consumer video camera was developed. And Stacy had grown up in a family that worked at Hollywood Studios. And so he was fairly familiar just with general requirements and procedures of filmmaking and studio work. And I've always been interested in that. So he came to me and said, hey, I think for only $1,200 we can buy a camera that we could video skateboarding with and the quality isn't bad. It's something that would be economical and I could try it. I don't think there are people that are filming skateboarding are doing a good job right now. And it's very expensive. And I'd like to try this. So we weren't making much money, but $1,200 was a lot of money at that point. But I went, OK, let's do it. And he bought the camera. He started making, he made one experimental film called Skateboarding in the 80s. And people saw it and went, hey, that's great. We need this to promote skateboarding. Because at that point in time, in the early 80s, skateboarding was still one of its all-time lows. We were making 50 decks a month, selling 30 sets of wheels. And we had, I believe we had 12 employees in a tiny little facility. And we knew we needed to do anything we could to get people interested in skating again and make it exciting. So we tried this and people, dealers that saw them, the kids that saw the first video liked it and said, give me more. So that was really the genesis of Stacey starting to make skate videos. He didn't want to just do a video of people going back and forth on a ramp or going down a hill shot from the bottom or the top. He wanted to really give you more of a what it's like to skateboard feeling and show the personalities and the culture around it. So that was really the, the first skate video was called the Bones Brigade Video Show. It featured the team that we call the Bones Brigade, which was named after our bones wheels, which had become the most popular wheel at the time. By the end of 83, going into 84, skateboarding started to grow explosively and almost the same way it stopped. Interestingly, in about 80 in June, when kids got out of school, sales just went like that and stayed that way for almost four years. And then in the fall, when kids went back to school four years later, the same thing happened and we were sold out. We made everything we possibly could. We grew at rates of 40, 50%, which was all we could finance. So we were sold out for three or four years, but because we had the Bones Brigade skateboard team, which were really the best skaters of the eighties and Stacey began to promote them. Most of that business came to us in the beginning and helped us to grow explosively. It went up, down, flat and back up again. And then it grew all during the eighties until about 1989. When Stacey and I first got together, he had left Gordon and Smith where he'd been a pro skater and he approached him and wanted to do his own team and extend his success, successful career with his own guys. And they didn't want to do that because they already had a team and they didn't want to disrupt everything. And so he left Gordon and Smith and interviewed around the industry. We were in a position where we needed a team manager and he was not only wanting to be a team manager, he was the most famous skateboarder in skateboarding at the time. So I felt really lucky that he chose us and we needed each other. And so when he said, I want to form a team of my own, I went, that's awesome. Do it, go for it. Let's start, let's start fresh. He didn't want to steal people from other companies. He wanted to grab young skaters that were just beginning their career that he saw had tremendous talent. As one of the most famous skaters in skateboarding at the time, he had a really good eye for what you need to learn and who you need to be and what your attitude needed to be in order to really thrive and excel. And so he'd picked these great skaters. And when the industry was flat and nobody was selling anything, other companies just went out of business and their teams were all shut down, but we didn't do that. When we began, we had the best skaters and that really made it possible for us to grow and for Stacy to attract additional skaters. From the very beginning, my very first employee was my wife's brother, was living in Santa Barbara. And at that point in his life, he was looking for a job, something to do. And he was pretty handy with his hands. He said, I'd like to, I'd like to work in the art department. We need to do that too. I went, sure, let's, let's give it a try. The very first graphic that he worked on was one that came from Ray Rodriguez. There was an idea that he'd pick up from an album cover that he liked, and it was a skeleton and a sword. And he sketched it on literally on the inside of a matchbook cover and sent it up. And I said, what is it? I can't tell. And he said, well, it's a skull with a sword. And I went, oh, okay, that's cool. I assigned Cort the job of developing this graphic. Thinking, I don't know, Cort asked for a skeleton as a model. And I bought a full skeleton. We called her Rosie. Rosie was our model forever. And Cort proceeded to, to render the skull and a sword. And I sort of became the instant art director and asked him to do certain things with it as it evolved. One of the few things that we did that was clever was to make this, this, the sword transparent so that it became more ghostly and ethereal. And the success of that graphic was instantaneous. It sold very well and people asked for more. And at that point, Cort was involved in doing skulls and working on other graphics. And we talked about doing a ripper, just an idea that came out of a skeleton ripping through a surface. I believe this was Cort's initial idea. He thought it would be fun. And this is Cort Johnson, known as VCJ today. Cort started developing the ripper and it evolved over a number of iterations until it got that classic triangular pulling tension through a surface. And we worked on the eyes for weeks, trying to get just the right eyes to give it the right feeling. And when it came out, it was also a huge success. And over the years, people have always enjoyed it. And what I realized at the time that those two became successful was that what we were creating was iconic images that tapped into the kind of Jungian subconscious image technology, if you will, that people inherently liked. Skeletons, skulls, life, death. And I've always thought of the ripper as being symbolic of regeneration and life eternal. And when it first came out, people went, oh, you're pushing death images and evil, which made us laugh. But as soon as you start doing skulls, you get into religious territory and you have to deal with that kind of backlash. Interestingly, if you ever go to New England and look at the gravestones from the late 1700s, you'll find that almost every gravestone has a skull on it, which amused me at the time. Anyway, we've continued with that basic iconic image and we work on it much longer than a normal graphic because what we're trying to achieve is a symbol that stands for the skater and his feeling about skateboarding and what he likes and one that will stand the test of time. By putting it into that Jungian sphere, it helped it to bridge generations and bridge decades. And skull and sword, 45 years later, still popular. The ripper, same. Mike McGill's skull and snake, same. With Tony Hawk graphic, of course, that was really our strategy behind the graphic development program. And Gord has just matured as an artist over the years and he's approaching, not my age, but he's getting up there and he's still turning out amazing graphics. I'm still working on product development. Gord's still generating tremendous art and my son Ari is taking over production and we're happy about the next decade. The things that we've done have usually been firsts. We led in product development. We lead in graphic development and the success of our products and the success of our graphics have created imitations and copies, spoofs, in a way. I'm always a little irked by it and then I go, hey, they're just advertising our products for us, so thank you. Skateboarding really started in Southern California and up and down the coast where the waves are good is where the first skate scooters got dethroned and taken apart and turned into skateboards. I grew up in West Hollywood and built my first skateboard out of a 2x4 and my roller skates and I think a lot of skaters did the same thing. Just like companies starting in their garage, skaters started with 2x4s because that was all we had. It became sophisticated. It became an oak plank. Places like Ventura and Santa Monica and Venice, San Diego, really were the heart of skateboarding. Genesis and even today, they still are. Skateboarding is spread all over the world. It's popular in Australia, Japan, Korea, even China, where we pioneered it. Skateboarding is no longer California-centric, but yet it still is because people come to California to be seen, to skate the California classic spots, and to hobnob with the best skaters. Ventura turns out to be an even better place than Santa Barbara was. Santa Barbara is a very small cloistered community and it has very little factory space and at one point as we grew, we finally had to buy a lemon factory, a lemon warehouse, in order to have enough space to put each of our groups in one place. And not only does Ventura offer us less expensive factory space that was ideal for what we need to do, place all of our work groups in the proper place and order and sequence, but also give us a workforce of young people that are looking for an opportunity to get involved in a factory position and grow with a company. We're very lucky to have employees that have been with us for 40 years. One of our first team members has been with us almost 50 years, Steve Cavallaro. We have literally dozens of people over 20 years, more than a handful over 40 years, as well as young people coming up through the ranks. So if you like working at a skateboard factory and you like doing what we do, then you're welcome to be with us for as long as you like. Ventura is the perfect place to develop that kind of young clientele that will come in and fill in our ranks and grow with us. When you look at a sport like skateboarding that has no rules and it has no boundaries and it's constantly evolving, you recognize that the equipment that skateboarders need needs to evolve with them. And we've gone from skateboarding in a straight line and doing kicktails and going down small banks and ramps to the incredible tricks that and kickflips in the air and sailing down 25 steps today. That requires equipment that didn't exist before. So as a product designer, that's stimulating for me because it's my job to keep up with what skaters are doing and make equipment that will help them to do what they're doing safely and not break on So when it comes to decks, we recognize that people were breaking seven-fly decks daily. Some people trying a particularly difficult trick would break several decks in a day and frequently they only lasted a week or two, which although the seven-fly deck is not super expensive, if you need three a day, it's something that becomes very expensive. So we developed technology that enables us to not break a deck. It's called flight deck technology and it's virtually indestructible and enables skaters to do what they need to do today in the environment that they've created for themselves. In the way of wheels, skateboarders have always migrated from the softest wheels to harder and harder wheels, primarily because harder wheels that will enable you to release your grip and slide them, which is necessary for certain kinds of tricks. So hard wheels roll really well on smooth surfaces and they release, but when you're skating them on rough asphalt or streets or down hills, they vibrate like crazy. They'll put your feet to sleep at about 100 yards. So we really needed to make softer wheels that would roll over everything, slide, and that really took a lot of compounding experiments, bringing different kinds of urethanes, different additives, different curatives, all together in order to enable the wheel to roll super fast with high rebound, to roll over bumps and cracks with less vibration, to absorb the vibration, and also to slide when you need to. And we call that dragon formula, but it's just one of the formulas that we've developed over the years to keep up with skaters and what they need to do. You don't lead by following other people, you lead by following skaters and what they need, and that's really the secret to our product development success. Follow the need. Talking about skateboarding is one of the things I think about a great deal, and having been in it for 50 years this year, I look at the changes and I always ask myself, are the changes going to be helpful to skateboarding or not? And it brings up subjects like, well, are contests good for skateboarding, or are they not good for skateboarding? Are contests good for skateboarders that participate, or does that actually harm skateboarding as a whole? Because skateboarding isn't just something that pro skateboarders do, it's something that a lot of kids do for fun, and it's not something that can be prescribed easily. And so we think the truest kind of skateboarding is really street skating, where people are interacting with the environment the way they want to, and seeing if they can do something on this ledge, or on this bank, or on this rail, or on this stone, or rock, or down this hill. And that really is where skateboarding is expanding and being creative. The future of skateboarding is going to be a constant battle between those trying to exploit it for money, and those trying to expand it for creativity and fun. You know, the thing that motivates me to make products is a desire to make the best possible thing I can. So if I see a problem, I see an opportunity. I always approach it not to just make a product, but to make the best possible product I can. And we often go overboard, and our product development tends to take longer than some people do, and I've been criticized for waiting too long to introduce a product. It's what keeps me excited about developing new products, is not just making a product, it's not a job. It's something you do because you love doing it, and you love doing it because you want to make the best possible product in the world that you can, that you can still afford to get to your customer.