Introductions
I first met Louis when I was about 15 years old in my hometown of Morro Bay. Our skate scene was still developing and he was a critical component of that evolution. When news came that he was starting up a garage brand named "Small Room", it made my dream of becoming sponsored a tangible reality. Our whole crew ended up riding for the Small Room and it became like a family. Louis’ art direction and attention to detail made the brand what it was... super cool! Through his influence, several others involved went on to do great things in skateboarding (i.e. Tony Buyalos starting Shorty's, Russ Pope starting Scarecrow, and Joey Pulsifer going pro and becoming a partner at ACE Trucks!)
I, myself, made the decision to move on from Small Room to Powell Peralta. It was the most challenging decision of my teen life because of my relationship to Louis. He was a great mentor and friend.
To this day, I believe Small Room was the coolest brand I ever rode for!
—Frank Hirata
Louis came from Denton, Texas (I believe) to a teeny little beach town in Central California called Morro Bay. I got linked up with Louis through a local mentor and skateboarder named Jack Smith for a company called Eppic Skateboards. I was included in that skateboarding program, which is where I first met the likes of Alan Petersen, Dave Donaldson, Eddie Gomez, Brian Tucci, and Sal Barbier, who were all Eppic riders. This is also when I met Tony Buyalos (founder of Shorty’s), who also came from Texas and had moved to said small Central Coast beach town as well. I can’t remember for certain, but I’m pretty positive that Tony was a Louis recruit, and he wound up being one of my best buds. Thank you, Louis.
Eppic was a very short-lived project, but it allowed for what would become my most favorite skateboard company I’ve ever been involved in when Small Room was born. And while it was Eppic that brought Louis to us, it was Louis and Small Room that brought so many more good folks together, like Jay Sigafoos, Bobby Hiller, Phil E, Frank Hirata, Omar Atiya, and countless others.
The aesthetic of Small Room was original. It was very DIY and very Xerox machine. Very organic. It was cool, hand drawn, understated, American Typewriter, etc. All of this came from Louis. He was such a great curator, art director, photographer, and skateboarder. I'm super fortunate to be given so many opportunities by him, which at the time were probably pretty under-appreciated. Sorry about that, Louis.
I was able to work on some of my first graphic and hardgood design projects there. I contributed to zines and advertisements. I learned how to silkscreen. I was able to go on skateboarding trips around the country in a van. I was driven to NSA and CASL contests… All of which was encouraged and facilitated by Louis and Small Room.
Louis is a super talented and successful designer who is a friend to many. Thanks from all of us, Louis.
—Russ Pope
=O =O =O
CBI: In a previous interview, Sal Barbier said that your roots with Eppic Skateboards, and therefore Small Room, can be traced back to riding for Nash? That you got your start as a teamrider there with some crazy travel budget? Is that really how it went?
Louis: (laughs) No, that’s not how it went down. I never had anything to do with Nash, but it is true I had a sketchy sponsor for a minute. I was living in Texas back in those days, and I believe Nash was based out of Fort Worth, but I was never involved with them. I’ve been skateboarding since 1976, and even back then, Nash always made toys. They weren’t really skateboards.
My story really gets going in the mid-80s, and at that time, skateboarding was everything to me. I had a halfpipe in my backyard, I worked at a skate shop and skated every possible second. I still love it to this day, but my whole life revolved around skateboarding back then. Working at the skateshop was super flexible, so I would travel around the country to every contest or demo I could. I had a little car and gas was cheap, so if there was something I wanted to check out, I’d just drive there. I was competing in some am contests, and I’d always check out the NSA pro contests, because those were the biggest thing in skateboarding at the time. I was shooting for Lapper Magazine as well, and would even would judge pro contests sometimes, too… which was sweet because you’d get paid, like, 50 bucks! (laughs)
But yeah, I was all in. And if you go to enough of those things, you’re going to meet some people. I think it was at Virginia Beach in ’86 or so, I met a guy named Jack Smith, who was based out of San Luis Obispo, California. Jack was working for Transworld at the time and we became friends. He’s a rad guy, kind of an old-school skater, and pretty well connected. After getting to know him a bit, he hit me up on the phone one day, like, “Hey, I think I can hook you up.”
At the time, I was living in Plano, Texas, and working at the local skateshop, but I didn’t have any sponsors yet, other than the shop. Back then, Texas was all about vert and I was a street skater. Street skating was starting to emerge but still in its early stages. So yeah, at that point, I was kind of down for whatever.
Jack was an interesting guy with a lot of side hustles. Like I said, he was working for Transworld as a regional rep, but he was also consulting for this company out of Texas that made water skis. They had this special injection molding technology for skis where they took hard foam and stamped it with a small sheet of aluminum, making them really light. Apparently, they were killing it with these water skis, so now they wanted to make skateboards, too. Looking back, it wasn’t the craziest idea, because Santa Cruz was making foam decks. Powell had Boneite. Anyway, Jack hit me up and wanted to know if I could test out a few of their prototypes.
“Sure, I’ll check ‘em out.”
So, I tried a few of them out and they were terrible. Like I said, they were made out of foam, so there really wasn’t any strength there. They’d break almost immediately. The construction worked for skis because all the force is coming from the bottom, but riding a skateboard is totally different. This wasn’t going to work… But they had money. And on one of these calls, Jack asked if I was coming out to the Oceanside contest?
“I don’t know. That’s a big trip. Let me see if I can pull it off.”
“Well, these guys can sponsor you. You could skate in the am contest out there.”
“Okay! Let’s do it!”
What’s the name of this company?
Galaxy.
Oh yeah! They had those weird ads in Transworld with the crazy silver boards!
Because the bottom was aluminum! And because the sheets started out completely flat, you could print literally anything on them. Four-color process or whatever you wanted… But if the aluminum chipped or splintered at all, you now had a razor-sharp edge on the bottom of your board.
Perfect for grabs!
(laughs) Exactly. So, I was riding mostly Schmitt boards back then, I just slapped some Galaxy stickers all over my Schmitt Stix board for the contest and I was in. But seriously, skating at Oceanside was rad. For street skating, it was basically “The Big Show” in those days. I even made the cut to the Top 15, which felt like a big deal. Everybody else who made it to the finals turned pro within the next year, so I’m pretty proud of that… but that’s another story.
I think that’s what Sal must’ve been thinking of, because Galaxy wasn’t even a real skateboard company. They just presented me with the opportunity to skate Oceanside and I took it, but that’s really the end of that relationship. They tried to make it work for a little while after that, but I wasn’t involved. I knew that unless they started pressing maple boards, they were never going to get anywhere.
How did Eppic come about?
Eppic goes back to Jack Smith again.
After the Oceanside contest, I just went back home to Texas and kept working at the skateshop. A few weeks go by and Jack reaches out again, like, “Hey, the Galaxy thing is dead but I’m working with these other guys now. They’re trying to develop a new kind of skateboard.”
(laughs) Oh no.
“Oh yeah? What’s this one all about?”
“Well, I can’t tell you because there’s an NDA, but they want to fly you out to California.”
“Why?”
“They want somebody who’s proven and can really skate this thing. It’s these two kinda ‘adventure’ guys, but they’ve come up with something cool. They’re also working with Dave Carson, the art director at Transworld, who’s gonna be the art director for the company, too.”
Their first ad actually had Natas in it.
I was gonna ask about that! It says “Skateboarding will never be the same” with Eppic Skateboards branding, but it’s clearly Natas’s feet.
(laughs) I know, dude! It’s 100% Natas’s feet, and it’s not like he was on the team, either. Dave just put him in the ad. I honestly don’t know what that was all about. And yeah, it was a little weird, but compared to Galaxy, this new thing sounded much more promising. At the very least, they were saying the right things.
I honestly had no idea what this company was all about, but Jack had them send me a plane ticket out to San Luis Obispo. The idea was for me to skate one of their boards and they’re going to film it, because they needed to put together a promo video. I was still skating and competing a lot, so in the back of my head, I was definitely looking for some kind of sponsorship deal. Like most places outside of California, there wasn’t a lot happening in Texas for street skaters. At the very least, I figured I could get some good footage.
So, these guys fly me out, and I still have no idea what the deal is with these boards. I get off the plane and they take me to a “secure location” for their top-secret project. They roll this thing out… and it’s this fucked up s-shaped board! There’s almost no concave and it has this super weird tail. It’s really hard to describe, but the guy who must’ve invented this thing is standing there, and he starts in on his pitch.
“Okay, here’s the deal. Have you ever done tai-chi?”
“No, what is that?”
“Well, the most stable stance you can have is where one foot is diagonally in front of the other, so we’ve replicated that on a skateboard.”
The whole time, I’m thinking this the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. That there’s no way this is going to work.… but at the same time, these guys have just flown me out to California. And it’s not like I’m pro or anything, I’m just some skater from the South. I kinda felt like I was on the hook, that I couldn’t just walk away. So yeah, they filmed me skating this s-shaped board for a day.
The 28 Special?
I think so? I’ve tried to block most of this out of my memory. It was really bad. But yeah, we did the video thing and I went back home. Then I get another call from Jack.
“Hey, those guys figured out that the curvy board wasn’t gonna work, so now they want to pivot and just do a proper skateboard company. They want to build a team and make regular boards. And they have money.”
This was the beginning of Eppic Skateboards.
Jack says, “Come out for the summer, I’ve got a place for you to stay. We can design some boards and try to pull together a team.”
So yeah, I drove out to San Luis Obispo and start putting the team together. And because I’d been going to so many contests, I already knew which amateurs might be getting underserved by their sponsors, if they had any sponsors at all. Because there was a lot of that in the South and Midwest. People didn’t get much coverage there, but they were rippers. Like, I actually met Sal that summer, before he was even sponsored, and put him on the team.
Yeah, Eppic had some legendary dudes! Sal Barbier, Kris Markovich, Bryan Pennington, Ron Chatman…
Dave Donalson and Alan Petersen, too! It was early on in their careers but it was still a solid team. And that was my job: Team Manager. I’d never really done that before, but I remember thinking to myself, “Hey, maybe this will go somewhere?”
Jack Smith was also friends with Russ Pope, which is how I first met Russ. Jack had hired him to work on graphics, which was all very high-concept illustrated stuff. Super trippy, like hands coming out of the Earth. Russ was just starting out, but it was still pretty cool. He was kinda like the kid everybody knew who could draw, so let’s bring him in to do some graphics.
And throw boards into a flaming garbage can with Tony Buyolas.
(laughs) You’ve done your homework!
How did Tony enter the picture?
That’s an interesting one. Because at the time, Eppic was making boards, t-shirts, and wheels… they had their own little screen printing setup going. A couple machines and dryers. All this equipment, but they still needed people to work it. So, I remember telling them, “Hey, I know a guy we can reach out to. He’s a rad skater, too. Maybe he’ll be interested?”
And that was Tony Buyalos, who was a friend of mine from Texas. I think he was living out of his van at the time, buying uncut blanks and cutting them out by hand with a jigsaw. He’d paint them and sell them with his stencil as “Crete Tools”. That was his little company back then. But other than skating, he really wasn’t doing much, so I reached out to him, like, “Hey, you should come out here. I’ve got you some work. This skateboard company thing is going. What do you say?”
“Sure, I’ve got nothing else going on.”
So, Tony and his girlfriend, April, drove out to California and ended up living with me for a while. Tony and I were best friends back then. Hanging out and skating together every day, which was rad because the skate scene in San Luis was still really small. We started working together at Eppic, too.
At this point, they also launched Eppic Hardware… which they were calling “Check Out My Nuts”.
(laughs)
Yeah, you can’t make this stuff up. Anyway, one thing leads to another…
I think I know where this is going.
Yeah, and to make extra money, Tony and April started coming into Eppic at night to package up hardware. Because we’d get these big crates of hardware, they would put eight bolts each into little bags with a sticker and staple the little cardboard thing on top. That’s what they did to get some extra hours at the end of the day. Like I said, it was still Eppic Hardware, they were just packaging the bolts, but that’s clearly the inception of Shorty’s, which Tony would end up starting a few years later.
That’s insane.
Granted, what made Shorty’s great was all the cool stuff they did in terms of marketing and the boards. Rosa and all that. But this is where it all started. Tony realized that entire crate of hardware only cost 50 bucks and Eppic was selling eight bolts for six bucks a pop!
Tony was actually a big part of Small Room, too, but skipping ahead, that’s where Shorty’s came from.
How old are you at this point?
I was 20 or so.
And you were both a teamrider and team manager for Eppic?
Yeah, they were actually talking about giving me a pro model for a minute, but I honestly didn’t want to be pro skateboarder. I was older than most of those dudes. And I was good, but I wasn’t THAT good, you know? I didn’t want to be the pro that other people look at, like, “That guy sucks! How is he fuckin’ pro!?”
So no, I didn’t want to be pro, but I could’ve pulled that trigger, man. They had a full graphics package and everything.
I found a Kryptonics Wheel ad during my research for this.
Yeah, I rode for Kryptonics for a bit around ’86 or so… Another Jack Smith hook-up! (laughs)
But seriously, I was stoked on Kryptonics. I skated in the 70s when Kryptonics was legit, so I was stoked to be getting an ad for them, even though I was a street skater in a full pipe. I rode for Tracker and Blockhead wheels for a bit after that, too, and then I landed on Thunder and Spitfire during the Small Room days. That’s pretty much my sponsorship resume in a nutshell.
Is it fair to say we wouldn’t have Small Room without Eppic?
Yeah, I think that’s true.
At Eppic, there were a few of the same players in there with Russ and Tony. I wasn’t too involved in the graphic side of it, or the marketing, really. I was more of the team guy, working on board shapes.
I don’t know if Eppic really had a strong direction or aesthetic behind it. All those big companies had such a strong presence back then, Eppic was just trying to find some kind footing in the marketplace. It was a little all over the place.
Jack and his friend Paul were kinda like the marketing team. They were the ones driving a lot of that stuff. They both used to skate, but it was back in the 70s. They weren’t really street skaters or too heavily involved in that culture at the time. They could come up with the some pretty interesting ideas, but I just focused on the team and what I was supposed to be doing.
What ultimately happened with Eppic?
Well, the two guys who started Eppic didn’t skate at all. One was an ex-cop from San Francisco and the other guy was this spacey surf dude from Central California. He was the tai-chi guy. And that’s where they were coming from. They’d started this company and found a few initial investors, but had essentially burnt through all that money with big salaries, R&D, and making weird boards. Because they started out in search of a gimmick, but then they tried to pivot into being a regular skate company, they just ran out of money.
The main investor was this guy named Ray. He’d put, like, $150,000 into this thing, which was a lot of money back then. The joke was that these two partners had embezzled all his money because they had absolutely nothing to show for what they’d spent. I think Jack had been doing sales for them up to this point, but after seeing everything go down, he had to step in to take the reins. He kept the company bumping along for another year or so, but he finally had to call it.
And Small Room started up right after that? How did this work?
Alright, so Eppic finally goes out of business, right? Nobody had been getting paid. Basically what happened was Ray, the majority investor, came into the warehouse and seized everything. Fair enough, as he’d put the largest chunk of money into the company. And at that point, I figure that’s it. It’s over. But then Ray ends up approaching the only guys who were still around, which was me and Tony.
“Hey, do you guys want to start a new company?”
Just like that?
Yeah, pretty much. I think Ray was in so deep, he just wanted to get his money back somehow.
At first, I didn’t really want to do it, because I didn’t know much about starting or running a company. I was just the team guy who’d designed some boards. I knew skateboarding, but had no business experience whatsoever. But while I wasn’t quite sure, Tony was super into it. He worked out an arrangement with Ray to take over the Eppic warehouse, which was essentially a turnkey deal because there was already a space with screen printing stuff and office equipment… like desks and phones. The bones of a company were already there.
The thing is that I was living in San Luis and didn’t really have anything else lined up. I figured if Tony was all in on this new thing, I guess I’ll help out. I can do this for a little while and see what happens.
So, Tony and I start working on initial ideas for what this company could be. We tried figuring out a name for the longest time. The way it worked out is that we ended up back in Houston at a party with a mutual friend of ours, Renee. Out of nowhere, she goes, “What about Small Room?”
We’re both like, “Fuck yeah! That’s it!” And Small Room was born.
We officially launched the brand once we got back to California and immediately started making stuff. Just me and Tony. This was 1988… which, there weren’t so many small companies around back then.
Were there any other names prior to Small Room?
There probably were but I don’t remember any. There must’ve been a list at some point, but that’s been lost to time.
What made her think of “Small Room”?
I guess she just liked the words. We did, too. It has an interesting connotation to it. Something that was small and true. And it made no real sense, which made it even cooler.
Is there officially no space between Smallroom?
Correct, but it wasn’t hard rule. There isn’t supposed to be a space but you can break that rule if you want. Why not? Who cares. But it was always intended to be one word, which makes it even weirder. Like, what is that? Swedish?
Did you just plug into Eppic’s previous distribution?
We honestly tried to distance ourselves from that Eppic association as much as possible. We wanted Small Room to be its own new thing.
It’s not like Tony and I sat down and built out some master plan for any of this. We weren’t that smart, and honestly, we really didn’t even know what we were doing. We just wanted to do this kooky underground thing. I’d been a zine guy for a long time…
What was your zine?
It was “The Harsh Realm” for a while, then I changed it to “The Big Hand”. I changed it a few times but I had a pretty good circulation. I loved being in that mix with other zine guys, like GSD and Swank. I always thought that was cool, so I wanted to bring that same sort of feel to a skateboard company. That DIY aesthetic where it looks a little crappy, but that’s what makes it cool.
Is Big Hand ‘zine where the graphic came from?
No, that just came from one of our riders fucking around with the copy machine. Making his hand really long. I just happened to see it and thought it was cool. From there, we made a better version of it and that’s the one that came out.
What would you cite as influences on Small Room?
Again, I would say all those ‘zine guys. There were some amazing people doing those things back then. GSD and Skate Fate, for sure. Neil Blender, obviously. He wasn’t a zine guy but just the way he illustrated and the hand-done quality of what he did. I loved all that stuff.
I was really drawn to the idea of skateboarding as a creative outlet. I had tried some things before Small Room, but I didn’t really know where to focus. I was just doing my thing and shooting a lot of photos… trying to figure it all out on my own, which was pretty important. I feel like you had to do that a lot more back then.
Probably a bigger influence was all that ran counter to what we wanted Small Room to be, like Vision. I watched that company become a giant soulless corporation and I kinda hated that for skateboarding. Small Room was largely a response to what I saw other companies doing. Let’s just not be that. What does the opposite of that look like? I don’t know, but whatever we do, it had to be authentic.
An example of this was our not doing pro models. Because I kept on seeing dudes win a contest, and all of a sudden, they were pro. It didn’t mean that they were good enough to be pro or even remotely ready to become one. There was just such a thirst to have names on boards that I felt like these brands were kinda ruining some people’s careers. They were pushing them to be pro too early, which ended up fucking with their heads. Because a few of these guys weren’t able to live up to the hype these companies were selling, and that’s a tough place to be. We saw that happen a lot, which is why we decided against pro models.
I used to make little jokes about it in our ads. Like the one with Russ doing a feeble grind, it says “Curb Model Not Coming Out” in small letters. It was a thing for us.
And this was a few years before Acme, who also did the “no pro model” thing.
Yeah, they were definitely later.
I feel like Small Room was in that transition from Big Five to all the individual pro companies that spawned afterwards. But Small Room wasn’t even a pro brand, it just seemed like a bunch of guys.
Yeah, the Big Five were still in their spot when we started in 1988, although things were starting to shift. By 1990, the recession had really taken a toll on those bigger companies. It took Vision down. Almost took out Powell and Santa Cruz. And then you had these little startups kicking off, like New Deal and World. I like to think Small Room was part of that same wave, reacting to a lot of the same things as the industry evolved.
I just loved the whole underground scene that existed back then, which became a big driver for us.
What were some non-skate influences on Small Room?
There really weren’t many outside of skateboarding, man. I wasn’t necessarily a creative dude going into it. I never went to art school. I didn’t know how to draw. I didn’t even know what I was doing was technically “graphic design”.
I remember starting to work with this amazing designer named Brian Collins. We were working on a project together and he goes, “Why don’t you just do it?”
“I’m not an artist.”
“No, dude. You’re a graphic designer.”
“What’s a graphic designer?”
“It’s what you’re doing!”
“Oh…” (laughs)
(laughs) How would you describe Small Room’s overall aesthetic?
I wanted it to be like a secret code, or a speakeasy. One of those “If you know, you know” kind of things. I always liked that skateboarding kinda had its own language. I mean, back then, if you told the average person that you just landed a big ollie, they’d have no idea what the hell you were talking about. Looking back, it all makes sense and seems intentional, but at the time, Small Room was just what we were into. It was the skater’s brand for skateboarders who were willing to pay attention and catch some of the details. Because there’s a lot of weird sayings in there. Stuff that didn’t make a lot of sense. It was meant to be intriguing. It’s cool because it makes no sense, and if you don’t think that’s cool, then you’re not our person.
“Secret code” is a perfect description. Because you had to seek these little ads out, in the back of a magazine that you already had to seek out. And it wasn’t just skulls and bullshit.
It wasn’t so in your face, because a lot of graphics and ads had a maximalist design at the time. We didn’t want to do what all those other companies were doing, so we decided to do something completely different instead. Some of it came out super weird.
That’s why we ran small ads, just to go in that opposite direction… which honestly kinda worked for us. I knew from my own behavior that whenever you got a new magazine, you ended up reading it multiple times. The first time, you flipped through and saw the really big stuff. Then you’d flip through it again a little later. And then again after that. Eventually, you would end up reading everything that was in there, which was the point. By the time you got to your fourth reading, you’d finally see our ad and wonder, “What’s this about?”
It was like this little window into a secret world.
Would it be fair to characterize Small Room as equal parts art project and skateboard brand?
I don’t think it was ever meant to be about artistic expression. Small Room was always a skateboard brand first, it just happened to be based in a handmade aesthetic and weird trippiness. It wasn’t so much art, although I do love art. Art is obviously a big part of skateboarding and there were people in the art world who were also in our orbit, too. People like Andy Schansberg from Molotov, Ken Sigafoos, and Thomas Campbell. Thomas was a fixture in our scene and did some graphics for us, too.
Over time, I think Small Room would’ve probably evolved into being a lot more art-driven, but it was always about skateboarding first.
Yeah, the ’zine from your Small Room retrospective a few years back lists Russ Pope and Thomas Campbell as key collaborators. What was their involvement?
Well, Russ worked there. At the height of everything, we had about 13 people working at Small Room, and Russ was a sales rep… just because he was rad and everybody liked him.
Thomas was much more feral. He was always floating around, taking photos and making videos. Doing weird stuff. He seemed to like San Luis and had friends there, so he’d come out fairly often. We had a ramp in the warehouse and Thomas was always part of the scenery.
I just remember Thomas always drawing. Like, he’d come into my office, tear something apart, and draw on it. He’s always been a rad dude. Just somebody I’ve always loved and respected.
What graphics did Thomas do?
He worked on several graphics toward the end of the company. Honestly, they barely even got out into the market.
Thomas was always just around. You have to remember that San Luis Obispo is a very small town, so you knew every skateboarder. And the fact that we were a skateboard company in town with a ramp? Our warehouse just became the hangout. People would show up every day and skate, like Frank Hirata and Chris Pontius. They came by the office every single day. I feel like so much of what Small Room was came naturally from that crew.
Yeah, but they were just a shop and a warehouse back then. They didn’t have a ramp or anything… and it was mostly surfers. I don’t want to make CCS sound bad because they were a big reason why Small Room became so successful. Them putting us in their catalog was huge. Those guys really helped us out a lot, but they weren’t trying to be part of the local skate community so much back then.
I always wondered if there was some kinda tie-in between CCS and Small Room? Because those catalogs were such a big deal.
Oh yeah, CCS helped us out immensely. I mean, the circulation for those catalogs was a quarter-million skaters! They really helped promote us over a lot of other brands. Like, at one point, they gave me the entire inside front cover to do literally whatever I wanted to with it. Nobody got that!
At one point, they were interested in actually acquiring us, but I didn’t really want to do it. In hindsight, maybe I should’ve? Who knows. It just didn’t make sense at the time.
Were Tony and Russ the only Eppic riders that carried over to Small Room?
I think so. Alan and Sal didn’t come over… I was the one who actually cut those guys loose. Because with Eppic going under, I didn’t know what was gonna happen. I knew those guys were good enough to land on their feet with something else. And good for them. That was the right move, especially with Small Room not doing pro models. Can you imagine Sal not having a pro model at that time? Dude, go ride for somebody else!
Did you know Tony and Russ had any ambitions to start brands of their own?
No, not at all. We were just kids, man. They were only 18 or 19 years old. I mean, Russ just seemed like the goofy guy who worked at the shop. He listened to punk rock and skated curbs. I love Russ but I could’ve never foreseen him doing all the rad shit he’s done.
It was just that time in your life when everybody is trying to figure out what they’re doing. Because when Small Room was really going, Russ ended up moving to Santa Cruz with no job and no prospects. I was really bummed at the time because I wanted him to stick around San Luis Obispo with me. He was moving there because of his girlfriend, which I thought was kinda dumb, but it was the right move because he ended up marrying her and being happy for the rest of his life!
He eventually landed a job in the warehouse at Santa Cruz, literally working his way up into doing SMA for a while. And, obviously, Creature was a great brand. Scarecrow was a great brand. He’s done a lot of great things. It’s cool to have known him prior to all that when he was just a funny dude with a truck. Watching him do all this stuff has been pretty cool.
Tony didn’t come across as having a lot of ambition back then, either. He ended up splitting early on from Small Room, and there was a lot of drama there. He moved to Tahoe and was a lifty for a while. Just hanging out up there, snowboarding. After a while, I guess he felt the need to do something else, so he moved to Santa Barbara and started Shorty’s. The rest is history.
Probably the most well-known Small Room rider, how’d you find Frank Hirata?
He was just the local kid that happened to be really good. He would come to skate the ramp all the time, and we hung out with all the same people. It only made sense to get him on the team. So yeah, he rode for us as an amateur for a while until he ended up getting approached by Powell. I still remember the day he told me. Because he was just a kid, man. 16 or 17 years old. I was sitting on the hood of his truck and he’s like, “I got an offer from Powell.”
“What are you gonna do?”
“I think I’m gonna take it…”
“Well, yeah! Duh! That’s probably the best offer you could ever get!”
Because being on Powell was a such a big deal at the time. This was before they started falling off. I mean, I would’ve loved for him to turn pro for Small Room, but I couldn’t expect him to do all that in order to not have a pro model. That just wasn’t realistic, especially with Powell waving that golden ticket around. Dude, go to the chocolate factory. Seriously.
I know he had that big Propaganda part right afterwards.
Yeah, he pretty much went from Small Room straight into Propaganda. That’s how good he was. He definitely had aspirations in skateboarding with the talent to actually make those things happen. I realized that, which is why I tried to urge him on, like, “Dude, you should do that. That’s fucking rad.”
Frank was rad back in the day. Just a really good kid. Like, he probably got good grades in school.
Did he really wreck his truck in that ad?
Yeah, he did. That actually happened. And I have no idea why I made that an ad. I guess I just thought it would be funny. It’s kinda funny but also kinda stupid. That’s what makes it rad.
What about Chris Pontius?
Yeah, he was a San Luis kid, too.
I’ve always heard he ripped back in the day.
Oh, he was an insane skateboarder. And he was the same then as he is now, just kind of a weird dude. He was weird and his skateboarding was weird, but he was also a good friend. He would stop by every single day, whether you wanted him to or not. He was just a part of it.
Chris wasn’t a contest skater or anything, he was just part of the team. He had a rad attitude and was always good to have around. And he could destroy the Small Room ramp. It was crazy the shit he could do. He was probably the raddest dude to ever skate that ramp.
Was he a tech dude or… ?
Let’s just say he did a lot of confusing fingerflip stuff.
(laughs)
I know. He’d do some weird varial fingerflip thing and you’d be like, “What just happened?!”
He could do all types of that stuff, super clean. It was impressive. And he was fun to skate with. Obviously, he has a good sense of humor. We had a lot of fun times.
You know I gotta bring up Small Room’s infamous rejection of Chico’s sponsor-me tape. Were you even aware of that?
(laughs) Yeah, I figured this was coming. Chico was rad and his video was rad, but we probably had 20 other videos at that same time which were also rad. We were constantly getting tapes back then and we couldn’t sponsor everybody, you know? At that point, there was no way of knowing that Chico Brenes was about to go on and become Chico Brenes. He could’ve been another one of those kids who skated until he finally got a car and quits. That happened a lot, actually.
There were just so many rad people everywhere. Like, there are rad people in Virginia you never hear about! We did have quite a few dudes in California, but we consciously tried to decentralize the team a bit with guys across the country. Honestly, it did more for the brand to have a really rad kid in Georgia than it would to have a rider in the Bay Area. That area is so concentrated with good skaters and companies, it’s harder to break through. There wasn’t shit going on in Atlanta back then. If you sent boards to a kid there, everybody in the whole city was going to know.
That makes sense. And let’s face it, Chico was gonna make it regardless.
Totally. We did not derail his career one bit.
Any other noteworthy “almosts” on the team back then?
Not that I remember. Definitely nobody else where I thought, “Well, we missed that train.”
The thing is we weren’t built on pro models, so getting that next big guy wasn’t such a thing for us. I was happy with Small Room being almost like an incubator, where I’d find kids as they’re coming up and work with them until they were ready to move on. I liked trying to give opportunities to kids who may never get one otherwise.
A good example of this is Dave Mayhew, who rode for us early on. He didn’t have any sponsors yet, and I sponsored him for about a year or so. He ended up getting on Evol after that and went pro. He really had a moment there. But at the time, he was just a kid out of Wisconsin.
What about someone who had a model on another brand coming to Small Room, like Phil E?
Well, Phil E came from that zine culture, too. He and I were pen pals for a long time. After Skull, he was kinda floating around for a while, so I was like “Yeah, I’ll send you some boards.”
Phil’s a rad dude, and was a bit of a name, but I liked him more because of his zine. He had a really rad art style. We talked about art influencing the brand, this was an instance where it felt like a good opportunity to veer the company into a more art-driven direction. That we could maybe get more artists involved.
Honestly, Phil’s ad also came from having a deadline. I had this rad photo of Phil skating a curb, I’ll just use that. (laughs)
Phil E was not a competitive skater. When you say “team”, we did have skaters who were competitive and wanted to win contests, but we also had dudes who just skated and we gave them stuff. It’s not like we were trying to create the next Bones Brigade. We just wanted to have a crew of rad dudes who were into cool stuff. Some of their focus was skateboarding and some of their focus was more on the art side of things. I think that’s a cool balance. Phil knew we didn’t make pro models, so there really wasn’t much of a conversation.
How would graphics typically come together?
Coming from the zine world, a lot of the original stuff was that photocopier style with clip art and lettering. Trying to push that into being more graphic instead of simply being cut and paste. Like, I would copy something a thousand times to where it got all cool and weird with fuzzy patterns emerging.
After a while, I started to have ideas that I didn’t know how to do, so I started working with different designers to make logos or redo some of the graphics. Like I said, that original hand graphic was done on a copier in our office. I had a designer ask if I wanted to clean it up and when I saw his version, it looked fucking amazing. It was so much better, so we started doing that more.
The whole thing was such an evolution, based on what we could do and what we had access to. Things that I learned over the course of doing it, because I didn’t really know a lot about graphic design when I started. A lot of that early stuff came down to what was possible at the time. What do we have to make things? Oh, that clip art is cool. Let’s make a graphic out of that.
One thing you have to remember is that we were printing all of our own boards and t-shirts, too. That added a whole other level of complexity to this as well. In hindsight, it was kind of a harder way to do things, but printing our boards gave us the flexibility to do whatever we wanted. We didn’t have to do a full run of red, we could start out with red and then add some yellow or black as we went along. That meant as the run continued, each board would look different.
T-shirts were the same way. We’d always have to tell our retailers that the t-shirts will have the graphic you ordered, but it might be on the back, on the front, or on the sleeve. Maybe in the armpit. You never knew exactly what you were going to get, which kinda became our aesthetic. We wanted every product to be unique. Like, if your buddy bought the same Small Room board as you, it may be the same model, but it was never going to look the same.
Was a lot of this stuff found art?
Yeah, most of it, but then it would get tweaked or manipulated somehow. There were probably some copyright laws that were broken, but skateboarding was so far off the radar at that point, it didn’t matter. Not that we were making all that much money anyway.
Toward the end, I did start opening up the graphics more and bringing people in. Like I sponsored Ken and Jay Sigafoos from the East Coast, which Ken turned out to be an amazing illustrator. It was cool working with him on some things, which made me realize how rad it was to have different people making graphics for us… Just to see how it all fit in with what we were doing. So, Dave Carnie ended up going a graphic for us. Thomas Campbell did some graphics. I was talking to Ron Cameron and Andy Schansberg at Molotov. That’s really where the brand was starting to go: Disparate designers doing cool weird stuff.
Who did the classic Box logo?
I can’t remember who came up with the initial idea and how it all fit together, but this guy named Bill Mulder built it. He’d worked on some Eppic stuff prior to that, so I hit him up with the idea. I had it all sketched out and he ended up redoing it on the computer, which wasn’t happening much back then. He made it really clean and perfect.
What about the Drip?
That was a Tony Buyalos original. He was renting a place that had those little grippy tiles in the shower, shaped like little flowers. He got the idea from that. He drew it out by hand, so it was a little sketchier, and that became the graphic. Probably one of our most well-known graphics, for sure.
We fucked with it later on and made a stretched-out version of it, too. That was a good one.
Why a purposefully misspelled logo for your tiny brand?
I guess it was just another one of those things, like, “Why would you do that?”
“Well, why wouldn’t you do that?”
It’s still there, just phonetic. It was all in how you saw it, it just wasn’t spelled correctly. Intentionally vague. Like, I love it when things are spelled wrong on purpose. People would always ask, “What does this mean?”
“What do you think it means?”
There really is no right answer.
I mean this in the most complimentary way, but do you ever look back on any of this as maybe too smart for its own good?
(laughs) I’ve never really thought about it that way. I do feel like some of this stuff was maybe a little ahead of its time, but I don’t think I’m that smart. It’s just that some of this stuff was born out of the moment and the time… let’s do it this way. It was definitely ambitious, because we were trying to do something that never really existed before. Trying to create something original that didn’t look like everything else. So many brands fell into what was being driven by the market. I didn’t want to look like everybody else. Like if you were to look at a wall of skateboards, I wanted you to get to the Small Room boards and immediately wonder, “What the fuck is that?”
Small Room was never meant to go head-to-head with Powell or anything, we just wanted to do our own thing. To do something intentionally different… maybe to a fault. I do think we might’ve gone a little too far at times, and not everything worked, but I’m still very proud of it all.
Is there a story behind the Pigeon Man?
Nothing too deep. That one came out at a time when I was trying all these different types of screen-printing techniques, like a half-tone pattern with lines instead of dots. Just experimenting with stuff. I don’t know, it’s just a weird dude with a pigeon and a backstory you’ll never know.
I loved that board.
Thanks man, and that’s something to remember, too. These boards were really good. Because when we first started out, we were working with Watson, who made boards for lots of people. They were good, but about a year or so into Small Room, Schmitt left Vision to start New Deal and PS Stix, which blew up and became this huge thing. I had known Paul for a while, and I actually asked him in conversation if he was making boards for anybody else. He goes, “No, but I’ll make you guys some boards if you want?”
“That would be amazing!”
So yeah, Small Room was the first brand that PS Stix made boards for, outside of Paul’s own in-house brands. That really helped us with going to distributors, because they couldn’t get enough New Deal Boards. We had the same wood. And these boards were beautiful, man. Super well-made and strong. I always thought they were the best boards on the market, and we had that all the way to the end.
Last graphic question, and probably my personal favorite: The 9 Fingers.
I like that one, too. It’s funny, because I look at that board now and I don’t really know what it’s about. I’m still not sure on the context of that photo. Because if you look at it one way, it looks like he’s on the ground, but if you flip it over, it looks like he’s looking down. Honestly, I could never really tell which way it was supposed to go.
But yeah, the way he’s pulling his hands back, one of his thumbs is folded over and not visible. It looks like he only has nine fingers. I don’t know why that was so prominent to me, but that’s why I called it’s that. And because “Small Room” has nine letters, if you look closely, the tip of each finger has a letter on it.
We talked about your quarter-page black-and-white ads being intentionally something, but was there a bit of financial necessity, too?
It was kinda both. Let’s talk about PowerEdge, because that’s really where it started. I knew Rick Kosick, who was the editor, and I wanted to support him and what he was doing with the mag. Also, their ads were really cheap. I remember asking him, “What’s the smallest, cheapest ad you’ve got?”
“Well, we have classified ads.”
“Can I do a display ad in your classified section?”
“Fuck it. Why not? It’s the same amount of ink.”
My thinking was that there are a lot of small ads in the back of magazines. How can we stand out in that world? What if I buy the smallest ad available, right in the middle of all the classified ads? Because no other brands were really advertising on that particular page… and it ended up working.
For Thrasher, the smallest size they had was a 1/4 page, so I went with that. Again, it was back to paying off that idea of us being a small company. We’re Small Room, we do small ads, and that was it. But here’s the thing: Most of the brands doing small ads back then did them real shitty. They were crappy companies and their ads usually sucked. What if we took that space and did something cool? We were just trying to do something different in a space where you didn’t expect it. A little surprise for someone to notice.
How much time and energy would you typically put into ads?
Probably not as much as I should’ve! (laughs)
That’s not true. There were times when I really thought about what we were trying to do there. The thing is that after a few of these ads, there got to be a bit of a formula. Throw in a graphic, maybe a little sketchy stuff or some hand-drawn type…
Things really changed once I got a computer. I was trying to play around with that because it was new and exciting. Like, all of a sudden, I could typeset everything, you know? But looking back, I like the hand-done stuff better. It was just that time of experimentation. Always.
I will admit that a few of those ads were definitely products of their deadlines and simply needing to get something out the door.
What are some of your favorites?
Well, there’s the Russ “Curb Model” ad, which was super cool. There’s an ad of Omar just standing there. I really like that one, mainly because Omar was amazing. A really good skater, but also just the raddest kid you could ever meet.
At this point, my favorite ads are more about the people being featured than the actual ad itself.
How would riders typically react to these ads? What was their typical feedback?
It mostly depended on the rider. Half the time, they’d be stoked, but other times, they’d be like, “What the fuck did you do?!” (laughs)
Because there was this whole weird dynamic with riders and ads at the time, like, “This is your ad and it’s a really big deal!”
And it is a big deal. I don’t want to take away from that, but let’s not lose sight of what it really is. It’s a tiny ad in a skateboard magazine. Calm down. And with our brand, we’d rather do something funny or weird that would stand out. I can guarantee you that some of the riders were not very happy with what came out.
I remember making an ad for Chris Watkins, who was another rider that was always just around. Ridiculous skateboarder. But his ad was just a photo of him walking, and I guess he’d just kicked out his skateboard to where it looked like it was kinda floating….
Skateboard Levitation.
Yes! And that’s another one of my favorites, too! I thought it was so funny, but I guarantee that one bummed him out. He was such a ripper, that ad didn’t really do him justice.
What about “Bunjee Board”?
Oh, I forgot about that one! That was this dude, Jeff Tipay, who worked at Small Room doing screen printing. He had a ramp in his yard and he used to take these crazy runs with an innertube around his board. He could do all this super weird stuff with it. I thought that was amazing.
That was real?
Yeah, and I really appreciated that. Because there was such a core idea of what skateboarding was supposed to be back then. It was very defined. Nowadays, it feels more flexible, but back then, it was very much coded what was “cool” and “not cool”. I appreciated the fact that this guy was just out there having fun, doing his bunjee board thing in his backyard. That was cool to me.
Who was that big face with the head Drip?
Another found photo, probably. If I didn’t have a good rider photo for that month, I’d just make it into more of an art thing… and that’s what we got. Sometimes, things got weird.
Where did “Send Whatever” come from? And what were some of the more exotic things received?
It was the anti “Send A Dollar” that was always in ads back then. Just send whatever you got. Because I remember from working in a skateshop, so many kids would come in with no money. Either their parents didn’t like skateboarding or they just didn’t have a job. Not to make myself sound like I’m Robin Hood, but why shouldn’t they be able to get a sticker? That’s so dumb. Why are you trying to make money off a sticker that’s promoting your brand?
Just send us whatever you got. And then it naturally turned into this thing where kids would send the most random shit in the mail, which was so rad. Like, we got an envelope one day where somebody sent us their sandwich. Some kid sent us his sister’s hair. We got somebody’s homework. One time, we got a duck decoy in the mail. I loved it, man. It made opening the mail so cool. (laughs)
We were basically sending out stickers for free, we just wanted to have some fun with it. And if somebody sent us something really rad, we’d try to stoke them out with a t-shirt or by sending back a mountain of stickers. Just to freak them out.
How did you feel when other companies started doing the “small ad” thing, like Think and Molotov? Because it did morph into a trend at the time. I feel like Powell even spoofed it in an ad.
I would never say we were the first to do anything, but we were very early on with that. I think it had more to do with a backlash against those big corporate brands. Because that’s where skateboarding was at back then… and then it exploded with all these little companies coming out of the woodwork. Economics had a lot to do with it, too. Ads are expensive and you need exposure to get your little company out there. Small ads worked for us and fit our brand.
I don’t look at Small Room as “pioneers” in that regard, it was just part of the psychology at that time. A response to what was happening. And it’s not like I ever got mad about other companies doing it. We hadn’t been doing the little ad thing for that long before them. Maybe if we’d been doing it for years and suddenly Powell started doing it, I would’ve been pissed, but no.
Do you think you would’ve eventually moved on from that small ad format?
Yeah, because we were already starting to mess around with other sizes. You always want to keep evolving, although I never thought Small Room would become a big company. In fact, there were times when it seemed to be getting bigger and I felt super weird about it. I honestly had a really hard time with feeling like I was profiteering off skateboarding.
It was kinda like the curse of a small company back then. Because you build it up around a particular ethos, what happens if you get bigger? What does it even mean anymore?
Fear of selling out was a common pitfall for our generation.
Yeah, and I was totally drinking that Kool-Aid, man. I actually felt kind of guilty when we were making money… but it’s okay because that all sorted itself out. (laughs)
(laughs) How was Small Room looked upon by the rest of the industry?
Well, it’s not like we were really a threat to anybody. Our ambition was to be small, which is not a very threatening proposition. And we didn’t have any pro riders either, so it’s not like we were looking to steal anybody. That’s usually where that type of tension comes from.
Honestly, I don’t really know what people thought because I was in San Luis. If we’d been in San Francisco or LA, I would’ve been more in that mix, but we were in our own little bubble. It was kinda nice, because there were a lot of industry politics going on back then. Some of that was pretty and some of it was not so pretty. I tried to not be a part of it.
I gotta ask... what happened with Tony and Small Room? Why’d he leave?
Okay. So, like I said earlier, Tony and I started Small Room together. I wasn’t totally convinced at first, so I was kinda more freelancing in the beginning. There was also Ray, who was the main investor in Eppic that owned all the equipment. He was a retired schoolteacher, which should give you an idea of where he was coming from. He had lost a ton of money with Eppic, so his entire motivation with Small Room was getting his investment back somehow. It was actually Ray’s idea for all three of us to be partners. He still owned 100% of the company, we were just going to share the profits.
At the time, Tony really wanted to turn pro. He’d been riding for Eppic and was an amazing skateboarder, and now he’s a rider for this new thing. His strategy for how to get the company off the ground was to go out on the road for six weeks and skate everywhere while promoting Small Room. And I remember telling him, “Dude, there’s so much to do here. Shit needs to get printed. We gotta do ads. We need to get distribution deals in place. We’ve got lot of stuff to do.”
“No, I’m gonna go skate.”
“Alright… well, I’ll handle this stuff for now, but when you come back, we gotta make this thing go.”
So, he leaves. Six weeks turns into eight. And in meantime, I’m out there hustling. Getting all the ads going. Running the production. Getting all the dealers going. Sweeping the floors. You get the idea. Making stuff happen.
Tony comes back and I could tell he was kinda bumming, so I ask him, “What’s up, dude?”
“I feel like you’re running everything.”
“I am doing everything! But it’s rad! Things are really starting to happen!”
I never intended to cut him out of anything, but there were things that needed to get done and he wasn’t around. And it’s not like I could just stop everything when he got back, either. Things were already in motion.
Unfortunately, this really seemed to bother Tony, and I feel like he largely checked out after that. I noticed, but I just tried to keep going and focus on getting the company up and running. But then Ray noticed it, too. And it’s not like it was a couple days, either. This went on for a while. Ray got really tired of it, so he started coming to me about things, like, “What are we paying him for? He’s not doing anything.”
“But he’s a partner in the company. You can’t just fire him. That’s not how it works.”
It was also around this time that Tony got into roadkill taxidermy. He started picking up dead animals off the side of the road and bringing them home to soak… because you have to burn off the flesh to collect the bones. It was pretty weird. But I remember walking into work one day and wondering, “What the fuck is that smell?”
I go into the darkroom and there’s a bucket with a dead cat in it. “What the fuck, dude!?! This is not cool!”
So, there was that. Things were getting out of hand. And it was a bummer because I really wanted it to work with Tony, but it wasn’t working. Ray was starting to write him off while Tony was basically doing everything wrong in Ray’s eyes.
The final straw was when we received a check in the mail for $1200. And I’m not making this up... Rest in peace, Tony. I love you… but his understanding of our arrangement was that every time money came in, we would immediately split it up three ways between us. So, he starts demanding his cut of the $1200.
“I want my four hundred dollars.”
“Dude, this isn’t profit. We have to buy boards and shit. It has to go back into the company. We figure that out at the end of the year. We calculate the profit, if there is any, and split that up. It’s not like every penny that comes in is split threeways. It doesn’t work that way.”
He took that as Ray and I trying to screw him over.
It was awkward, and Tony was super pissed about it. Unfortunately, Ray had also been part of that conversation, and after that, he was like, “I’ve had it.”
That night, Ray changed all the locks. Tony shows up the next day and his key doesn’t work... And I had nothing to do with that. I didn’t even know, because when I got there, my key didn’t work, either. But by that time, everything had already gone down with Tony and Ray and he split.
It put me in a really tough position. Because I’d spend the last six months building this company, getting it going, and it’s actually working! It’s rad and people are stoked! But at the same time, Tony was my best friend.
Ultimately, I decided to keep doing the company. My hope was that Tony and I could still be friends, but he was definitely pissed. He carried a grudge that I don’t feel ever got resolved. I tried to help him out a few times after that, connecting him with different people… because this was years before Shorty’s and he didn’t really have much going on. It was a bummer because he’d been my best friend for years, and suddenly, we weren’t really friends anymore. The whole thing was based on a misunderstanding.
Thanks for getting into all that. At its peak, how big did Small Room get?
For a while there, we had a really good thing going. We had distribution across the US, Japan, Europe, South Africa, South America… pretty much anywhere skateboards were being sold. It was out there and gaining steam. We even did a tradeshow! We did an ASR with a really weird booth on a shoestring budget, but there was energy around it. Like, I remember George Powell, Paul Schmitt and Bob Denike all standing in my booth, checking it out. That was a good moment for me. There was obviously a lot of chatter going on.
At one point, we got approached by Santa Cruz. They were looking to potentially buy Small Room and absorb us into NHS. In hindsight, that probably would’ve been a smart move but I just wasn’t ready for that. Because this was at the peak of our popularity, why would I sell now? Everything was going so great. Regardless, they saw potential there.
As far as how “big” Small Room became, I don’t really have a good barometer to compare with other companies. I want to say Small Room was consistently doing a couple thousand boards per month. Maybe a little more. Plus, we had t-shirts and everything else. The thing is that we were always juggling cashflow. We were never able to fulfill all our orders because we didn’t have the capacity.
One of the underlying things in all this is that we didn’t have much funding. We started the company with very little money. We had the equipment, which was a huge step up, but we still had to build up the brand. Making stuff, selling that, and using that money to make more stuff. Turning things around quickly in order to grow, because we had no external funding.
Small Room was never secretly funded by somebody else? I remember that being a rumor at one point.
Oh no, but that would’ve made things so much easier. That would’ve been fucking great. (laughs)
Looking back, I really didn’t know much about business… And running a business is tough! I just knew about skateboarding and how to get boards made. That’s where I was at. I didn’t know much about accounting and cash flow. And we grew really fast, which sounds good, but it makes that money thing tricky. So when the recession hit in 1990, it all basically stopped for a while, which really hurt the company. All of a sudden, we didn’t have any money coming in and had to lay everyone off.
It was a super shitty time for the industry. I didn’t know what to do, so I just decided to try doing it all myself, along with this other guy who stuck around named Greg. He really helped me keep it going, but looking back, I would’ve done so many things differently from a business point-of-view.
I found a Small Room video on YouTube from ’92 showcasing the Swiss team? Was that real?
No, we had nothing to do with that. Some kids over there just made their own video. I mean, they were stoked enough on Small Room to make their own video! That’s kind of rad.
Was there ever talk of a proper Small Room video?
Yeah, I definitely thought about it all the time. People used to constantly ask about one, too. The biggest obstacle was that I didn’t know anything about video production. And also, by the time it got to where a video would’ve made sense for the brand, I didn’t have the time or money to dedicate towards something like that. Editing was expensive, and then you had mastering and duplication costs. Plus, skate videos weren’t necessarily the be-all-end-all that they would eventually become.
I did have a concept, there were just too many hurdles for us to make one at the time. I wish we had because it would’ve been awesome to capture all that energy back then.
What was the concept?
Oh, man… It’s hard to put into words, but if I had to call this concept anything, it would be “Inside Out”. Thinking about skateboarding through the lens of the obstacle. Like, if you’re a curb and something is happening to you, how is that portrayed? Because skate videos are all about the glory of the trick, is there something else there that’s centered around a more environmental perspective? I wanted it to be something unique. Maybe pitch black where only the curb is lit up and you only see the rider at the very last second? They do their trick, and they’re gone? Something really moody and trippy like that.
…Go watch Memory Screen. That’s the video we would have made. (laughs)
(laughs) Did you feel constricted by Small Room after a while? Or that you possibly outgrew it?
I never felt like we outgrew it. There was always more stuff to be done.
We did start working on another brand for a minute, when things were really at their lowest. I’m not sure how much of it got out there. Greg, the guy who had stayed to work with me, was also doing graphics at the time. They weren’t really for Small Room, but I saw what he was working on and decided, “Fuck it, man. Let’s do something with this.”
The brand was called “Black & White” and it was all based on black-and-white photography. It just didn’t get very far because we didn’t have a lot of money to put into it, but it was rad. It was all super weird and dark. Very Joel-Peter Witkin-inspired, which was prevalent at that time. The rise of industrial music was happening and Greg was super into that. I thought it was cool... Let’s make a little line.
We also did a little clothing brand for a while. I actually thought it was pretty cool, and we learned a ton about making clothes.
I’m guessing this was a cut-and-sew thing?
Yeah, I didn’t want to do it under Small Room so we started another brand called “Blunder”.
This was back when pants were really big, so the whole thing with Blunder was “Oh, look at these giant pants! They were meant to be long speedos but we fucked up and now they’re gigantic. Sorry.”
That was the basic premise. Every garment would have a hangtag with some story about how it got fucked up and now this is what it is. Another blunder. We did that for maybe a year, but it wasn’t easy. We’d have to go down to LA and buy fabrics. There were people in San Luis who could sew, but it was all so slow and expensive. We just didn’t have the volume to make it make sense. We sold everything we made, but we didn’t have the money to buy any ads and really make it a thing. It was rad to learn all that stuff, though…
In hindsight, I guess I was just ready to do something else.
I didn’t know about either of these brands.
We never ran any ads or anything. We just made a few products that were sold through our network. In retrospect, it wasn’t the smartest move because if you’re trying to grow a brand, you probably shouldn’t start more brands to dilute your resources. It just felt so new and fresh at the time. I figured we might as well give those a shot and see where they go. It was more from a place of curiosity and optimism. I’m really proud of those projects.
How did Small Room end?
Well, after the recession hit, I basically had to fire everybody and hunker down. It was awful but we just didn’t have any money. I mean, we barely had enough money to order boards. The recession took all the wind out of our sails and it was really tough to know what to do. Those early 90s recession years were brutal, man. It was like that for a lot of brands at that time. Vision died, Santa Cruz was struggling. Powell was struggling. And then, just as things were starting to turn around, there was a wave of little companies showing up, too. Swimming in the same pool as us.
The truth is that I was kinda stuck. I had this partner, Ray, and all he cared about was getting his money back. Yeah, people wanted to buy our stuff, but we still needed money to operate and grow. He refused to put another dime into the company. So, I just had to work through it all on my own and hope things turned around, because I didn’t really know what else to do. I figured we could just get really scrappy and build it back up over time, which was probably the hardest way to go about it. It did work in the sense that we kept it going, but it was just so hard. And in the end, I burnt out. I was working all the time, only for it to still be moving so slow.
So, we continued on for a year or so with almost no money in a really tough business environment. And, like I said, I was totally burnt out by that point. It just wasn’t fun anymore. So, I finally made the decision to call it in the beginning of ‘93.
You left the industry entirely?
Yeah, I was so tired of the business side of it all and just wanted to focus on designing. Also, I had met somebody during all of this and had gotten married. It felt like a good time for a new beginning and I was ready to do something different. I was pretty tired of living in San Luis by then, too, so we moved up to Portland. I started doing some freelance work in streetwear and snowboarding. It felt good to be learning new things and not just repeating what I’d already done before.
Small Room just felt like a good chapter to end on. Close on that and leave everything in a good place. Yeah, I could’ve sold it to a distributor, but they probably would’ve turned it into something I wouldn’t like. I didn’t want to live with that on my conscience for the rest of my life. (laughs)
I’m surprised NHS never came knocking after trying to buy Small Room outright and then with Russ, Thomas and Frank all doing stuff with SMA at the time.
Yeah, I probably could have swung something, but like I said, I was ready for a fresh start. I’d been in the industry for almost eight years by that point, I was ready to do something else. I still loved skateboarding, I just didn’t necessarily want to be in the industry anymore. I’d gotten more into design and that’s sustained me ever since. I have my own agency now. We do a lot of weird stuff and it’s fun. I wouldn’t have gotten any of it without skateboarding.
How did you react to not only Russ doing SMA and Creature, but Tony and the Shorty’s juggernaut after Small Room’s demise?
It was very surreal… And good for them, man. I don’t have one bad word to say about either one of those guys. I’m mostly proud that I might’ve had some type of influence there. That I was maybe able to help initiate some of that growth. Not that they accomplished any of that because of me, they did it on their own, but I’d like to think I maybe played some small part in it. They both went on to do some seriously rad things.
I couldn’t help but admire what Tony did. He went from being the guy living on my couch to creating one of the biggest skateboard brands ever. It was amazing and I still look back in awe of that. It really was incredible, you know? What he did was truly an accomplishment.
I’m sure it’s come up, but have you ever considered bringing Small Room back over the years?
A little bit. I had that show in Portland and we did a small run of boards for that, but that’s about as close as I’ve gotten. I’ve been a pretty bad steward for the brand over the years. Because in my mind, that was then and this is now. I’m doing something else. I definitely haven’t been “glory days” about it. I see Small Room as having had this really beautiful moment and now that’s gone, which makes it even more precious. Just leave it alone. I loved it, but now I’ve moved on to something else that I love.
If you redo something like that, you’re kinda diluting the memory of it, in a way. I find it more appealing to try something totally different and new. You don’t want to be that old band playing their greatest hits at the State Fair.
That legacy act with one original member. The keyboard player…
…and maybe he don’t see so good, but you’ll recognize this hit! (laughs)
(laughs) What do you see as the legacy of Small Room? I see so many remnants of it in microbrands today.
I can see some similarities, for sure. I look at Welcome and they had a bit of the vibe, but I can’t say there’s a direct influence there. Instead of saying we “came up” with something, I see Small Room as just a biproduct of the mentality of skateboarding at that time. You can say the same thing about several companies. We were just one version of the skateboarding reality at that moment.
I appreciate that so many of these tiny brands exist now. I actually think we’re currently in a golden age of skateboarding in a lot of ways, because anything goes. You can just start a company and do whatever you want. Express yourself and make a brand out of it. And not only can it be accepted, it can be cool.
But as far as a legacy goes, I hope it’s as simple as people liking what we did and appreciating Small Room for what it was. That means a lot.
Small Room felt like it was ours, instead of some Dorfman-helmed behemoth.
That’s the ultimate compliment I can get, because that’s what Small Room was intended to be.
It’s hard to put into context now, because it really did take off quickly. It was embraced by a lot of people at a certain point in time. A year later, I felt like nobody even remembered it, but for those who were there at that time, it was something. Small Room meant something. It had an impact, and that’s what means the most to me. Feeling like we did make some sort of contribution to skateboarding, this thing I’ve loved my whole life.
I’d like to think that Small Room opened the door for possibility. That a skateboard company can look like something else or be something else. It doesn’t always have to be robotic monsters every time. You can do other stuff and that’s cool, too.
Big thanks to Louis, Frank and Russ for taking the time.
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