The secret to Ducommun’s long-standing success? Dedication. “It’s very much Skull Skates-but it’s a Japanese version.” Then they’re all hanging out ‘til 1 or 2 in the morning,” says Ducommun. It’s total countryside and not even light out.’ Before you know it, it’s midnight, and all these kids arrive and put piles of shit on the counter. “I remember the first time going there thinking, ‘This is weird. Launched in 1994 by skater Satoshi Ono, the store is a four-hour drive from Tokyo and opens at 8 p.m. One opportunity that he later agreed to was a Skull Skates shop in Japan. “You don’t say yes to every opportunity that comes to you-it has to be good for you.” “ helped inform how I run my business to this day,” Ducommun asserts. “Not a lot of money being made.” It seemed like the right time for him to return home to Vancouver (Rick stayed in L.A.)-but with a new mindset. “It was a lot of revving in neutral,” says Ducommun. New Southern California brands were leading the scene, and the older brands were taking a beating. The Melrose shop generated strong traffic and cool contacts, but business stalled toward the end of the ‘80s. In SoCal, the brothers cemented their place in the skate world. Promotional opportunities were aplenty, and Skull Skates provided boards to punk bands, including the likes of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Social Distortion.
If you wanted to expand, you needed a Southern California outlet to be taken seriously. was the centre of the skateboarding universe. The brothers took on Los Angeles in 1983, while retaining their Vancouver retail presence (though the shop did move locations). “It was also a place where we developed our technique: if you’re nice to us, we’ll bend over backwards but if you’re a jerk, you’ll get kicked out of the store.” It was a special place for a lot of people,” he continues. “We became this place where people met and ideas were exchanged.
And it was more than just a place to sell gear. “If you wanted this cool stuff, but you just couldn’t get it anywhere else, you had to come to us,” Ducommun says. Oak and 67th was their first significant location. “Basically,” recalls Ducommun, “our customers renamed the company for us.” Originally dubbed Great North Country Skateboards (to convey that it was Canadian skateboarding) then shortened to GNC Skates, the line was later renamed due to the number of orders addressed to Skull Skates. Soon enough, the idea that they could make a better skateboard than what was currently on the market led to the in-house brand Skull Skates in ’78-the logo adapted from a jagged skull that Ducommun had carved out of grip tape on his board. “He thought I had a certain amount of notoriety that we should capitalize on,” explains Ducommun. The name for the Vancouver shop came easily-at least to Rick. And my dad stood up and said, ‘I guess we’re done here.’” That was the end of Ducommun’s high school career and the beginning of P.D’s Hot Shop. “I had this big pitch about how I’m not learning anything at school and how I’m learning so much in business. “I arranged a meeting with my counsellor and my parents,” he remembers. That is when Ducommun convinced his parents to let him quit school in Grade 11. This evolved to a mail order catalogue run out of Ducommun’s bedroom in 1976, and soon after, the brothers’ storefront in Vancouver.
Rick was in and out of Los Angeles with a t-shirt company at the time, and would fulfill Ducommun’s request list of skate items that were hard to find on Vancouver Island. With good timing, visitors can spot Ducommun, a man with skateboarding street cred to spare and the war wounds to prove it: a metal plate at his left ankle and a knee-to-ankle pipe on his right.ĭucommun’s older brother Rick first introduced him to skateboarding, and ultimately, to the business behind the sport. But stacked with a trove of in-demand skate goods-mostly edgy black-and-white basics (skateboards, snowboards, skimboards, bicycles, and clothing) by in-house brand Skull Skates-the shop attracts a steady stream of locals and out-of-towners alike. Tucked away in Point Grey, the shop’s quiet presence is a nod to Ducommun’s concerted effort to remain slightly under the radar. Fast-forward to today, and his business-P.D.’s Hot Shop, currently located at 3734 West 10th Avenue in Vancouver-is considered Canada’s longest-running skate store. It was humble beginnings for Peter Ducommun, better known as P.D., who started out sourcing materials for skateboards from lumberyard scraps in Nanaimo.
0 kommentar(er)
