Damon Way: 20 Year Issue
Interview by Campbell Milligan.
This interview appears in the 20th-anniversary Issue (buy a copy here) and is apart of the Analog To Digital: 20 Years of Culture and Change Podcast Series (listen to it here).
From a kid full of idealistic fervour to creating one of the most recognisable brands in the world, Damon Way has been chasing big ideas and pulling them off for as long as we can remember.
With a penance for collaboration, DC became a brand that we felt emulated the same kind of thing we were trying to do with Monster Children - leaning into subcultures but fusing it with art and design tastefully. With his heart firmly in the world of skateboarding, Damon now heads his own skate brand FACT, but for this one we bought it all the way back to his first brand Eightball, followed by Droors, Dub, Blunt, and DC Shoes. Told you he knows a thing or two about how to make a brand more than just a pair of shoes.
Do you remember the first piece of clothing you bought? Like a band shirt or something that started the passion for you?
When I think back to the first sort of customization of something that I could actually put my own touch on, I think it was custom Vans. There was a shop in Encinitas and you could go in there and you could do customs. Sorry one sec, my kids like talking in the background. Tashen, I'm doing an interview dude.
I know the feeling.
All right, here we go. That was our warmup. Ask me the question again.
Nah you got it. What were you doing in 2003?
Oh man, in 2003, I had my head down in the Artist Projects program that I created for DC. I had just wrapped the CAUSE release the year before and was working on the Phil Frost release.
How did that project come about? Because I feel like more than anything during the last twenty years, that was a project that I personally felt conceptualized what Monster Children was also doing - living in the skating world, but also pushing into the artist side of things. Where did that idea come from?
So in 2000, Shepherd Fairey and I were hanging out. We were friends down in San Diego when he had moved from the East Coast. And I admired what he was doing creatively and he admired what I was doing creatively. It was just kind of like this aha moment where we were like, why don't we work together and do something that could sort of pull your creativity into a shoe in the same way that we work with pro skateboarders? Let's approach it with an artist's story. At the time there wasn't any precedence for this type of collaboration. There wasn't any artist slash footwear collaborations on the market. Nike didn't do anything like this. Adidas didn't do anything like this. So Shepard and I, just from love for each other and wanting to work with each other, did it.
At that point, how long had DC been going for?
We conceptualized DC in 1993, founded it in 1994 and so that would have been almost ten years.
What led you into producing clothing and going down that kind of avenue?
Well, Ken Block and I had met at a retailer in North County and went snowboarding. We both landed in the same math class in junior college. At the time he had a graphics and silk screening class and he was working on a brand concept called Eight Ball that was based on a black and white kind of approach to graphics. He was really inspired by Kevin Staub's brand at the time and wanted to figure out a brand motif that kind of backed into that approach or that aesthetic. I started drawing him some graphics in our math class and he ended up using that as sort of the logo and made some t-shirts in the silk screening class there at college.
I gave them to my brother and he gave them to skateboarders who were on Plan B at the time. It just happened to connect. At the time there wasn't any apparel brands in skateboarding. So it was very welcomed and took off pretty quickly, even though taking off is sort of relatively small at that point in time. As the brand evolved, we evolved through the whole workwear aesthetic. At first we were making service jackets and knit shirts and bombers. And then as the market evolved and brands like Nautica and Polo Sport became more prevalent, we started steering the brand more towards that, which was kind of like an athletic sport vibe. Then in 94 we launched DC.
It's kind of crazy to think to when you first started as it being the first kind of apparel brand coming out of skateboarding. It’s wild to think there was nothing else going on when now it’s like Quiksilver and Billabong are all owned by the same big corporate company.
Yeah, I actually think it's a really interesting time for skateboarding and surfing. Surfing in particular, it reminds me of that consolidation era of brands like Ocean Pacific and Hang Ten and then into the 80s with Gotcha. Where these brands became really big and then they became less relevant to the endemic market which created an opening for new brands to develop like Volcom, and RVCA and things like that. I feel like we're kind of in a phase now where there's a really big opening for new creativity and a new generation to come in and redefine the narrative and aesthetic of surfing and skating.
I'm at the age where I am not really on the pulse as far as a 20 year old kid, but it's very interesting to sit and watch what's happening with brands that started in the 90s. Seeing the Billabongs and Quiksilvers become huge and then nearly eat themselves.
There's so much more to a brand than just kind of making something cool. Like the actual business side of things is so important these days. But I imagine that there's like a whole new wave of kids that want to do it differently, that see it differently- that look at those brands as a sort of consolidated mass market interpretation. These other brands are all under the weight of returning revenue to the parent company. In a constant state of pressure that is always going to drive bad decisions versus being independent and free and being able to navigate a brand in a market organically in the currents of the market and the culture. So I think those brands are going to be in a tough place in the coming years, which is going to further reinforce that opening for new ideas and new expression and new creativity in the space.
I wonder when a young surfer or skater walks into a store for clothes, it must be hard for them to associate with a brand because of the whole corporate side of it now. No matter how technical the fabric is, they still don't want that kind of logo association.
Yeah thinking back, wearing a brand was an extension of what you are connected to culturally, and what your perspective is on things. Wearing an Anti Hero shirt over a Primitive shirt says something very different about you within that community and is a bit of a tribal flag.
My thing was a backpack. I remember having a backpack that I took to school with a big Rat Bones drawing on it, the DK or crass logo written on it with a Sharpie. Not everyone got it but ones that did would give you a nod.
Yeah, totally. I mean I used to know and draw all the logos to Black Flag, DK, Crass, DRI now it’s a thing to wear a no brand name. Kids that are surfers aren’t wearing surf brands. That’s the crux of subculture and this desire to be different, be authentic and do things in a way that's individualized and coming from a place of personal expression. When your brands are completely homogenized in sort of the broader market, there's no opportunity for that which then creates an opening for new brands.
I think another big thing is that when we were younger everyone would wear a Thrasher or a DC shirt with a big graphic and be like this is who I am. When you saw someone in a Thrasher shirt, it had meaning behind it. Now even the people sponsored by the brand are wearing it inside out and kicking back against it.
Yeah I think skateboarding and surfing goes through its oscillations this way. It'll go through a period of really big logos and then it'll get reduced down to white t-shirts. Then it'll go back. It's always in this expansionary traction of what's cool and acceptable versus what is not. It ebbs and flows.
How do you feel about technology and it’s impact on our culture?
I think technology has probably impacted the media the most. The fallout from that is it's had tremendous influence over how a narrative is managed. I think back in the 90s or even early 2000s, the way we managed brand narrative was through print publications with an equal rhythm month over month over month. You could really work hard on the concept and fine tune it, delivering in a way that had maximum impact. Now that approach has been so fragmented to the point that I think brands have lost control of the narrative, and just responding to it now versus controlling it.
Yeah I mean with my dealings with brands I find it crazy how much content, how many marketing assets or whatever is needed. It goes up online and is gone within a week, even though you’ve spent all this time and effort. We make a high quality film and it just ends up as a story on Instagram.
I think the sort of equilibrium between input and output has been really, really messed up. Meaning, you know, you can work so hard on crafting a very detailed piece of content, or product or music, whatever it is, and it hit the market and the transient nature of the market gives it staying power for like a week or sometimes even less, maybe a day. The incentives to really put a lot of work into something gets diminished to the point where the work starts to suffer. And it just becomes almost like a drive-by process where it's more about frequency and output than it is about quality and detail.
The fatigue of collaborations as a model as well. It just seems like every shoe brand is working with every apparel brand at a frequency that doesn't give anything, any amount of time to breathe or to be something special other than the flavor of the week. When we started doing that stuff in the late 90s with DC, I think we were the first brand to work with Supreme, do collaborations, and move into projects with artists. We would only do one or two a year. Now brands are releasing collaborations on a two-week cadence and it's gotten to the point where none of it has value anymore. You're always in a state of chase versus embrace.
If you could give your 2003 self some advice, what would it be?
Super simple, document more and archive everything. There was so much output throughout the 90s and 2000s at DC and the other brands we were working on that we didn't archive or keep or create like a strong historic record around. What I realized too is nothing feels precious in the moment and you have to be aware of that.
In the last twenty years, what do you think was like your biggest mistake and then your biggest kind of achievement?
I think the biggest mistake was Ken and I prematurely selling DC. I don't think we really understood what we had built with regard to a broader market potential. But at the same time, it was our greatest success selling DC. So it's got this kind of knife edge that cuts both ways. We don't know what would have happened. But as a brand and as a logo, it's extremely iconic and it really rolls up an entire period of skateboarding through the 90s and 2000s and had a tremendous impact on the aesthetic of skateboarding. And that's spilling over into other market segments and having much broader impact and contribution to culture. I think at the time that we sold it, we were kind of in sort of the fog of war with so many issues we were running into and we were just completely fatigued and burnt out. We didn't really have any mentors to give us advice on what to do with the brand and platform or to realize there was a much bigger brand opportunity out there.
Was it hard to watch the brand in those years after you sold it?
It was difficult for us because we got to a point where the brand was being steered towards performance from a public market perspective to offset the lack of performance at the time with the other brands. As a result, the management team that was steering all that was pushing the brand downstream. But that’s just how it goes.
On a personal level, what is the next thing that you really want to sink your teeth into?
Right now I'm really focused on FACT, which is my apparel, footwear, and accessory brand. I'm developing some new product categories for it. It gets me back to the things that really inspire me culturally, the things that I've been connected to over the decades from a subculture perspective around music, art, and fashion, and skateboarding.
All right, my last question is what is Monster Children to you?
Monster Children to me has always represented the rebellious youth spirit presented in a thought-provoking and inspiring way.
