05/02 – 01/05
City Boardshop
Owner/President
Owning my own business was by far the hardest thing I've ever done. And like most challenging experiences, offered the most education and personal growth. I’ve always had the mindset of an entrepreneur. Whether it is the constant business ideas rolling around in my head, or having a feeling of ownership at every job, I always think about what could be done to build the business or make it better.
Steve, the owner of Farm Basket, once told me a story about how he and his friends would play on these water towers. One night they were playing too late and it started to get dark. Realizing they had to get home in a hurry, his friend jumped to the ground even though it was too dark to see well. Steve was afraid, and the longer he waited the darker, and scarier it became. Finally he jumped. He told me this was much like owning your own business, the longer you waited to do it, the harder it became. So I jumped.
When I bought City Boardshop, the previous owner had been trying to sell it for several years. The shop had a good reputation, but inventory was low. The owner’s interest level lagged and it reflected in the sales. City was doing about $200 a day on average. I instantly put together a plan to boost sales and get people back in the door. Within eight months, sales were over $1,000 a day.
Our core customer had always been the pure skate kid, not the mall kids who wear skate clothes, but the kids who ate, slept, and breathed skateboarding. Guerilla marketing was our secret weapon. Nontraditional, punk rock, ant mall/chain stores attitude, drove the core skaters to us. I started hanging out at the skate parks, giving out stickers, flyers and getting to know the kids. The key here was to be genuine. These kids can smell a fake instantly, but if you really care about them and what they’re into, not just them spending money at your shop, they’ll be your most loyal customers.
City has always had the best locally sponsored team, so we began working on a new video. The skate crowd in Vegas, like almost any town, is tight knit. Once word got out that we were making another video, it created an instant buzz, for the next year. When we finally had the video premiere, we brought in all the pro skaters who came from Vegas (most of whom were once sponsored by City), we rented out the largest theatre at the Palms Casino, which we filled past capacity. It was a huge success.
City also had a small but loyal snowboard crowd. To build on this and separate us from every other store, especially the chain store, we made a plan to support the scene. Normally you do this by sponsoring contests at the resorts. The local resort had just changed owners and was unwilling to do contests at the time. Brian Head in Utah, while a good resort was too far away to benefit us in any sponsorship. So we decided to host our own events, in our parking lot. Very few shops did stuff like this, it wasn’t unheard of, but no one in Nevada or Utah, and very few shops in California held parking lot demos. We built two, 10-foot drop in ramps, a 12 foot fun box, and an eight foot rail. We started off by hauling snow from the mountain, but later made some connections at one of the local ice rinks, to get their shaved ice. It usually took about five or six pick up trucks full of snow, depending on how hot it was, to line the ramps, run ups and landings with snow. People in Vegas were floored. Not so much by the structures that we built, but by the fact that we had real snow, in our parking lot.
We increased attendance by scheduling local bands to play. We partnered with Red Bull and other snowboard vendors to donate prizes for the competition. We publicized each event by providing photos and the story to Las Vegas’ Smash Magazine and California’s Happy Magazine, both cover music and core board sports. Each of these events brought between 300 and 500 attendees, including people from California and Utah who came to compete.
We even did a similar event for wakeboarding in our parking lot, where we built a 10 ft by 56 ft wood frame, lined it with roofing tarp, placed the rail from our snow contest in the middle, filled it with water, and pulled the wakeboarders with A.T.V.’s.
The best way I found to promote our events was to go back to our roots of guerilla marketing. Besides distributing flyers and promoting word of mouth we used www.myspace.com. MySpace is an online community that the mid teen to late twenties crowd is very active in. I set up a page for myself to represent the shop, and all of my employees had pages as well. By posting events and news about the shop on our pages and telling everyone linked to our pages to repost the announcements, we were able to create a huge underground buzz with out ever spending a dime on advertising.
We had such success with these parking lot events that we organized a large scale pro contest during S.I.A. (the annual snow sports convention), to take place at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino. We designed a huge structure to be built in the parking lot, just for the event. It took an entire semi truck full of ice and a modified tree chipper to provide enough snow. We brought in industry sponsors; Burton, D.V.S., Smith Optics, Planet Earth, and Bear Mountain along with the Hard Rock. We had more top professionals competing in our event than were in the X-Games the week before, and approximately five thousand in attendance. It became so successful that the Hard Rock stole the idea from us and did it again the next year (I heard it wasn’t as good).
After two and a half years of owning our own shop, and after having our third kid, we decided we wanted to move home to Boise, so we could raise our kids near their extended family. We sold the shop, with much protest from our customers, and moved back to start over.
