Interview by Zach Moeller

What’s up Maury, what’s up Kim? When did you first meet and how did everything get started?
Kim: I had a store in the Outer Banks (North Carolina). People would come in and say “There’s not a good skate shop in Richmond.” I’d hear it all the time. So I decided I was going to come up here and look around. I was looking around Carytown and this guy down the street was showing retail spaces. I asked him to see the space and he said sure. As soon as I looked at it I asked “Can I give you a deposit?” So just like that I decided to move up here and try this out. We were a skateshop, but also had some other stuff like hair dye, Doc Martens, all kinds of stuff. A lot of skateboarders started coming in and I started to get to know them all. That’s when I first met Maury. Those days were fun. Eventually we got a spot together near the shop and people started to put it together that we were a couple. At this point the shop was called Backdoor, but there was another shop with the same name in Wilmington, NC. They just celebrated 30 years as well. We’d occasionally get packages mixed up, plus the landlord of our shop sold the building, so we had to get out of there, and moving was a good opportunity to change our name to Dominion and rebrand a little bit. We narrowed the focus and became much more skate-oriented.

Maury: There was nothing else. It was only skateboarding. Back then with all of the core brands around, it was easy to support ourselves off of only that.

What year did you change the shop’s name to Dominion?
Kim: I think that was ‘97. That was the beginning of the shoe dynasty. I still remember one day when a guy came in and said “We’ve got this new brand you should look at. It’s called Lakai.” We had everything in there, even stuff people forget about, Kastel, Duffs, Simple, Nice, Sheep, Axion, everything.

Maury: There was a point when we had 6,200 pairs of shoes in there.

Was this around the time you were hosting a lot of demos?
Kim: Yes, back then we did so many demos. Maury would build all the ramps and we’d load them up into a UHaul and take them to this church that used to let us do demos there. Teams would call and say, “Hey, we’re doing an East Coast tour. Do you want us to come through?”

Maury: And we never didn’t do one. I’m pretty sure we did every single demo that ever came through. Back then, you’d have to pay a fee for teams to come through, but once skateboarding started to be on autopilot, it would be free. My dad would come and help us assemble the ramps. We got sick of renting the UHaul, so we bought a 24 foot trailer and started doing this like once a month. We had so many teams come through, Birdhouse, with Tony Hawk and Riley Hawk, who at this point was only one or two, Foundation, Santa Cruz, Savier, a whole bunch of different teams. 

Fast forward to around 2010 when you changed the shop’s name again, this time from Dominion to Venue. What’s the story behind that, and where did the new name come from?
Maury: We had a lot of stuff in store and were a bit overextended. The rent at that place was getting high and we had to figure out what to do. So I found a new spot at this location, and got the team riders to help move everything over. We started operating out of the new location, and changed the name to Venue.

Kim: We rallied the team, Maury’s dad, his dad’s friends, and were like “We need to move the entire shop overnight.” And we did it! As for the name, we threw around so many ideas with the team, especially Gil (Crockett) and at one point there were like 15 possibilities. We would talk about them, and Gilbert would be like “I hate that” or “that one’s cool” but we’d say no.

Maury: I still have all of them on my phone. What it came down to was, at that point the shop had already had 40 different video premieres and 70 demos, plus signings, private viewings, etc. It was always about getting people together to do something. So with Venue, it just felt right for what we were doing at the time. Names always feel dumb for the first couple of weeks, but it just made sense.

Is it true that you were about to announce the closing of the shop at the Old Dominion premiere?
Maury: That premiere was at the Byrd Theater and had Dominion on the flier as a sponsor, but at this point we knew Dominion was going to be gone so we put a Venue logo on it. No one knew what the hell that was, which was pretty funny. That premiere was going to be when I announced to everyone that we were done, out of business. But at that premiere, like 400-500 people showed up, and I was like “Alright, I need to figure out how to keep this thing going.” Once that happened, we decided we’d make it work – we had made it this far. At that point we’d been around for 18 years. So let’s make it to 20 and then I’ll stop if I need to. But then 20 came around, and we did a little party in here, and seeing all the faces of friends and family was all I needed to stay on board with this.

In the last three decades of running the shop what has been the highest point?
Kim: I’d say around 2007, back in the middle of the Dominion timeframe. That was still the time when if someone wanted a new pair of shoes, they’d come to the shop. You’d have all the moms with the catalogs filled with circled products coming in to shop for their kids.

Maury: If you’re talking about when we were thriving, then ‘07. But the best days were around ‘95. We were sleeping in the shop, we didn’t care about a working shower, and we kept the door open until midnight so any random local could come hang – you could come watch a movie with us or something. Even though in my world I don’t think there’s anything better than having kids, this was still pre-kids. All we had was two dogs and a car that didn’t really run good.

And what about the lowest?
Kim: For me, there are two points that stick out as the darkest times. One was in 2010 when we realized we had to move from Dominion down here. That was rough. The old space, and even the name, were both big parts of our identities.

Maury: Yeah, 2010 trickling into 2012. Moving in here (current location) was such a bummer that we truly didn’t even want to be here. We had kids working here who we never really bonded with like we do with our staff now, and I was starting to work movie jobs. That was probably the worst stretch.

How do you find a balance between keeping kooky brands that might sell well out of the shop while also successfully running a skate shop?
Kim: Believe it or not, I’m actually really particular about the brands we carry. I don’t think there’s really anything in here that feels kooky to us. It’s about keeping our finger on the pulse of what’s happening. I don’t know how you could do this without that. I also like to buy things with certain customers, or groups of customers in mind. If I know there’s a crew of guys who are going to be into an egg shaped board, I’ll order that with them in mind.

Maury: If we see kids out at the mall wearing it we probably won’t ever get it in here. I really don’t want anything that doesn’t build upon the vibe that we’ve always had. Maybe that’s not smart – maybe we could carry other stuff and make more money. But we don’t want to sell our souls. When you’ve been buying product to sell for as long as Kim’s been doing it, you know people at different brands and what they are about. For example, with Limosine, you know that something Cyrus is doing is going to be legit. You’re not taking too big of a risk, and you try it.

With things getting more expensive and oversaturated, a lot of shops are struggling or even closing their doors. How are you addressing this current climate?
Kim: We’ve been through this before. I remember back when some companies were bummed on shops that sold a lot of shop branded clothing or boards. And with how things are going, I feel like we’re going to go back to seeing that again, with shops having to focus more on selling their own products and less of everything else. The difference this time is that now you’re competing with everything online. Now I’m competing with Tactics.

Maury: But I feel confident we will survive this whole thing. Before at Dominion, we didn’t make our own shirts, our own embroidery. Now we do all of that right here in the back of the shop. We also never had a website, beyond just going to a page to see the team, and now our site is getting orders we have to pack every day. Between those two things I hope we will be alright.

What’s it been like to watch Gilbert and the rest of the Bust Crew guys come up?
Maury: We’ve known Gil since he was a little kid, back when he was 11 or 12 and had a little rat tail. He and his mom would come in and we’d give him a board or two. Later on he’d start coming around a lot more with his own crew of friends. Gil basically forced himself onto the team. We weren’t quite ready for him yet, but he showed up when we were filming the intro for Hot Minute. He ended up filming a trick that got into the video, and he worked his way into filming a full part. We helped them get to a certain point, but if we didn’t have those guys out there promoting the shop like that, it wouldn’t have been the same. Every one of those guys, Gil, (Josh) Swyers, (Jordan) Bradshaw, all of them, they never expected a single thing and were always grateful. And Will (Rosenstock) does more for the shop than anyone else! If you have a shop crew that isn’t like family, I’m not really sure how you make that work. If you’re not hanging out and putting out videos together it must be really hard. It hasn’t always been easy but it’s made it so much easier for us having that crew support us so much. I mean, you’ll still see Jon (Rowe) wearing some random Venue shirt he got in 2012.

Kim: You were asking earlier what the best parts of running a shop have been – the retail side of things comes and goes, but having all of those guys affiliated with the shop over all of these years has been amazing. It’s something that you can’t buy. Somewhere along the line there was a mentality shift where the thinking changed from “What can the shop do for me?” to “What can I do for the shop?” and that crew was a big part of that. I really hope those guys have always felt like this is their shop, meaning they can come in here whenever they want and ask us for something if they need it, or just to hang out. I hope they’ve always felt comfortable doing that.

You have put out a lot of great videos throughout the years. Which ones have been the most memorable?
Maury: Probably making the first one (Dominion 1), I think that one was one of the most fun. We basically would freestyle it and make a video over a couple weeks. This guy Mark Restivo has been my friend since I was 16, and was behind the first videos. Now he works doing a lot of CGI shows and commercials, so he’s not around as much anymore, but me, him, and Travis (Pulley) grew up skating together. I want to say Will has been behind six videos now. There was a transition between Mark and this guy (Matt) Reamer, who did Main Course, the video between when Mark was filming and then when Will took over. At that point Will was an outsider looking in. He knew each one of our videos front to back. So he knew what we like, plus he’s really good at listening and knowing what goes where. I’d love to say I have more of a voice in what goes into our videos, but at this point he could basically do a video from beginning to end and I would probably not have anything to complain about. The filming is right. The editing is right. He’s pretty much been able to take the videos and do what he wants. Every video from Gospel until now has been Will. He’s working on a new video for us too.

Kim: I think it’s because they’ve all been around each other for so many years now. The whole crew has a general idea of what they think is good. We’re really lucky to have two really good filmers here, between Will and Thomas (Goldman) it’s pretty covered.

How did it feel to see so many people come together to celebrate the shop at your 30 year anniversary event?
Maury: It was incredible. It wasn’t even so much about the big turnout, more about how everyone who came there loved talking to each other and hanging out. I really had hoped that it would be like that – that’s why I put so much work into it. But honestly, it’s not even really work when it involves bringing friends together.

Kim: One thing that I hope comes from that is that some of the younger kids see how important the community is. Especially when seeing the photos from all the years, looking at the guys all growing up together. That’s what it’s all about.

What advice would you offer someone considering opening their own shop?
Kim: Don’t do it! No, what I would say is only do it if you really love it. Don’t open a shop because you think you’ll make a ton of money. Do it because you love skateboarding. Don’t do it unless you’re prepared to live it every day.