Who were the original people you were skating and shooting photos of out in Arizona?

My friends that I first started with were Andrew McCarthy, who does Golden Hour with me now, and Mike Surget, who was like my best friend growing up. He passed away a few years ago, but he was a really amazing skater when we were kids. Once I got better at shooting I got in with Lee Bender, Michael Tubbs, also the Cowtown kids like Ricky Geiger and Brian Lantz. My photos would get a little better and then I had the confidence to reach out to some more sponsored skaters that I didn’t know like Marty Murawski, Ryan Lay, and Levi Brown. 

How long after you started submitting photos did you become staff at The Skateboard Mag?

I was probably 18 and I sent a bunch of slides to Grant Brittain with no information at all, basically hoping for a bad critique but then they ended up wanting to run one. Shortly after that, Dave Swift came to Arizona and I met him and we got on pretty well. I visited two or three more times over the next year, and kept sending photos. Right when I turned 19 they said they wanted to pay my retainer, $750 a month, and that I should get a passport. I can’t even tell you how much it was the exact thing I wanted. It was literally the dream come true. 

And you were there until the end? What was the deal with the Berrics buying The Skateboard Mag?

Man, I know the mag was kind of shrinking and we were having less ads. Thrasher was really killing it at video and online and we still had a lot of resources put into photographers. It’s heartbreaking to say, but it would have made more sense to have more people making video content and doing web stuff. Berra decided he wanted to add a print element. It just wasn’t for me, I’d been there eight years and that was kind of the last straw for me. Not that I have anything against the Berrics. I know it’s really easy within skating to talk shit on Berra. I just don’t understand what he’s trying to do or wanted to do with it. The way I got my job at the mag was like, we worked in a studio above a mechanic on the beach. It was six people and it was mellow, we had beer every day at 4:00pm. Going to the Berrics office, it just felt a little more stuffy, a bit more cold to me.

I feel like The Skateboard Mag had a way of presenting skateboard media that was important for that era, and then the Berrics just ruined it. 

I’ve always been bummed that people never got to mourn a little bit for it. Where everyone talks about what it meant to them and how important it was, and the mag never got that because it didn’t really technically end, the name changed and then just slid away. The staff was so unique and the mix was so perfect. Obviously Grant and Swift, they were the forefathers of it and then Atiba and Ako brought kind of this fresh piece to it, and then you had Kevin Wilkins who brought this really amazing abstract writer’s brain, kind of subversive piece to it, and then working with writers like Carnie and Neiratko, Ty Evans writing weird columns or Lee DuPont. It was so cool and it was a really special thing to me. 

So you made the transition to CCS. What do you do there?

When they hired me at CCS, Footlocker was putting them out of business and they had fired everybody and liquidated all the inventory. So this skateshop from Portland called Daddies bought the name, social channels, and mailing list, basically an intellectual property deal. They already did pretty decent online sales, so I helped them bring a lot of brands back in and start this thing back up. About five years ago they offered me a full-time job as the Brand Manager. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to, but I realized that the opportunity was just too cool. How often do you get the opportunity to work for an iconic brand that you have history with and do pretty much whatever you want? I’m proud that we kept CCS around and we still serve a lot of skaters a lot of places. 

You’re referring to it as a brand, but it’s still a mail order system right? Does CCS do anything to show support to skateshop owners or that infrastructure?

I’ve always wanted to do more, but it seems like there’s just kind of a little bit of a disdain sometimes, and I want to come from a good place of supporting skating as a whole, so we mostly do our own thing. The other thing I’ll say about the argument of big e-comm stores hurting the small stores is CCS has been around since 1985. So more than likely if you had good years or bad years, you had good years or bad years with CCS existing. A lot of skate shop owners probably hate me for saying that and I’m sorry to those guys. At the end of the day, if we’re not careful we could move into a place where every brand is its own store and that’s it, everything is fully vertical. But once you start doing that, you lose the important partnerships that still bring a lot to skating as a whole. It’s hard, I think skaters, we love to stay in our old school headspace sometimes. 

Tell me about Golden Hour.

Golden Hour at this point is just a creative outlet. I just wanted to put together a little mag and see what happened. About ten minutes into trying to lay it out I called my old friend Andrew, and asked if he wanted to put it together since he does design stuff. I think he just smoked a bunch of weed one night and he laid out the whole magazine in three or four hours. Now the ideas are stacking faster than the issues come up, but we are able to keep it small and make it so it doesn’t get too overwhelming because we do both work full-time aside from Golden Hour. If it became too much of a pain in the ass, we just wouldn’t do it. 

You’ve been in the industry a while. What do you think is the future of printed skate media?

I think the way Greg Hunt did his book with Dill is really cool and unique. And he’s done reprints that are different editions and he tapped into the market in Japan that was really interested in it and did a special book for them. And that to me is the future. Certainly not in a monthly format working at this point. I don’t think people want to consume print media like they want to consume Twitter feeds. 

Would you say there’s less gatekeepers now making the rule?

If people are printing more skating that just helps all of us because then the community grows and people are reminded that they love getting skate magazines. To all the photographers out there to know, just do a run of 50. Just try it out, you know? 

And it’s so important for consumers to support those projects, and support those photographers.

Yeah, it’s worth it to just keep this thing alive that you love. If you put out a project and it’s getting supported, then you’re going to have this really good feeling about going out and supporting other projects. Hopefully we can just perpetuate more of that.

This has been a crazy last year, what’s a prediction for 2021?

Oh my God. There’s almost no way to make a prediction in this era of our lives without just sounding stupid because you can’t predict anything. I mean, my hope for 2021 is that skating continues to grow. And through that, a bunch of new people and new ideas and new crews and new projects come into skating, on the print side of things and the photo side of things. I don’t think we’re going to get quite back to normal yet. I think everything’s going to stay a little weird for a while, but I kind of hope that skating has another year of productivity. I hope that people see what they did last year and are able to continue putting cool stuff out.