How many times have you seen the movie?
At least 50. Doing ‘Dog town' I got to meet Sean Penn years later and it was really enjoyable getting to say ‘thank-you so much for being Spicoli, you made my life a lot easier'.
Has any one in the middle of a sales meeting ordered a pizza?
The theme of sales meetings about five years ago was Fast Times. Everything was checkerboard and I ordered 10 pizzas and asked them to just barge in the middle of it and bring them right up the front.
It was great because after my dad left, sometimes they may have been a little too stuffy. You know suits and ties and stuff. It was perfect and I am bit of a prankster.
Sounds like good times, what else do you think was adding to the brands success?
The thing about Vans is that we had a run from 76-80 with all the two tones and that rolled into solid colour slip-ons and then straight into checkerboard. We didn't rest on our laurels! We started doing red and white, green and white, two tones, any kind of combination because again, we only have a vulcanized shoe. We don't have what Nike has, all kinds of athletic stuff. We had a canvas shoe and we're trying to make it look like a marquee diamond. So how do we do that? With colours and fabrics.
We also used to get kids to draw up what they would like to see on the sides of the shoes. Every month we'd pick a winner, bring them down to the factory and take their family to Disneyland. All of a sudden we had things that had ‘Rad' on them, we had unicorns and rainbows. When you get 200 designs with strawberries, we'd do a strawberry shoe. So that's how we would do it and having our own factory, I could have a new shoe out tomorrow.
