THE HISTORY OF VANS

The very first event we did was in 95 at the Hard Rock Café in Newport Beach. There were 11,000 people, Ben Harper played and Tony Hawk won the skate event. There was an existing Triple Crown of Surfing, so we bought that for a good sum of money in 96. That was the second Triple Crown and the third one was the Triple Crown of Snow Boarding. Then we did BMX, wakeboarding and so on.

Who owns Vans now?
VF Corporation bought Vans. They are a unique company, they actually researched for a year the Quiksilvers, the Billabongs the Vans, you name it, any kind of youth culture brand. They kept doing market surveys and Vans kept coming back as a cool company and that's why they bought it for $400 million bucks. When my dad sold the company for $75 million we were doing $40 million is sales. Now our sales are around $360 million.

Van's big movie experience was ‘Dog town and the Z-boys' which documented the Zephyr teams evolution of Skateboarding. Was it an expensive exercise?
We dabbed into that and put out about $800,000 for Stacey Peralta to buy the rights for the music as well as do the direction of the movie and put that documentary out. We basically got out money back too.

Are you surprised the Dogtown story has become a Hollywood film ‘The Lords of Dogtown?'
I am excited about it because I thought the actual documentary was fantastic and it would get to a lot of theatres but it just didn't. I saw the actual directors cut a few months ago with Skip and Tony Alva and it's going to be great.