When did the company realize it was developing a following with skateboarders?
Santa Monica and Manhattan Beach is where they started coming in and custom making shoes. In the very beginning we sold tons of the #44 blue deck shoes. Then the custom orders started coming in, and it started with just red and blue. We let that run for a few months then we came up with a stock shoe - navy blue, gold, navy blue and then brown, beige, brown. We would watch the customs and make brown/ beige/ brown if everybody ordered it as a custom. You had school colours, team colours, skaters and bmx kids who came in the late 70’s and those guys really liked the wild colours. There was no leather around until 76/77 when we finally came up with the Old School which had leather in the toe and heel because skaters were wearing hell out of them. Leather would last a long time, longer than anything else. The outsole never wore out, the side wall of the material would never wear out, they could get it down to where there was just a little bit of fabric but the sides would still be good.
When did Vans start developing shoes for skaters?
In 1975 we had the blue deck shoes, but the guys over in Santa Monica, like Tony Alva and Stacey Peralta wanted to make customs. We decided to add padded backs, an outside heel counter and the ‘Off the Wall’ label and that was our new skate shoe that came out on March 18, 1976. The Skate Hi had padded sides so when the board flew off the pool and into their ankles they didn’t kill themselves. That was a big thing, that saved lives for skaters, they loved them.
Did you think at the time skateboarding was just a phase or that it was here to stay forever?
It seemed big because so many of these kids started organizing contests. I remember my Dad had no budget so I was driving a van bringing guys from the Valley over to a contest in Santa Monica. Tony Alva and those guys, the board companies looked after them but we just supplied shoes. The first cheque we ever wrote was to Stacey Peralta, I think we were paying him about $300 to wear the shoe and he was travelling world wide. Each store manager had seven or eight guys that they were supplying shoes to as well. We got our first team manager, Eric, in about 77. He had a van and a plexi-glass ramp and he would travel round, do the demos, and make sure the guys got their shoes. Kids were buying whatever they saw in the skate magazines.
