Wellcome to Brandventures and get ready for an exciting adventure into the world of brand innovation of the Brandventures podcast. GP5 Production for Adventurous Brands. Hey guys, welcome to the brandventures. The show that’s going to take you into the world of Adventurous Brands. I’m your host, Gustavo,
And today we’re in the heart of Venice Beach for a very special episode. And our guest today is none other than Greg Falk. Greg is a visionary and one of the great minds behind this brand. However, I skateboard company born in this very streets. He’s not just an entrepreneur.
He’s an artist with a knack for design and engineering together with his partner Neal. They did not only build an empire of skateboards, they actually pioneered a new sport called Surf Skate. Stick around until we explore his incredible journey and the impact he’s had on the skating world. Welcome to the Brandventures, Greg.
Good morning. Tell me a little bit more about you. You’re born and raised here in Venice. Well, I was born in Inglewood, down the street and grew up surfing the bay here. You know, from El Porto to Malibu initially, you know, it was the bathtub where I got the most inspiration.
I remember being an infant, just being in the bathtub and just being submerged. And this is so inspiring, you know? Something about the us being electrical and being submerged in this, you know, the water. Yeah. And then when I was introduced to the ocean, a whole other level. Right.
All the movement and all of the trace minerals and salts out there beyond words, right. I mean, the experience of being in there now, because we evolved from the ocean, you know, our tears and our sperm and our sweat, you know, all salt,
You know, And so I think that we return to the ocean when we go out there. Tell me a little bit about your art. What is it that we can see in your place here? There’s a mix of things and materials. And what’s what’s your art about? My studio is sort of a
Sanctuary for creation. I’m intrigued by how form manifests the forces that play that, you know, decide the shape of our organs inside the shape of a seed pot or seashell. And so I gather these objects and I use them to inform my understanding of form
And how it manifests and maybe where I am on that continuum of natural law. You know, from plant to animal How do you think being an artist has influenced the design of Carver? You know, as an artist, I make things to evoke emotion,
To elevate the quality of my life and those around me. Carver when we first created it, we were trying to create sort of a trailing wheel, and I had just finished a show at the Turner Gallery down the street where I use the special thrust bearings, like this industrial set of barrel
Beads that rotated very, very small and compact and industrial quality. So you can ollie and land on it. And I don’t think we anticipated that we would still be using those thrust bearings today, but our C7 uses two sets of those. What excites Greg the most? Let’s see.
You know, I wake up every day and I have ideas and I come into the studio and I make them express them, and that’s what excites me. You know, looking at the world around me and finding opportunities to add value, to improve things and to be fertile, you know, an active environment.
So what is a Carver board? Let’s see. A carver is a skateboard. That is a system. The deck is specific. It has concave and usually a tail and nose kick. It has specific wheels that you know, grip well. And it has two different trucks.
The truck in the front performs like the rails on a surface. We call it twist and Sway. And so it has that sway function like a certain play in the back truck, performs like your fins. It gives the board directionality and stability. So the sum of those components is a Carver.
What’s the difference between the two trucks? Well, let’s see. Our C7. This is the the first truck that we came out with. This was sort of a prototype. This was designed to be able to adjust the the twist and the sway functions of and determine the perfect ratio. Right. Yeah.
But it turned out to be a great tool and it has a dual axis gets the okay truck with independent control of both the twist in the sway. There are other trucks out there now that have dual axis, but you can’t control them both.
And then this is a CX, which basically has the same net geometry. If you were to take a pencil and trace, there’s the same geometry as this without all of the hardware. So it’s much tighter. wow. You know, now they all come with hollow axles and Hollow Kingpin, so they’re all very light.
But the CX is only a two part, two part single axis. This is a dual axis truck. wow. But we were interested in being able to negotiate head on and be able to control and amortize our speed. Right. And get at it with control, not with just gravity.
Because a surfboard comes to a point when you engage the rail, it thrusts forward. Right. So that’s why we do that. Yeah. So our skateboard, just like the surfboard when you engage the rail thrust forward. So you don’t need to push it and even, you know, uphill, it propels.
You know, imagine if a car didn’t have the steering wheel, the ability to turn the front wheels down or bicycle. Right. Or marine life. You look at a fish and you see that it’s the the head leads. Yeah, absolutely. And so it needs very specific geometry to do that. Okay.
That’s what the Carver does, the C7 or the CX. That’s what they do. Tell me about the first creations of your of the truck. Well, you know, initially we didn’t know that it was going to be about the truck. We thought it might have been the deck
Of really got into and we put the thrust bearings in the middle. Yeah. And it was that that sort of projected light, you know, towards the notion of creating a trailing wheel. And yeah. And then eventually it became very clear that the deck did have certain
Qualities that it needed in order to perform. But it was really about the trucks. How was those first days of of building Carver? I was living in a church on Venice Boulevard, and it was my studio. And then one day, Oliver Stone
Knocked on the door, and I knew the writing was on the wall. I got along. Venice was, you know, poppin at the time. And so having sold my car, I had to move my studio to my house on my skateboard. And on the way I rode by this guy’s studio.
And I looked in there and, you know, his history looked like my studio. Everything was sort of modified. You know, nothing was as it should be. Was modified, you know, And we began hanging out and talking and surfing together. And the breakwater was flat one summer, completely a lake.
And we took our what were skateboards that we had to, you know, the hills of Santa monica. Yeah. And we attempted to go surf skating and we said, this doesn’t feel like us. Yeah. So we returned to Marine Street, the steepest hill in Santa monica every day for about three years, and continuously
Improved and tweaked the trucks and until they performed them. And then we were addicted. Right. And yeah, Carver was sort of an extension of our desire to share this with others less entrepreneurial pursuit and more about the way it felt to ride a Carver makes me smile, even just thinking about it.
And then when I drop the new wave, I have this sort of involuntary little hoot like I knew I actually it’s involuntary. And I get that on the Carver right? And so we wanted to share that. You know, you want to share that with your brothers and your community.
And so that was the motivation, really. And we wanted it to be like a skater made company. We didn’t want to approach it like businessmen. We wanted to be spoiled skaters, you know, that took over a factory and skateboards instead of the other automobiles or something. Okay. There’s a group of girls that
Adopted your product, and they, you know, they’ve created a whole movement around it. And can you tell me a little bit more about them Girls Swirl? They’re amazing. They’re you know, I think the impetus was Lucy and Lindsey and just a few local girls that just love riding their boards.
And, you know, I guess when you’re a girl riding a skateboard, you get a lot of the wrong attention. But when you get, you know, ten girls skating together, it’s critical mass and it’s powerful. Guys fall silent all of a sudden, you know, letting them work. And so they’re really embracing.
And so they get together, you know, in mass, sometimes there’s 50 or 100 of them and they just hang and skate. And, you know, and it’s really, really profound. Really the the influence they’ve had on bringing new people, new females, you know, young and old. Yeah. To the skate table.
This design had really sparked a new kind of approach to skating, which is a surf skate, right? That’s right. What are the differences between skating and surf skating? Well, you know, skateboarding is broad, right? There’s half pipe. There’s bull riding, there’s street cats. Right. Everyone has a different expression.
So Carver is among them. Right. And Carver sort of accentuates the surf aspect of a skateboard. And I think that what Girls Swirl is attracted to the ability to express yourself on a skateboard, there’s actually a neurological basis for that. In our inner ear, we have these stones called otholits.
They’re made of calcium carbonate like seashells. wow. And they move within a membrane in our ear. I always picture. Yeah. An anemone. Yeah, these stones moving and the stones are tethered to the magma core of the earth. And when we accelerate angularly or laterally, these stones move in the membrane.
And so I call it jiggling the stones. And so our sort of goal indirectly was to have the stones jiggle in the same way that they do on a surfboard as they do on a skateboard. You know, some people are ballerinas, some people are soccer players.
We all jiggle our stones in different ways, but the rhythm of the movement of the stones is, I think what’s interesting and I think the girls are attracted to the way it jiggles their stones. I also think that the Caver has allowed for femininity to be brought into skating,
Not just femininity, but agility and like a whole rhythm. Another dance. I was reading this article by Red Bull, and in it the the guy who they interviewed said that surf skate is the child of both surfing and skateboarding. The father of skateboarding and the mother of surfing
And we know mothers always say of always, right. Who would you say are less of your your three most notable writers? Our first team writer was a guy named Laird Hamilton. okay. And then he was, you know, a legend, an amazing innovator. But and now recently we signed Kai. Lenny. no way.
Who’s other level, you know, is an alien. Yeah, he is an alien. And I really appreciate his everything. His innovation, his integrity. And let’s see, we’ve been working with Taylor Knox for ten years, maybe. Okay. And he’s part of our family. Is that him on the. On that magazine? Yeah.
How did you guys come up with that idea? Carver’s about movement, right? That’s what distinguishes it. And so to have a, you know, of back in those days, we were advertising and, you know, Juice magazine and Surfer magazine. And so we had these sequence shots that we would do.
And when we did the shot with Taylor Knox, he he wanted his photographer to do the shoot. And it was guy named Art Brewer. Legendary. Okay. Art brewer. What a name. That’s exactly right. It’s like, great point. But he’s ridiculously talented guy, and
I guess he had been working with Taylor for years and was sort of a father figure. Okay. So he ended up driving Taylor hard that yeah, over again. Over again. And he taught us how to properly do these simple shot these shots with this plate system.
And from that point on and, you know, changed how we did things, he really influenced us. In fact, that day we produced maybe four ads of photographs we took on that day. Okay. That’s how powerful he was. And, you know, Taylor was exhausted.
And I said, no, we’re going to know that we’re driving over here. And it’s really, really cool to learn from art. We worked on a project for Not Impossible Lives and Mick Ebling where you had to design electric wheelchair. Yes. And tell me a little bit of what happened. That was a
Really fun project that I’m still involved with. But really the goal was to create a modular electric wheelchair. Right. We had these scooters on every corner nowadays, and but the wheelchair industry is pretty antiquated. It hasn’t kept up. Yeah, that’s true.
So the goal was to fast forward it right, to bring it to state of the art. And so we made several prototypes that are electric wheelchairs that break down into small parts. And our case study was this young lady named Kelly Lee. And so we built it for Kelly.
And I remember the the last prototype that we created. She actually drove it in. There was a big convention. She had it and she actually drove it in to the convention. And only 10 minutes prior to that, she had toppled the thing and turned it by over outside, which she felt pretty bad.
She was such a good sport, but. Yes. Electric wheelchair. One of my favorite projects. Yeah. Talk about, you know, exciting those the particles in their eyes. Right. Using the stones. Yeah. Yeah. What do you think has been the biggest challenge for Carver?
So initially, I think the steepest hill was convincing people just to try it. And then once they did, you know, especially the surfers among them got it and realized this is this is a surf tool. But yeah, that was the steepest early adoption was resisted.
Was there any point where you’re like, this is this is not going to work? You know, you’re like, you just yesterday I’m kidding. No. It’s like a child. You know, it has to survive. You know? I know the way you guys feel about Carver, you know? Yeah, well, I feel the same way.
And, you know, my business partner as well. So Carver will always exist. And it really is not a, you know, capitalistic pursuit, right? It’s only a byproduct of our commitment to delivering to our customers. You know, with all of the transparency today of social media. All you have to do is be honest.
Yeah. And produce the best product that you can and open your kimono and your customers know who you are. So all we’ve done is we’ve been sincere in delivering on the promise of surf skate and we effort to make it as inexpensive as we can. Our motivation isn’t profit now.
You know, we have adults in the room like Dave to make sure that’s as well. But our motivation is delivering the experience. Yeah. Surf skate to our customers and having it and doing the thing that’s important that it last, you know, lifetime. What was that spark that really or the impetus that turned
Play and game into a serious business? You know, it wasn’t a vision, you know, it creeped, you know, it ebbed and flowed. And initially we you know, no one wanted our truck. You know, it was this trailing wheel system that looked very different,
Felt very different, didn’t feel like a skateboard at all, so initially we had trouble convincing others to get out once they did get on it, fell in love with it. But there was this moment where Japan, we went to this convention and what is currently our Japanese distributor
Approached us and I think they ordered 600 Carvers. No way. And so we went right to work making 600 Carvers, and we couldn’t make enough. Like it was hard to keep up at the time because we were just, you know, just three of us at the time.
And it was a series of those, you know, fits and starts. And Carver just responded. We continuously grow and evolve. And, you know, currently we have a proper formal president I call the adult in the room. The boss. Yeah. And his name is Dave Root, and he’s super talented.
And so, you know, but it’s only through 27 years of trials and tribulations that we’ve wound up here and, you know, have a, you know, highly effective functional company every year. We call it Kaizen and constant improvement. We listen to our customers and we guarantee these trucks for life.
So if anything breaks our customers, let us know. And we see what is weak in the system and we, you know, upgrade it. So we’re always improving it constantly, even 27 years later, we’re we’re hoping that the children that we pass it on generations can, you know, have a surf skate too.
So what does the next ten years look like for Carver? Well, we’re going to continue to innovate. And right now, we’re about to come out with this new plastic skateboard. nice. Recycled fishing net, the fishing nets are made with nylon sticks or structural plastic.
So rather than the nets being dumped in the ocean and killing fish. Yeah, the mammals, we recycle them into. But this one was about performance. Okay this one here is basically we used plastic because it could be what it was the best medium material. Wood has limitations. We call it produce.
You know, it changes and warps. And there’s also limitations you can do with compound curve. Okay. The plastic is completely malleable so we’re able to achieve all of the wheel wells compound wells. We need. This deck is committed to performance really what it’s about.
Wow. Even though you’re healing the planet when you buy it. Yeah, right. It it’s also about performance and longevity. It’s a win win. And this hasn’t come out yet, right? So I’d say about two more months it’ll be available Well now you know, you guys have the scoop. Yeah, it really does.
It come with a specific design with the wheels and the what? What truck does it use? It’s going to be all black. It’s going to be a black deck. This plastic will be black instead of this gray. The truck’s simply blacked out. And the wheels. Yeah, that’s my style.
So, Greg, thanks so much for having us over at your amazing place. It’s really inspiring to be next to someone that’s done such amazing things for a skating and at a human level. I really appreciate your opening up your doors and having us over here. This is going to be a for 2023.
For us. It’s been our it’s our first season. I was super excited end it in such a great manne. Thanks so much Greg. Thank you. Gp5 five Production for Adventurous Brands.
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