Dec 22, 2020
Arbor Collective just crossed the 25-year anniversary mark and I had the good fortune to sit down with founder Bob Carlson and talk about their history, the early days of skateboarding, and more.
Arbor Collective just crossed the 25-year anniversary mark and I had the good fortune to sit down with founder Bob Carlson and talk about their history, the early days of skateboarding, and more.
And we’re going to give away an Arbor Skateboard on the show this week. Listen to my convo with Arbor Collective Founder Bob Carlson! In celebration of Arbor's 25th Anniversary, they are giving away an Arbor Skateboard to one lucky Outdoor Biz listener! The deadline to enter is January 22nd at noon Pacific time. The winner will be announced Monday, January 25th.
Show Notes
Introduction to skateboarding and snowboarding. When surfing sort of started growing in Southern California, one of the big scenes in LA was State Beach, Will Rogers State Beach, and in the seventies, a great single fin shaping tradition began there around a shop called Natural Progression. And a lot of great surfers came out of that era and that zone through the sixties and seventies from Mickey Munoz right on through shapers like Robbie Dick. And I kind of grew up in the middle of that, loving it, loving sort of just the whole outdoor life around the beach and surfing, and the culture and the people aspects of shape and art and color really captivated me. And probably I don't know, it's gotta be around the middle of elementary school I started skateboarding.
How did you meet Chris Jensen? I knew Chris in junior high. We became good friends in high school. And Chris was an amazing individual, you know, he woke up in the morning and the adventure started, he was always in the pursuit of fun. So he was that guy you wanted to be around because whatever he was doing was going to lead to good times. And he had a magnetic personality. He was a total charmer and he was just, he was a great friend. And we spent a lot of years traveling up the coast and down the coast. His family had a little piece of property on the beach North of Santa Barbara, that we used to camp out all the time. I still actually do. And so we were just good friends. Through that early part of life, a group of us went on a lot of adventures together that really kind of forms those lifelong friendships.
The Sustainability Idea- I remember the trips up the 395 from Venice to Mammoth and talking about our business and what we were going to do next. And the idea of making snowboards came up. We could do koa top snowboards, no one was doing koa tops. No one was talking about sustainability at that time in snowboarding, everything was oriented towards the teenager, you know, bright, heavy graphics, big rock star athletes, and ambassadors. Fashion play baggy pants, really the focus on sort of urban culture. And as young environmentalists, but moving into our work lives, there was really not a lot out there for us. For people in this group of snowboarders that were going into their twenties and thirties and forties. And there was nothing oriented towards the non-teenage customer, the customer who was looking for a little ethos in their product or was looking for a different sense of style. That was cleaner, more craftsmanship oriented. And we, so we clearly knew that there was something to be had had there.
So, at some point I said to him, look dude, Go make one board, go make one snowboard. And if you can make one, I'll be in. And he went out and he had a top sheet made and he went and found this guy, Michael Lish, who was running a little snowboard factory in the Valley. I'll never forget the day he walked in the office and held it up and I was just like, okay, that's life-changing now.
Follow up with Bob