High school guidance counsellors are the dream killers.
What do you want to be? they ask. You say, 1 want to run a wild little
surf label, surf heaps, make enough green to buy a couple of cribs at
favourite points and maybe, just maybe, change surf fashion. They gag
on their milky instant coffee and drench you with scorn and spit:
university, the public service, banks blah blah blah. That's how it
works. You can't just... create... something out of nothing.
They are profoundly wrong. And it's good men like JC, photographed here, who is out there proving that dreams can fly.
Let me take you back 20 years. Back when JC was an apprentice butcher
in Wellington. The kid with the mad surfing bent would be jammed into a
kitchen hacking the heads of bovine and swine. Every night he'd come
home, drenched in blood, his spirit a little poorer. Six months in he
quit and began foiling fins and competing on the New Zealand contest
circuit. Soon he was out of the factory and into retail, dealing surf
fashion to the kids at a local shop.
By the time he was 19, JC was in partnership with his mate Tony Bruce.
The pair set up a skate park in town, complete with a two-metre high,
100-metre long half-pipe, a four-metre vert ramp and scores of
mini-ramps. They charged three bucks an hour and the joint would swell
every arvo with grubs, dropped off by their parents. "It was the
cheapest babysitting in town, " he says.
So JC does The Skate Pit for three years then washes around in retail
for a time then, in 1991, he gets offered a job in Australia from Beach
Culture founder John Brooks who'd moved across the Strait and set up
Aloha Surf in Manly.
This is where his career started to gain momentum. In Australia, JC
meets Wes Fabb. Both help John set up Beach Culture at Sydney airport.
Wes flys to a trade show in LA, sees the new fringe label Volcom, set
up by ex-Quiksilver employee, Richard Woolcott, calls JC and says:
"I've got this thing called Volcom. Wanna do it in Australia?"
The pair throw in five-grand each. The first range arrives complete
with purple boardshorts and leather waistbands and extravagant leather
jackets. "You gotta remember, this is when the Hot Tuna 8108 denim
above-the-knee boardshort ruled supreme," says JC. "I'd never seen
anything like it in my life. It genuinely was punk meets surf culture."
Initially, they couldn't even give away the stickers (ironic, cause you
can't buy 'em) and their first phone call at their Warriewood office
was from a customer wanting their Vulcan gas heater fixed.
But then it started to roll. Wes and JC rented a three-bedder in Manly
where they lived and worked. Team riders slept in the lounge and the
wardrobes and corridors acted as a warehouse. They stayed until the
front door couldn't be opened or the back door closed because of
cartons of clothes and accessories. Even as late as 1995, JC was still
working five days a week at Aloha Surf, using his two days off to run
the Stone. JC and Wes'd rep the gear, organise production (some truly
heinous creations came out in the early days: asymmetrical arms, rogue
stitching, seams that split at a whisper), work with teamriders, make
the ads. Everything.
Wow, well into their second decade in Australia, the Stone is a player.
Maybe not top three, but not-so-slowly closing in. The Volcom surf
team, says JC, is quality over quantity: Bruce, Oz, Deano, Jay Quinn.
Their office, once a small portion of an industrial estate, has
consumed the rest of the building. It now counts three warehouses plus
offices.
So what's success to JC who, incidentally, has accrued all the
trappings he dreamed of in the first paragraph? "Getting up in the
morning
and knowing I've got a great job and great staff to go to," he says. "And
that I've got a team that want to ride for Volcom, that really want to
ride for the Stone."
