Buying In - (Page 39) buying in 39 Peralta released a video of his riders doing tricks and behaving like outlaws and having a great time. Sold through skate shops, such videos became a standard tactic of board companies and created an aesthetic that influenced everyone from critically revered filmmaker Spike Jonze to the creators of Jackass. Powell Peralta was also known for excellent graphics and memorable ads in a handful of skateboarding magazines. (While Stacey Peralta directed Dogtown and Z-Boys, the documentary was funded by Vans, the shoe company.) In 1993, Ed Templeton, like Peralta and others before him, started a company—it had the appealing name Toy Machine Bloodsucking Skateboard Company—basically planning ahead to have a way to make a living when he eventually got too old to skate professionally. So that’s the first reason that it’s not quite right to suggest that the DIY skate scene was a purely uncommercial thing before the big companies came along and capitalized on it. The second is that by the time the “Beautiful Losers” show opened in Orange County, a funny thing had happened within the outlaw culture of skateboarding. Sales of skateboarding “hard goods”—helmets and wheels and actual skate decks—totaled around $809 million. But sales for T-shirts and shoes and other “soft goods” brought in much more, around $4.4 billion. Skate shoe sales, in fact, were growing faster than any other category of athletic shoes, according to NPD Group, the retaildata monitor. Of course, just because you own a pair of skate shoes doesn’t mean you have to skate. And this is precisely what has happened to the skateboarding culture over the past decade or so: It has become possible to participate in the idea of skateboarding without actually skateboarding. To someone like Ed Templeton, this is absurd. And that should matter. Even professional marketers who pay lip serv-
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