Pieces: Don Brown
In this new feature series, we dispense with the questions and just give you the answers. Here we talk to former pro freestyle skater and skate footwear innovator, Don Brown.
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Once a humble freestyle skateboarder from the town Brighton on England's south coast, Don Brown made his way across the Atlantic in the mid-1980s to pursue his dream of becoming pro.
In less than two years, he had turned pro and by 1989, he had won the Freestyle World Championships in Munster, Germany. But it was his work off the board, alongside Etnies owner Pierre-Andre Senizergues, that Brown gave his greatest contribution to skateboarding by helping to develop new technologies in skate footwear.
HUCK caught up with him at Etnies 25 Years Anniversary celebrations as part of the Public Domaine skate exhibition at La Gaîté Lyrique to get his story.
The Early Years
"Back in 1984, I was with bunch of people who said, 'let’s go to America'. [We bought] a one way ticket with a five day Greyhound pass, so we landed in New York, went down to Texas and hung out with Jeff Philips, and then we got the Greyhound to California. I ended up staying at Del Mar skatepark and sleeping on the beaches and trampolines there. But it was when skating was really small so you got accepted within the family of skateboarding. People would say 'come stay at my house' so it was kinda cool. So yeah, we just did that until I ran out of money and ended up working at Vision Street Wear in the warehouse. I was skating amateur at the time, then won all the amateur contests and then semi-pro. In 1986, I first turned pro and just lived the life of travelling and doing contests."
Meeting Pierre-Andre Senizergues
“I first met Pierre at a contest in 1981 then Pierre came out around ’1986 so we would go skating together down in Huntington Beach. And then the end of 1989, skateboarding kind of crashed and all the freestylers and vert skaters all got washed out ‘cos Steve Rocco came in and took over [with World Industries] with the whole street deal kind of broke away from the big five companies and fractured everything. Pierre was doing the distribution for Etnies at the time. In 1991, I saw him skating at the beach one day and he was like, “yeah, if you need a job, I need some help”. I was just thinking I could help him out as a friend or whatever, then it was pretty much just me and him doing whatever it took and it just kind of went from there.”
About Etnies
"The first Etnies shoes were vulcanised but very kind of flashy from zebra stripes to tiger prints to polka dots – completely out there. But it was really interesting, really creative stuff – really well made 'cos the shoes were actually made in a bigger factory from a very high fashion brand. [After I joined] Pierre and I started to design more of the products with the key thing being that as skateboarders, we knew what skaters needed so it wasn’t that we needed to hire a bunch of people to do all that stuff. It was pretty simple."
The Rap
"My favourite shoe is probably The Rap. It came out in 1991 and it was such a pivotal shoe at the time. At one point, I was hooking up pretty much every one of the top riders in the industry. It was just such a strong foundation for Etnies. At the time it was a suede and it had the ollie patch at the side with a rubber underlay so it lasted a lot longer. It had an insole for extra protection and it came with a double set of laces, which we kind of started before all the skate companies. All the other shoes before that had big rubber patches and just ugly things kind of just built into them, and this shoe just created the true style for something you could actually skate in and wear out at night and still look good."
The Influence of Freestyle
"It's funny that a lot of freestyle skaters [like Rodney Mullen, Pierre-Andre Senizergues and Steve Rocco] started to take over the manufacturing side of the industry. [...] Within freestyle, I do think it was a little more thoughtful maybe. I mean I think Rodney Mullen is the genius who took things to whole new levels. When you look at him as an individual, he’s pretty much a prodigy in everything he does. So I think there are components within freestyle that’s much more engineered and structured more than the street or vert. [..] But I think skateboarding as a whole is something that is just really creative. We all look at the world differently and, at the end of the day, it’s just a piece of wood with wheels on that's about the enjoyment of rolling. But then it's just human nature to always want to progress and evolve, so that starts to attract people that just love that creativity and the freedom of skateboarding and they always wanna take things to the next level."
The Future
"I think the most important thing for skateboarding is that there’s always a big smile on everyone's face. We’re obviously seeing a big influx of some of the athletic brands out there. All they know is competition and just want to be 'number one'. I think the most important thing is to make sure as skateboarding grows to new levels but where we always keep that true core spirit of what skateboarding really is alive. Let's not let all these non-skateboarders come in and be a Napoleon and try to kill the competition. […] That’s not what I got into skateboarding for. I got into skateboarding for the pure love and experience of skateboarding."
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Pieces: Don Brown (text) by Ed Andrews is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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