OTG: The most 90's thing you've thought about today


  
 

The story of OTG


In the late 80's my parents started a small business selling playground equipment. The business originally existed on the main floor of our house, but later moved into the basement where they setup an office and had some staff. As the business grew, they eventually rented external space, and finally ending up buying a building on 1800 block McAra sometime in the early 90's.

In April 1993 I was with my family on a snowboard trip in Whistler. My brother had just got a new snowboard, which ended up being a total piece of crap, and we couldn't get the bindings mounted on it. We decided to go to a skate/snowboard shop in the village to try and get some help. I remember the place being pretty ghetto, and the grungy guy helping us out was banging some hard core gansta rap. Nonetheless, he set my bros snowboard up and started chatting it up with my old man. At this point in time, my brother and I were starting to get back into skateboarding, and something about the shop and this guy got my dad thinking that he should maybe expand his business into selling skateboards. The guy at the shop was pretty cool, and openly gave my dad the name of a skateboard distributor.

Soon after we got back, we decided to do a big order and fill the display area of our building with all types of skate clothing, boards, trucks and so on. No one knew how to order skate stuff, so the distributor helped fill the order. We got some dope stuff, but we also got some crappy old stock that you could tell they were just trying to unload. Some of the boards still used the old truck bolt pattern, and actually had to be drilled to work with new trucks!

We decided to call our skateboard division "Bitchin' Boards", after an add I once saw in Thrasher. Since the closing of "Skate Fever", there were no more skateboard shops in the city, and only one other store, Fresh Air Experience, even carried skateboards at all. We thought sales were going to be great, but business was less than booming. I think the problem was threefold: we had a poor location, skateboarding was pretty unpopular in 1993, and we were associated with a company that sold children's playground equipment.

To make matters worse, we had a series of break ins that literally crippled our skateboard stock. For the first break in, they pried open the side door of the building and robbed us blind. For the second break in, they came through the front window, which we naively had left unbarred. After this, our skateboard stock was severely scaled back and soon office desks began to occupy parts of the display area. Nevertheless we trudged on. Although skateboarding was just a side line for my parents, and hardly constituted any measurable amount of income, I honestly believe the reason they kept any skateboard stuff in stock was just because their kids thought it was cool.

Towards the end of 1994, my mom had started a community organization named SK8 Regina, which was dedicated to building a skateboard park. In 1995 we had a huge skate jam at SouthLand Mall, and Bitchin' Boards was one of the sponsors. We had t-shirts printed up that had both the name of the organization (SK8 Regina), and the name of the shop on them. In hindsight, it probably wasn't fair trying to link the store with the community organization, but in today's world of corporate sponsorship, it really seems like peanuts. The shirts sold pretty well, and helped us to gain some recognition.

Until my parents closed their business in 1996, the skateboard division had gone through its ups and downs. Because I was still in school, I couldn't be there during the day, and it was up to my parents and their sales staff to service any skaters that managed to wander in. In the summer of 1996, I realized that the skateboard division needed some direction, and I, along with my buddy Rob Gwilliam, started running the shop full time. The first move was to get a standalone bank account for Bitchin' Boards and treat it as separate entity. Then, near the end of August, my parents informed us that they were closing their entire business down, and that if we wanted to, we could take the skateboard stock as a loan and start our own shop. It was a bit of a scary idea, but it would give us the freedom to take the business in the direction that we wanted to go.

It was around this time that we decided to pursue a name change. Bitchin' Boards was a pretty retro name, even in 1993, and it was starting to sound a bit lame. Also, parents hated filling it out on checks. I remember a few times I told people to just write B&B Skateboards so that they would stop fretting. Ultimately the name "Off The Ground" was chosen, and I'm pretty sure that Rob came up with it. Sure, it's kind of a generic name, but it didn't sound dated and the acronym, OTG, was most definitely memorable.

Now with a new name in hand, it was time to look for some space for a shop. Because we were running on such a tight budget, we needed some seriously cheap rent, and we were willing to take what we could get. After checking out a few places, our landlord suggested that we see some space he had on Broad street. The building was kinda oldschool, and had some warehouse type space in it as well as some other small businesses. One of the warehouse rooms actually reached all the way to the front of the building. The only problem was that the room was not accessible from the hallway, and that it was actually part of a larger warehouse. Luckily we were able to strike a deal whereby if we dry walled the room off from the warehouse, and then had a door cut, we could rent the thing for just over $200 a month. Sure it was only the size of a living room, but it was ours! Gwilliam and his dad did all the painting and drywalling, and definitely deserve a big thanks for all of their effort.

We opened the doors just in time for school to start, and we needed a staff member to run the place while me and Rob were away during the day. This is where our buddy Shawn Trott entered the picture. Shawn stalked shelves for the Wholesale Club during the night, and had no daytime commitments. He agreed to work the shop for us during the day while we were at school. Shawn would literally drive from the wholesale club and sleep at the shop until it was time to open the doors. If he slept in too much, he would sometimes be woken up by customers knocking on the door! There were several surprised moms who had a half naked guy in a sleeping bag let them into the store.

Because business was never booming at OTG, no one, including myself, really earned much money. I couldn't even afford to pay minimum wage, so I had a deal with all the employees that they would only get payed a commission on whatever they sold. This also absolved me from collecting CPP, EI and any taxes from them. Although pay checks were small, in a funny way, it kinda made the shop special. It was a somewhere you could go hang out, watch a video (favourites were Gleamin' the Cube, Thrashin' and Animal Chin), eat some 2 for 1 pizza and play Nintendo. If a customer happened to walk in and you made a sale, then you also got a small check at the end of the month.

When winter rolled around, we tried to expand into the snowboard business. It seemed like a natural extension for a skateshop, but ended up burning us really badly. We had very little snowboard stock, and because we weren't a big company, there weren't any mainstream snowboard manufacturers that would deal with us. Instead we had to order snowboards from our skate distributors, which meant that they were usually companies that no one had heard of, like: Static, Prophecy and Goodtimes. Needless to say, we didn't sell any boards, and only a few pairs of bindings. I ended up taking a board for myself, and selling a few to my parents at cost, who then gifted them to my brothers for birthdays. We also sold very few skateboards at the time, and kept only a small stock of them. Some of the decks were drying out and pressure cracking, and there was a period where we kept them in a box and never even put them up on the walls.
Finally after a hard winter, spring came and skateboards started selling again. We did a couple big orders and sold a bunch of boards. Things were seeming up! Around that time Shawn moved to Calgary, so we brought on one of our homies who actually worked across the street at Sears Bargain Center: Chris Tyrer. Chris was a great guy to have around the shop, and would even come and hang out on his breaks from Sears. A little while later, Rob also ended up moving too Calgary and it was just me and Chris left running the place.

Then we hit the summer slump. I can't explain summers, but there is this odd point where it's nice outside, people are out and being active, and yet no boards are selling. It got to a point where companies that had given us credit no longer would until I paid them back. Instead of paying them though, I used what little cash I had to order stock from another distributor in hopes to make more sales. I still couldn't bring the place into good financial shape, and began to worry that we weren't going to be able to make things work.

By the end of the summer, stock had depleted a lot, and I was sick of the business. I was ready to do something else, and my grandpa was nagging me to work road construction for his company. Around this time, Shawn Trott, and my buddy Paul Friesen were talking about moving back from Calgary. They asked me if I wanted to sell the shop, and I agreed. I just didn't have any passion for the place left. I sold them the company for $700 plus the cost of the remaining inventory. I then used the money to pay off whatever debts I owed my suppliers. In the end, I walked away with $600 profit, which was the most money that I had ever made from the place.

It's funny, because our revenue model was so different than what it is for skate shops today. We made most of our profit from the sale of boards, trucks, and wheels, and we made a marginal amount off of t-shirts. We didn't carry pants (except for Shawn Trott's custom God Skates ones), and we once in a while brought in a few pairs of shoes. There may have even have been a couple of hats from time to time. Nowadays, skateshops are all about clothing, and shoes in particular. A large part of the reason is that most of the people buying them don't skate. It was really rare for a non-skater to ever show up in the shop in those days. I'm happy that skateshops today are doing well for themselves, but I could never go back to being a shop owner. I wouldn't want to carry the cool brands, nor sell skate clothes or longboards to people who don't give a crap about skating.

So to close it all off, being in the skate business was tough, but I'll never regret owning my own shop. All of the people I met, and all of the experiences that I had were priceless, and I'll never be able to look at a slice of 2 for 1 pizza the same again. I still think back to those times with fond affection. To the old VCR we had to beat up in order to get tapes to play. Waiting for 5 O'Clock so that we could watch Fresh Prince and The Simpsons on our old TV. Making a spontaneous order for some super wide decks in the middle of winter, and then writing "For Big Ass Boards" on the check memo. The feeling of getting a new order of stock in, and how awesome it was to see all the boards. Everything about it now seems magical, and the hard times hardly seem that bad.

b-ill