Skidmark

The-Ahhhh memories. So an old buddy just sent me a sweatshirt of his company that his family owns in Virgina Beach along with some stickers from the company where we met. We used to work together at Wave Rave. Wave Rave Snowboard Clothing based out of Boulder Colorado. You may or may not remember it? Wave Rave and Quimbola Man were the first two snowboard clothing company's "b.i.t.d." I got hired cause a ski guy that I lived with convinced the guys in there that I knew something about sales and could help rebuild the company. When in fact I was just a shop kid that ran a store and bought things for it that we thought was cool. Oh and drank beers promptly at 6pm out of coffee cups while working the sales floor when the shop closed at 9. The fact that we carried Rad Air, Bamboo Curtain and Bat Waves should of given these guys a clue to my skills.
Yea...anyway back to Wave Rave. Mark Wilson was the dude who hired me and just sent me the sweatshirt AND some old Wave Rave stickers we did. In the stickers was a Skidmark sticker, which made me chuckle a little bit and go through some historicals I had put away and find these three bad boys. Skidmark magazines, some of my better work I may add as it was real raw.
My marching orders when I was hired at Wave Rave was to "increase company communication to the reps and retailers." So I dreamed up this little mini zine and took writing inspiration from Blunt Mag and a little local Breck zine that Dave England did called Skintight and figured we could get the word out that way. I'd write crap up on this thing like I do here, then go to the printer and print the hell out of the shit and Vinny the graphic guy and I would staple 500 - 1000 copies a month together and send em out to retailers and reps. I though it was pretty fun. Then I got the chance to write the catalog and from there wrote some NW and Drake catalogs and clinic manuals.....and the writing thing began.
The thing I liked about writing in the "snowboard world" was that you never really had to know anything about writing. You just put words down, like you'd tell a story or make one up and phonetically spell the stuff if you were too lazy to spell check it and for the most part it was accepted. Except by the fags that didn't actually snowboard.
So when C3 started 5 years ago, the dudes all wrote their own catalogs and had no need for a hack like me. But the itch needed to be scratched and I started a little "news update" section on the company page that quickly got shut down because of the content and golfers that read it. And here we are today, a non company blog that isn't a company blog but sometimes has stupid things about company "happenings" or something like that. Real hippo-critical like.
Why the fuck I didn't title this thing The-Skidmark kills me now. Say it out load: "The-Skidmark, a toilet paper" is freaking Jeenyus!

Wilson