The Rider Was the Product In the 1980s skate industry, the deck under a kid's feet was rarely the thing being sold first. The thing being sold was a person — a pro skater whose name was on the board, whose graphic was the graphic, and whose style in a magazine sequence or a video part told the buyer what the brand …

A Format Nobody Expected to Sell When Powell Peralta released The Bones Brigade Video Show in 1984, the company expected to sell about 300 copies on VHS. It sold 30,000. That gap — two orders of magnitude between the forecast and the result — is the whole story of how skate video became the dominant marketing medium of …

The Boom Was Built on a Bust The popular image of 1980s skateboarding — vert ramps, backyard halfpipes, street skaters grinding curbs in the suburbs — looks like a culture that chose the margins on purpose. In a sense it did, but the choice was forced. The reason skating moved out of purpose-built commercial parks and …