streetwear vs. skatewear
Skateboarding is a lot bigger than streetwear is. The Streetwear scene is actually really small, but is growing bigger every day. In the skateboarding market you can't really make a lot of stuff that you might want to make because it's a hard to sell certain stuff to most skate shops. Most of the products in skateboarding are really logo driven and basic. That's what sells the best in skateboarding. Where in streetwear you can make whatever you want, just do something off-the-wall. Even though Diamond is a skate brand, I think I make a lot of stuff that doesn't really look like your typical skate clothes. I guess that's where the non skate sneaker type of kids got involved and interested in my brand, Even though I make a lotta logo driven shirts, I also make stuff that's different than what the average skateboarding gear usually looks like I guess. I'm not a streetwear expert but if you look at a lot of the people running the streetwear brands like, The Hundreds, aNYthing, J Money, Fucking Awesome, Mighty Healthy and many others are run by people that skate or use to be part of the skate culture. They are mainly skaters who started most of these clothing brands. So I guess streetwear is somewhat part skate oriented or influenced.

well connected.
How I had such a grasp on the skate industry from the beginning was because of who I was and where I came from. I grew up in SF skating The Embarcadero in the late '80s, early '90s which at the time was the skateboard Mecca of the world, with Mike & Greg Carroll, Henry Sanchez, and all the other locals such as fuckin' Mike York, James Kelch, Rick Ibeseta, Jovantae (Turner) just everybody from Embarcadero. as well as all the heads that use to come out and skate from New York and LA like, Harold Hunter, Steven Cales, Keenan (Milton), Billy Valdes, Kareem Campbell and so many other people. We all grew up skating together. Street skating was around for a long time before the Embarcadero era, But basically it was all new shit back then. All the tricks were new at EMB. Everyone was learning all these new tricks that no one ever saw before. It was just a great time for skateboarding and that's where I came from. So growing up there and being around all those people who became some of the best skaters in the world, and some that still are to this day, gave me a jumpstart to what years later manifested into a job for myself. When I started Diamond, right from the get-go, I had 30 of the best pros on my team. So when I launched Diamond in 98, these were all my homies riding for my company, it was like, here's Diamond. Here's Mike Carroll, Henry Sanchez, Eric Koston, Stevie Williams and Rick Howard. Right away it took off. There was no, 'Oh, here's Diamond, let's try to get some sales. A lot of the sales were already there from the start because of who was involved. That was a blessing.

in the rough.
I have had fiberglass and plastic skateboards since I was 3 years old, but When I was age 10 in 1983, I got my first real board which was a Santa Cruz Jammer with Yo-Yo wheels and Indy Trucks. I was one of those rebel-punk rock kids. Like a little fucked-up, 10-year-old kid with an army jacket and a mohawk, listening to punk rock and rap, breakdancing, skateboarding (cracking up) and causing problems all the time. So when I was between 10 and I'd say 13, 14, I used to go to juvenile hall all the time for stupid-ass shit. I'd always get busted for selling weed or breaking into houses and cars or something. Basically, I was living in San Jose at the time Runnin with the bad kids and the courts couldn't take it anymore so they took me away from my parents.They put me in a ghetto fuckin group home in San Francisco. While living in the group home I used to be able to just bounce out all the time. I'd go to school, but then I'd just skip school because the group home people didn't really care, I mean my counselors that ran the houses were smoking crack and shit like that so I'd just leave and go skate down all the hills in SF and chill with my friends.... The city was like a big playground for me. I would take the train down to Embarcadero which was the only place where there was all these kids that were just like me, skating. And I was like, "Oh shit!, this is dope, all these kids," you know. And they're not even going to school. They're just drinkin' forties of St. Ides, smokin' weed listenin to rap and hangin' out, doing the shit that I liked to do. I was just a 14-year-old kid. Back then all I had was the EMB crew and the group home kids that I lived with that were all fuck ups or abandoned kids from different hoods in the city. I got kicked out of all my group homes and put back in juvie numerous times for all kinds of shit, got kicked out of all my schools too. I was getting kicked out because I'd never go to school and had zero supervision. The group homes and courts didn't know what to do with me. So I did what I wanted and just lived in and out of juvinile hall and group homes, basically, throughout my whole high school years until I was about 18. From around '87 'til '94 I was skating the Embarcadero almost every single day chasing the pro skateboarder dream, minus the two years I was in Sacramento from '92 to '93. None of my friends were going to school. No one was doing shit except skating. Eventually EMB got shut down and made unskatable, some of the crew left SF and moved to LA since they became pro skaters and the SF skate scene was dying down since EMB was gone. [We] didn't really know what to do because nobody went to school and no one did shit. So some of us, like myself, Mike Carroll and others went and did our own shit. So 4 years later when I started my company and I got all those people to ride for my team, Mike Carroll liked what I was doing with Diamond and offered to help me with distribution out of Girl skateboards in LA. I then sold shares of Diamond To Rick Howard, Mike Carroll and Mike's brother Greg to get some cash flow. I immediatly packed my things and moved to LA to make it happen. That really helped it grow and got Diamond recognized in the skateboard world. Being at Girl gave Diamond legitimacy. After 6 years Diamond has just recently parted ways with Girl Distribution and we now have our own Distribution company called EMPIRE which is in the SF Bay Area. Diamond is sold and shipped out of our new warehouse in Hayward, California and I have my office/showroom here in LA. I have an apartment in SF now so I can be back and forth from LA to SF all the time.

who got game?
After the whole EMB era and my skate career came to a halt due to injury after injury I was working at a restaurant, learning how to be a bartender. I was in my early twenties and I didn't really know how to do anything but skate. I really didn't know how to do much of anything, but I always wanted to design stuff. Ever since I was a kid, I used to fuckin' cut up shit and make clothes. I think I made the first zip-up flannel back in the day. I cut the buttons off of a flanel then hand stiched a zipper on it and I gave it to Jovantae (Turner) who ended up wearing it in the World Industries Love Child video while he's skating. I thought that was the sickest thing. I was like, "There's my flannel he's wearing! That's tight!" And then zip-up flannels came out like a year later. I was always sayin, "Ah, I made that shit up." (laughs) So anyway ... I was always into designing stuff, but I never knew really how to do it. I would tell ideas to people that worked at skate companies, Give them free ideas -- "Do this, Do that." And then one day I got myself a computer -- a real cheap Macintosh that just had the bullshit art program that came with it. I had that computer for probably about four years and just fucked with this crappy program. I don't even know what it was called and I was just messing around with these fuckin' graphics. I again at the time got myself in a bit of a mess in SF and I moved to Santa Cruz with my Dad in '96 for a year. I Didn't know what to do, I had this computer, doin' graphics, knew I wanted to do something. I wanted to make a clothing company, actually, but then me and my homeboy in Santa Cruz came up with this idea for a special skateboard bolt. I sold my dad on the idea and he let me borrow a little bit of money to start sampling the bolt at some machine shops. So that's how my company started. I started working on trying to make this Double Allen head bolt that could be tightened on both sides with just two small allen keys. Basically, we tried to make it for two years. Two years I was workin' on this damn bolt..(laughing) That I couldn't get to work. I pretty much gave up on the idea after 3 years and just made regular skate bolts like everyone else already made. I was making and selling Diamond t shirts anyways by then, which is where all the money was at for me. When I first began working on the bolt I didn't even know about Illustrator or photoshop until about four years after I was already doing graphics on my computer because I didn't know of anybody that was doing graphics stuff at the time. I just had this janky-ass computer. So I guess I learned a lot because I had to tweak everything all the time to make it work right, which made my mind work good on the computer. Problem-solving like hell. After a year I moved back to SF and I bought my first real computer. I had this homeboy in San Francisco who worked at a shipping company so he got me a stolen G4 when it first came out -- the tower with a monitor, printer and everything... got the whole set-up for $900 bucks. I don't really want to say how I got the $900 back then, but I bought it off him. This is back in 97'. Then my homeboy SKECH, a Graffiti artist from San Francisco who went to the Academy of Art for graphic design showed me how to do hella shit, He got me the Illustrator program and gave me the crash course. I started fucking with it. I started working on some better designs and at this time came up with the name for Diamond, then Sketch helped me design my first Diamond logo.....which is the same logo that I use today.

slam dunk
The Diamond Dunk came about because I really wanted to do a Nike shoe ever since they started the skate program. I was always thinkin, "I want to do one." So I manifested that shit. I used to tell the skaters that rode for Diamond that were on the Nike team, "Dude, hook it up so I can make a Diamond Dunk. Hook it up." That was my shit for two years, or for however long Nike SB was out. And then out of nowhere one day, Sam Smyth (Girl skateboards team manager) was like, "Yo Nick, Nike is doing a team manager series for skate companies and they're going to do one with Girl" He then asked me to help him design something. So he designed one and then I said, "Do this Tiffany colorway", which was the black with the Tiffany color because I had made a shirt with that colorway already that looked pretty good. He then sent them both to Nike to see what they thought. Nike sent us back his colorway sample, which is the Gucci Dunk that still hasn't dropped yet --It's denim, black and green and red Gucci colorway Dunk Hightop. A few days later. He told me They're going to make both of the colorways." And I was so fuckin psyched! I asked him if the tiffany one is gonna be the Diamond Dunk. He's like, "I don't know. (Laughter) Let's fuckin' see what's up with Nike." So Hunter (Nike SB Team Manager) shows up over at Girl a few weeks later with a sample of the shoe. It was the Diamond dunk colorway but it was just on regular, plain nubuck material, with a plain gray swoosh and I was like, "Oh, shit that's tight." Then I asked him, "What's up, man, is it a going to be a Diamond Dunk or what?" He said that he had to check with some people at Nike SB to see if it was cool to make it the Diamond Dunk. I went to my office and emailed Nike the Diamond logo and said, "Put
this Diamond logo on the tongue" and "Make the black part crocodile and put a metallic silver swoosh..." you know, just flipped it and emailed it to them, They hit me back on some 'ol "Oh shit, it's sick!" type shit and then it just officially became the Diamond Dunk. So... then they made it.

300 pages of hype
I got the shoe a few months later and I was so excited when I first got the sample. I was thinkin man, 'This is fucking sick.' Right? So I asked Andy Mueller (Girl Skateboards art dump member), to take a picture of me holding the shoe with the matching Diamond shirt on so my friends on Myspace could see it. I had him take the picture and I put it on Myspace, then I didn't really think anything of it. You know just posted the picture up, no big deal. I then started getting hella picture comments from everyone, 'Dude this shit is sick!' They were saying all this crazy stuff about how dope it was. I was thinkin that it was cool that people like it. After work, I stopped into Kendo sneaker store and my homeboy Arsen that owns it is like, 'Dude, you gotta check this out". He shows me on his computer that someone posted the picture of me holding the shoe on NikeTalk.com. There was a chat thread of about 20 pages in less than half a day of people talking about it. He said he never seen people go this crazy over a shoe before. I had no idea that it would end up being a 300 page thread of people talking about my shoe on NikeTalk, as well as 300 pages of it on Solecollector.com forum, Every website in the world, including Hypebeast and Fader magazine, started posting the picture of me holding the shoe, every trendy website in the world from Australia to China had my face with this shoe plastered all over it. It was everywhere. They just blew it up and it still wasn't going to come out for another 4 to 5 months . It was the biggest thing to happen in the sneaker game for a long time. Magazines started hitting me up for interviews, all this stuff just started happening, kids would run up to me on the street taking pictures of me, all because of this fucking colorway. The Diamond Dunk colorway. It was pretty crazy.

a perfect fit
I recently got together with Stevie Williams and the dudes at Fitted hawaii and we're opening up a Fitted LA store, which is a fitted hat store -- We are selling sports teams New Era and Reebok hats that are custom designed by us. It's going to be more like the Undefeated store of hats instead of shoes, as opposed to a Lids or footlocker type of place. It's going to be a hat store with a lot of different flavor and different ideas that you can not buy anywhere else. The store is located on Fairfax and Rosewood, which is the same block as Supreme in LA. . It will be a fun project and is opening in about 1-2 months. It is just something new and different for Stevie and me to get our hands in. We also brought in our friend LA rapper Diz Gibran as an investor/owner in the store as well.

some next ish
I'm always working on new ideas for skate hardgoods. I'm doing some collaboration stuff with different companies rite now as well as coming up with new concepts for packaging and accessories. I'm going to drop a cut n sew line with some Diamond denim, hoodies and jackets. Just building. I am starting a skateboard truck company with my brother Joey which will be under the Diamond umbrella along with my skateboard wheels I have been making for a few years now called Fillmore wheels. I am just going to continue having fun making Diamond the best I can. Keep makin shit I want to make.