In the heart of Willaimsburg, Brooklyn, you’ll find the Bustin Boardshop. Bustin recently moved from Hoboken to Brooklyn but the new retail space already reflects the excitement and innovative spirit of a young, growing company. Inside the store, people are hanging out, listening to music, and building longboards. There is a tangible sense of camaraderie among these young people who are living their passion. Bustin’s reach extends far beyond this physical store. They have built an incredible website that gives users thousands of options to customize a board to their needs. They also have developed a substantial social media presence and maintain a rich, engaged online community. Moudy and I sat down with Ryan, Bustin’s founder, and Mike, Bustin’s shipping and team manager, to discuss entrepreneurship and longboarding. For all of the craziness going on in the shop, Mike and Ryan spoke to us with an impressively calculated calmness. They showed us that the best way to reach a group of people with your business is to become an active member of the community.

What is the essence of Bustin Boards?
Ryan: I guess I would call it a project. I wouldn’t call it a job. I love that everyone here is involved. I almost see it as a clubhouse and we’re all having fun building something together. We’re trying to become more interested in making money and making it sustainable but it’s more of just a hobby that we get to do every day.

How did you get into longboarding?
Ryan: I was in college and my girlfriend and I were staying at this beach house with our families. We were walking through this long grass and tripped over this thing. It turned out to be a really old hand made long board. We tried to skate on it but it was all rusted out. That’s what kind of kick started everything. We went to a store and looked at longboards but we couldn’t afford any of them, so we were sort of bummed out. My Dad had woodshop at our home back in Maryland, so I went in and made us both a board. That’s how it all got started. Then my cousins and friends were super interested in what I was doing. Everyone was asking me to make them a board. I got super addicted to it.
Mike: I was given a longboard at camp in Michigan right out of high school. I was about 17 years old and a friend of mine was a rep for a skateboard company and he gave me a board.

When did you realize this passion could become a business?
Ryan: Making boards had been my project for the better half of the summer. The following year I went back to college and decided to bring a bunch of tools with me. Sometime during that year, I made a nice board and decided to put it on EBay and it sold. I was like “whoa” this could turn into something and it sort of did. That’s when I started making boards to sell. I learned how to make nice EBay templates and created some cool graphics. By the time I graduated college, I wasn’t making any money, but this was my job. I realized that I could make boards for beer money.

Mike: I realized it could be profitable when I was living in Florida and I purchased decks from play-it-again sports. Since longboarding was more or less misunderstood, and nobody really knew prices, I would buy a board for $80 and flip it for $150 because I knew the value of these boards.

How has that initial business evolved into what it is today?
Mike: The initial vision was, “you choose your style.” We began as a design based company. We evolved from one shape, the complex into the cigar and then the spliff and then the strike, and then the sojourn. The evolution of board shapes reflects the different personalities that have been involved and the different terrain that has influenced us. Bustin has grown with the culture. Everything that we make is a direct reflection of what our riders need.

Ryan: In a lot of ways it’s the same and in a lot of ways it’s evolved. When I graduated college I was real gung ho. I was like, “I’m going to do this; I’m going to start a skateboard company.” I had contacts and manufacturers and I was looking into how to do it. At the time, it seemed like a stretch because I didn’t have any money. So, I went back to Maryland, and set up in my dad’s shop. I started making boards and hanging out with my friends. It became sort of like a clubhouse and at the same time I was trying to make it into a business. It was super impossible in the beginning. I couldn’t do it with any kind of scale. So, I did it for six months and then I realized that I had to get out of my parent’s house. I admitted to myself that this might not be working. I took a job working on Wall Street in New York City. I did it for a year and didn’t make any boards, although I skated a lot. I didn’t know anyone in New York, so I felt like a loner. I never lost the passion for the sport. After a year of working, I decided that I had to quit and start my company. At that point, I got a lot more serious. I wrote a business plan. I convinced my dad to be my initial investor. Ever since then, I’ve been trying to keep it alive.

What was your dad’s reaction to you wanting to start the business?
Ryan: I think it was definitely hard for him to understand it at first. Fortunately, he’s a great dad. He said, “I don’t see it, but you say you do, so let’s do a business plan and give it a try.” Until this time last year, my dad was still pretty skeptical. I think any parent is concerned about their kid having a good job. So, it definitely took a long time for him to understand what I was doing, but he was really cool about it. Hopefully, I will be the same way with my kids and have the mentality that if I can’t see it, but you do, you should go for it.

In the competitive world of longboarding, How important is branding to Bustin?
Mike: Branding is very important. It’s really what has driven our sales, the awareness of push culture and of bustin boards. There is a lot of competition and new board companies emerge everyday. Because we are a web-based company and brick and mortar skate shops are facing more and more challenges, we have a big advantage. We’ve started to build a community across the world, not just in one location.

What is push culture?
Mike: It’s fast paced, in your face, dirty riding. We go out in the streets, in the city and we push everywhere. A longboard is never inappropriate. We push it to dinner. We push it to the club. We push it to school. We push it in a suit. We push it without a shirt on. If you can push somewhere we do it. Where some longboarders ride downhill because they have mountains, we’ve adapted push culture because we live in the city.

What do you say to people who say NYC isn’t a good place for outdoor sports?
Mike: We live in a concrete jungle and longboards require concrete. If you like to skate flat ground, we have it. If you like to skate hills, we have the Williamsburg Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s really endless. When riders get together, you skate it all, because everyone likes different terrain. Since our riders are so diverse, you get a little taste of everything.

How has the internet helped Bustin?
Ryan: I feel that the internet has totally leveled the playing field in business. You can start a business from your home now and if you’re smart about it, you can make it seem big. Before the internet, you needed to have a lot of money and a store, but the internet has changed things a lot. It’s been ideal for our business. Without the internet, I would have sold some boards in college and that would have been it.

Tell us about the importance of your website to the business.
Ryan: When I first started making boards, Nike ID had just come out. And, I was like, “Whoa, if we could do that with our boards, it would be ridiculous.” I looked around and found a guy that said he could do it but wanted to charge us $25,000. So, I actually got on this site called Lynda.com and I learned how to build websites. If you want to start a business, you can learn any program you want for $25 a month. Learning how to build websites, was the best thing I did for Bustin boards. It was more important than product development or any other things that we’ve done. Because, when we need to update the site, I can do it for free.

How do you use social media to promote your company?
Mike: We use twitter, facebook and myspace. We also have a blog, which is our heaviest hitter. We really try to pump the internet with our content. We also have a youtube account, which is dedicated to riders around the world sending in what they have. This way people can see what’s going on in the broader world of longboarding. Some board companies bring on production companies to make skate videos for them. However, we feel that the grassroots approach is much more effective.

Do you believe in two-way communication with your customers and followers?
Mike: 100%. We value communication with our riders, which we call family. When you buy a bustin board, each one is personally numbered and is made for you. You design it on the website to fit your needs. We understand that each rider has a distinct personality. Some riders like to ride alone and some like to ride in a group. By bringing everyone together on the internet, we really feel a sense of family.

What advice can you give to other young entrepreneurs?
Ryan: It sounds cliché, but you just have to go for it and figure it out along the way. It kind of evolves on it’s own according to your means and creativity. For us, the reason our focus on customization evolved is because I couldn’t afford to keep inventory, like a real company should. When we made our first batch of boards, we couldn’t afford to produce fifty boards with one graphic because then we would be the new company that only had one graphic. Instead, we did this customization thing and offered twenty graphics but not a single board was made. In fact, when we launched, half of the designs were just on the computer. I hadn’t even made up the silk screens for them. So, if somebody ordered that graphic, we had to figure out how to make it. But, it made us seem bigger and more legit. I had a stack of ten boards and waited for an order to come in and when it did, I made the board. It took a stubbornness to get it going. I think a lot of people would have said, “That’s unreasonable. You can’t do it that way.” But, when you just do it and figure it out along the way sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

What is the future of Bustin?
Mike: The future of Bustin Boards is more board designs and a larger family. We started a wholesale program this year because we want to go global. We also want to extend our reach into the mid-west and west coast. We feel the sky is the limit.

Special Thanks to Ryan Daughtridge, Mike Dallas, and the entire Bustin family. For more information on Bustin, please find them at www.bustinboards.com, twitter, facebook, and youtube.

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starting story posted Wednesday, February 24th, 2010