YouSaid · the spoken record

Ken Block

lines on the record: 122
first: 2019-01-31
most recent: 2019-01-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“For shutting down these streets. Well, I think that the exposure is a good thing. They do look at that, like San Francisco looked at it and said, okay, yeah, that's good. This is a viral series that could potentially give San Francisco more exposure. But at the end of the day, I just think it's money. You're paying the film commission, the city, the government to go do this, you know, and the city's getting paid, the police department's getting paid, you know, it's a it's a”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The George W. Bush Sr. So he was the only one that they'd ever shut it down for before that. So it's been kind of wild to go on this ride of like, ah, they'll never let us do that to like shutting down some of the biggest cities in the world to do some of this stuff.”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they get Treasurer Island. They start slowing everybody down. And when they have everybody start to slow down, the traffic then empties out ahead of them and then we get on at Treasure Island or whatever that's called and then go out and do it we need to do where the traffic still stopped before the island we have 10 or 15 minutes to do it we need to do then we move on and the cops just let the traffic go so really they only stopped for 10 or 15 minutes and we did that I think four times So, you know, it messes up some traffic, but for a short amount of time on a Sunday morning.”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would have never even thought that would be possible. But that's the thing that's interesting about all this as we went through this process, you learn, oh, like a city like San Francisco where a lot of TV shows are shot, a lot of movies are shot, a lot of commercials are shot. Like there's a very good film department there. The police force are very adept to understanding what the needs are for these movies and things. And they understand what you need to do to do this. They offered us the bridge. We're like, I would have never thought. We're going to shut down the Bay Bridge and use the Bay Bridge. But they're like, oh, yeah, we do that Sunday morning. We block them over by Oakland. They start over. They get on the bridge over by Oakland. Then as they get towards the island,”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so he came back to us like a month later. It was like, hey, I have all that stuff. You ready to go look again? So we went back to San Francisco and looked at everything he brought us. And we said, wow, we have enough here to make an amazing video. We still need a few little things, but we have enough here. And then in that process, too, the city came back and said, hey, do you want the bridge? That's absolutely nuts.”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Scout that does Hollywood type stuff. And he's like, hey, you want to go check out these spots in San Francisco? You know? And we just kind of laughed like San Francisco's never going to let us do this in their city, you know? It wasn't had nothing to do against San Francisco. It was more of the idea like we're hooning with cars. We're having fun with cars. I'm doing giant slides and donuts with a car. There's no way a city's going to let us do that. But also we just didn't understand sort of the movie world as well back then. And so the scat was like, no, no, we can do whatever we want. We get a permit. We have that street to do whatever we want, you know? And so he took us to a couple locations and we were kind of blown away. We're like, really? We can use these locations. And so, you know, he had some good stuff, but we said, hey, we need a jump. We need this and that. We need a real twisty street. We need something down by the water.”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, anyway, getting to Gymcona 5, we went and scouted an area outside of San Francisco that's like an old military base where they used to build a lot of bombs and warships and that sort of thing right on the water. And it was cool, but it didn't have enough creative driving situations to really make a whole video. So we went and looked at it and we're kind of disappointed and we're driving back into town to go to the airport. And the scout was with us had just scouted San Francisco for, I think, Iron Man 3. So he's a very high level”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And for Jim Connoll 3, we'd actually gone to San Francisco. It's not San Francisco, Detroit, and scouted Detroit. And then we went to go get the permits to film there. The city was like, we don't like certain locations you've picked. We're like, well, why? To us, everybody knows Detroit as, you know, part of the Rust Belt. It's an industrial city that like, you know, isn't so industrial anymore and has a lot of urban decay. And we like the urban decay. We had some new stuff in there too, but a lot of Detroit to us was very cool urban decay. And I wanted to drive in and through a lot of that. And they just didn't like that. They wanted to veto even on set, they could say, no, we don't like what you're filming and veto us. So there's no way we could put up all this money to go film at a location where they're going to randomly veto us in the middle of shooting. So we never ended up doing Detroit. We just thought, oh, that's going to be too difficult.”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“you know you've got jaws and you've got the war of the worlds and like all these different sets that i was driving through that made a real unique thing um but these were all closed sets right you know like private airfield and private racetrack and that sort of thing”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When we first put it out, I was like, oh, I really like this video, it kind of showcases what I want to watch, what me and my friends want to watch. And when we put that out, well, it's turned out that a lot of other people like to watch it too. And that video really took off. And so my sponsors said, hey, when are you going to do that again? We really like that exposure. And so DC paid for me to do the second one and the third one and the fourth one and then the fifth one being San Francisco. Now the second, third, and fourth one all are sort of very similar filming concept, but we just found different locations. The second one was on some piers in Long Beach. Third one was a really unique old race course in France that has this banked walls that go up to 51 degrees. Jim Connofer was on the one of the studio lots up in Hollywood.”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They get all the best angles of it, and they'll take 20 of these tricks and put them together to make a video part. And it's just the best of what this person can do. And this has done a lot in skateboarding, snowboarding, surfing, motocross. Like they make these videos that are then sold to the consumers. So basically, I kind of created that same thing, but with a car. So I went and did a certain number of tricks and slides and around different obstacles at an airport called El Toro and Irvine. And that's what the first Jim Connor video was. And I thought it was really cool. It wasn't about trying to do something in one try. It was about trying something 10 times to get the perfect shots to make it look really good and kind of tell this story of driving around this airport and kind of put it all together kind of as a course.”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know this website to host this, and it was costing a lot of money. I'm like, we got to put this on YouTube. So that's kind of how long ago this was. It was over 10 years ago that we started doing this. And it's weird to me that you think about this today, that YouTube wasn't the video standard that it is now. People were still putting videos kind of all over the place because YouTube today is just the standard. Everyone puts stuff there from the daily show to the YouTube community that some of them have subscribers in the millions, you know. So anyway, we created this video and it was really fashioned after skateboarding. So a skateboarding video part, a guy will go out and say, you know, he'll skateboard and try and capture certain tricks on film for a year and he'll go to a certain handrail and he'll try 30 times and slam 29 times, roll away on the 30th time, and they make sure”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The funny thing about that is Jim Conno 5 is my favorite video. We started making these videos the first one. It took us two days to produce. It was a very small team. And it was the first time that we really had a video because we'd made several like recap videos of me and Travis racing. I'd done some stuff with Nitro Circus. I'd done a 170 foot jump like on a dirt bike track with my rally car for a program called stunt junkies that got like 10 million views. But Jim Conna, the first Jim Conna video that we did, it's called Jim Conna Testing and Practice. It was the first real viral video. It got like 10 million views in a couple weeks and then just kept going. And it was actually, this was before YouTube was really popular. So I had a video player on my”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, we self funded. We had our names on very large lines of credit, which I genuinely hated, which was one of the reasons why we eventually sold that like, you know, the liability of that, if there was a down year or the economy crash or something, the business would have gone away quite quickly because we didn't have, you know, we were not cash heavy. We were definitely very debt heavy, but that's what we needed to grow and how we did grow. And it made for a very successful company, but also that can make things volatile in the long run. And that's why we saw a purchase with someone like Quicksilver as a very good sort of route to a good end for us. And it worked out really quite well.”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You just have to have the wherewithal to understand what those jobs are. What it takes to succeed in those jobs and then hire the right people to do it. So that's one thing I've really learned probably in a big way over all this is that it really takes a big community of smart people to make something successful, but at the top, you still need to be able to set that bar and manage that bar to get something where you intend it to be.”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do an architecture in high school, and I ended up basically designing the first 15 models of our shoes, you know, with some of the pro athletes, but I did the drawings. I flew to Korea. I immersed myself in the business and said, this is what I have to do to succeed and did it, you know? But doesn't mean I'm a good salesperson doesn't mean I'm a good accountant and you just got to hire the right people and be able to manage them. And if they can't perform the management CIU has to fire them and move on and hire someone better, you know. And to me, that's a big part of success is understanding your strengths and weaknesses and hiring the people to really help make a business successful that you can't do everything yourself. There's no way, at least in my mind, there's no way that you can be a brand director along with an incredible accountant, amazing salesperson.”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How do we find him? Some of them were friends. Some of them were friends of friends. Guy that ran our business for a while was actually the father of someone I went to high school with. And then as we grew bigger and bigger, we used headhunters to go out and steal people from Nike for sales and stuff like that. You know, that's just the reality of big business is, you know, if you're trying to go a certain place, you know, like with sales, you need to hire the guys that do that for someone else, you know. And we, you know, would hire and find and hire the right people and we were able to grow quite, quite well over the years. But, you know, that's the tough part about business. I was a marketing guy, you know. I was very good at design. I had some design experience from.”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because that seems to be a very native medium for you. On the business side, like I said earlier, Dave and I were smart about, you know, realizing we weren't the smartest guys in the room and to hire those people, you know, and then manage the expectations of what we were trying to do and grow the business.”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we kind of played into that over the years and had some funny taglines and made kind of creative but slick ads. But in the end, like one of the biggest things that we ever did was build a giant ramp, like what's called the mega ramp for Danny Way to do basically giant skateboarding tricks that had never been done at sort of the scale. And that was around 2003, 2004. That had really made us and him stand out in a way that we were seeing skateboarding go to like a whole new level to the point where XGames adopted that ramp and put it in the X-Games. And I think Mega Ramp style is still in the X games today, but all initiated from Danny thinking in an innovative and different way and then us funding it and creating a video part all around this. And that was just the type of stuff that we did.”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Paint being poured over it. We were selling clothing, there was no clothing in the ad you know, but this is the early 90s We were just trying to be a bit outlandish and different than what everybody else was doing in the magazine world at that time, in the skateboard world, I should say. And it was much more of sort of a fuck you fashion style attitude. And it just really worked, you know. We kind of played on that idea of, you know, just being rebellious through the years and it's fun because skateboarders are generally like that. So it was fun really playing into that over the years. DC, as we were growing it, got a bit more professional, the style of DC was kind of a bit more of like...”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, back in the day when we started drawers, we were, you know, a couple industry guys, me and Damon, that, you know, we didn't have the experience that a lot of the other companies that we were competing against had. But we just had a vision. We had an idea of what we wanted to do. And we came up with some very innovative marketing concepts, not only for drawers, but into DC. But the first thing that really started us off in drawers was just coming up with really fun and unique, like kind of twisted ideas. And, you know, Rob Dierdick, who's now a fairly big MTV star, he was one of our skateboarders back then. And one of our first ads that really stood out in the magazines was literally just, I poured blue paint over his head and he was smoking a cigarette. And we just had these really obscure photos of just his head with blue.”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Essence for everyone from big companies like Nike and Apple down to small brands even like us with Hoonigan. So if you can capture the interest of the consumer with the right story that touches the right nerves in each of these markets, then you can really set yourself apart and then drive that consumer to buy the product. Because at the end of the day a t-shirt, pretty easy to make even nowadays a pair of shoes pretty easy to make lots of competitors out there. So how do you grab the attention of that?”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Rebach or something else like that. Yeah, the kid's definitely going to take the Supreme shirt over the Reebok shirt, you know? But that is because of a brand essence. You've sold someone a story. You've sold someone an image. And to do that and to do it at a very high level is very difficult. You know, it takes years of development and really having that bar set so high and kind of judging everything against that bar so that you end up with marketing projects that are huge and different and really capture people's attention. Or you have products that lead in the industry or that you have, you know, athletes that really stand out and stand right along with you with their huge accomplishments and represent your brand with them at the same time. So it's kind of all those things in one that create this brand.”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But when I look back on it, one thing that always, the Damon and I always. Thought about was really like the easiest thing is saying set the bar very high. And when you say that, you're like, okay, well, how does that apply? Like, does that mean you make a really nice t-shirt? Well, no, that's part of it. A lot of it has to do with like, okay, if we're going to go do marketing. How do we do it unique and different? How do we be creative? You know, the thing about the world today is it's easy to make a t-shirt, but how do you get someone to buy it? Why is supreme more desirable than, say, something else, just for a random example, even throwing”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Management style, and what's helped me really be successful. There's plenty of other books like The Habits of Millionaires, all that sort of stuff. Those books do, but I think that book really was part of kind of what shaped me as a business person and a director.”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think that book, I think that there's a lot of good lessons in it. And I like the attitude, even the title, like how to win friends and influence people. And that actually fits very well with how I like to manage, how I like to work with people. And a lot of it is about working as a collective and getting people on a team to accomplish something as opposed to just being a director embarking orders. So I've always enjoyed the collaborative effort of working in a company that, hey, we're trying to get this done. We're trying to, you know, finish this campaign, whatever it is. And everybody knows and understands the goals. And we've set a bar and we've set this bar high. How do we all get there? And that book was really one of the first books that really kind of helped me achieve.”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know ups and downs of dealing with people and success based on the people you surround yourself with. And so I needed to grow as a person in that position. And I knew that, you know, management was really one of the keys. So the first actual book that I picked up to learn communication skills and management skills was how to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie. And I don't know how old is that book now?”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the simple background of that is, you know, I was a young 20 something, and all of a sudden I have a business and I've got to manage it. And I have no management experience. You know, like I didn't go to work in some other company and rise up through management and learn management skills. I went straight from junior college to having my own business, you know, and our business opportunity was growing every year. It was successful every year. And it was successful because, you know, my business partner, Damon, and I worked very hard, but we were working on our talents. And after a while, For us to continue to grow, we needed smarter people than us around us. And that meant that we need to hire them. We needed to manage them. And, you know, no matter what in every company, you have...”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah. Like the actual expense spent over years protecting our trademark around the world is millions and millions of dollars. It's a fact of business. And it's an ugly world. It's not any fun. I've been various parts of the world and shown up and found bootleg versions of our shoes and not even like good bootleg versions. They came straight from our factories too where they're like, oh, we have too many of these souls and too many of these uppers. We'll just put them together and sell them out the back door, you know. And it's really unfortunate, but that is the world we live in, unfortunately, part of the world.”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The logo that we have looks kind of like Chanel and Chanel actually has that trademarked for snowboard. So that's why you never see our logo done the way it is on shoes on a snowboard.”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“DC actually stands for drawers clothing. So almost every word or variation of the word in the English language is trademarked in some way, you know, or another. And so as we were trying to work on names for the brand, we had all sorts of names that we submitted and everything was taken. DC was actually, I had made DC logos for drawers because drawers clothing. It's just an abbreviation, you know, something you could make a simple logo and put on a sleeve. And so I knew that I could make logos and art for that. So we submitted that and it came back that, yeah, that was possible to do. So the crazy thing about trademarks, though, is even when you trademark something for one category, it doesn't mean that it's good for another category. So eventually we made snowboards, but”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To more of youth culture as opposed to only skateboarding, we found our unique marketing angles to do that and do it in fun and innovative ways and grew the brand, I think, at its peak at 2007, 2008 or something was around 550 million. It really grew to be quite a big brand. It was actually on target. There was a plan at one time with a guy that was running our company Nick to be a billion dollar brand. Unfortunately, made it there because of some problems that Quicksilver was having who had bought us in 2004, but it was incredible to take a brand from nothing, you know, to over $500 million in sales a year.”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Types of skateboarders out there, same as basketball. There's guys that like high top shoes, guys that like low top shoes. There's, you know, so you have different athletes that represent different things like that. So we, you know, spent all our marketing dollars to attract those teenage kids to come into the skate shops. And buy it. And over time, as the brand grew and we did more and more sales, we expanded to more mall stores. And so that kid isn't affected as much by, you know, the pro skate order and the skateboard magazine. So then we started working with artists like Mike Shinoda from Lincoln Park. And we had, you know, a mic custom signature shoe and did stuff like that. And eventually we worked with artists and people like that. So, you know, as we branched out.”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, DC, I mean, we were mainly selling to skate shops in the beginning. So, you know, you're talking, you know, teenage kids, mostly boys that were going in and buying the shoes to skateboard in. So, you know, back in those days, mid-90s, you know, we had all the skateboard magazines because that's when magazines still existed and were big, you know, so we had at least one to two ads a month that we were making that dropping all those magazines. And then you add various video projects and there was like 411 magazine, the video magazine. And then on top of that, you sponsored, we sponsored maybe 10 to 12 skateboarders that were the top guys in the industry that fit our brand. And so, you know, you have all sorts of different genres of, you know,”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reach the consumer that's actually going to buy the product. And that can be very difficult. And there can be very many opinions with that. And even in a company, you can have 10 different opinions on that and even have some personal agendas thrown in, you know? And so it can be very difficult. A lot of it is a learning lesson. And you got to look at everything else that's out there and what your competition is doing and try and do it better. You know, it's a difficult process and it's one that you really have to work at and think through. And I mean, I've had so much random stuff. Like your example right there, I had one of our athletes. It was like, I want to bus. I'm going to build a bus. It's going to be 300 grand. I need 300 grand out of you. And we'll put a big logo on it. Everybody on the freeway is going to see it. And I'm like, I don't care about everybody on the freeway. Like those aren't my consumers. Like, if we're going to spend $300 grand, we need to.”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that all marketing and advertising. Know a lot of people don't realize they're like, oh, we have 100 grand to spend. Sweet, you know, well, you need to turn that 100 grand into, say, a million dollars worth of business. So it's about targeting and having the right message.”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of social media, really maximizing the potential of YouTube and delivering what the fans want. Because at the end of the day, this is all a business. I love to race cars at the end of the day, but without the sponsors, without the series that are out there, without all the fans, there's a whole culture here that all interacts and goes together. You know, if you don't do it right, you can't be as successful as the potential is there to be.”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Such a great ambassador for all these brands and hopefully very good and engaged athlete for these fans that follow me. So it's been a very fun process to go from that guy behind the scenes that kind of understands it all because I wrote the contracts. I made the ads, I directed the social media, you know, we made commercials. I made skate videos. to now being the guy on the other side and delivering what the sponsors needed so And there were certain guys that like actually pissed me off over the years that I saw so much potential for and just watch them fail because they didn't understand that I said you know what I'm gonna prove whether these guys ever see this or not I'm gonna prove what is potential if you just understand the process you know and that's actually been very fun for me over the years you know maximizing the potential”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, we had guys that we would send out to a shop to do an autograph signing, and there'd be, you know, a thousand kids lined up waiting for these guys to sign autographs. And some of them, instead of being engaged with these fans, they'd be looking at their phone or turning around smoking a cigarette, you know, around kids and stuff like that. And it just, they didn't have the right understanding of what they were there to do, you know, and to me that's a real simple example, that when I go to an autograph signing, you know, we try to make the best poster. I try to be as engaged as possible, always trying to make the fan as happy as possible. They're there, you know, for me and I'm there representing all these different brands and maybe, you know, the shop that I'm there for, those sort of things. So it's understanding the whole situation because of where I came from before, which has then made me”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Attitude and a different, not necessarily different, but I had to be worried about what I said and how I said it and how I presented myself, which I just didn't have to worry about before that, you know. So that transition was a bit tough. But once I got into it, I basically said, okay, I know what bothered me or I saw the good and bad of all these athletes that I worked with for, you know, 15 years before this. So how can I take... All those experiences, what I liked and disliked about what all these different people did and make myself the best of what I can make myself. And I'll tell you a really stupid example.”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was one of the things that when I transition for me from going from chief brand officer at DC to a race car driver, it was actually a bit difficult for me at first, and mainly because as chief brand officer at DC, I actually liked to be in the background. Damon and I didn't really like us getting press for DC. We liked the athletes to be the people that stood out front and represented the brand. So as I became a race car driver, I was like, oh crap, now I got up at my face out there and I've got to be the voice and I have to, you know, show a different.”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stuff and understand the business plan to go anywhere, you know, and there's so much basics of life that if you understand Know how products get made and how companies profit and what it takes to spend advertising dollars, there's so much in life that you will understand just by knowing those basics.”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was actually for eight ball and drawers. And Damon came in with some money and we were equal partners in the beginning. But really it was from my parents and my parents however you'd like to say ethics law, you know, business family ethics that basically set me in motion of how to learn business, how to start a business, how to pay back a loan, all that stuff. Because, you know, I was a 19, 20-year-old kid that was just trying to better himself and they helped me set the path to do what I did. And that's something that I genuinely appreciate. And anytime anybody asks me from like, how do I start this business or how do I get sponsored? The easiest lesson is if you don't know business and you don't know what marketing budgets are and you don't know advertising or sales, like you've got to understand that.”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so when I was starting our business, I went to my parents and said, hey, I need some money. And my mom said, well, I'm not sure that my dad will do that, but let's try. She said, write a business plan. You know, if you want 10 grand, prove to us what you're going to do with that 10 grand and how you're going to pay us back. And I said, okay. So I bought books and figured out how to make a business. And I got 10 grand out of my parents to help start the business.”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I grew up with that mentality that whatever I did, my parents were not going to give me anything. They were going to help me, but they were going to make me work for it. And so that's something that I really genuinely appreciate and something I'm going to pass on to my own kids that like life isn't easy. You've got to figure certain things out and you've got to make it work. And it takes hard work to be successful. I've seen a lot of people have stuff given to them and they've floundered with it. And I think that experience really is the best lesson.”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Business is not easy to start, you know, and I come from a family. My dad had his own business and he was fairly successful with it. And my parents, by the time that I was a teenager, had a decent amount of money. I wouldn't say they were overly rich, but they had enough money to buy 16 acres of avocados in a house, you know, in Valley Center. So as I was growing up, I wanted certain things in my high school that drove B&Ws. I'm like, I want that. My dad just laughed. He's like, no way, am I buying you that? You know, like you are going to earn everything that you get.”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And eventually we started DC, so we were kind of lucky with DC that we got all this experience of a couple years floundering around with these other clothing companies and magazine, but we learned a lot so that by the time we got to making DC, which is 94.95, that we were able to make this startup work very well very quickly. So we already had the infrastructure of buildings and artists and salespeople and warehouse and all that so that when DC got plugged into that, it took off, but we were able to manage it and make it work. If we hadn't had all that other stuff and experience and all that, we wouldn't have had all that. Now, one thing that I did forget to mention in all that, though, is”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Be great if I could actually be a part of this industry I love. And in the meantime, at the same school as Pal Mar College and Vista, California, I met Damon Way, who's the older brother of the legendary skateboarder Danny Way. And Damon and I hit it off and we both had interests in trying to be in the industry of skateboarding and snowboarding and we had this real mutual interest in that and I was I was more of the graphics business type guy and he was more of the clothing designer type guy and so we just kind of merged our talents and started working together and started very small with a ball and drawers and eventually I did a magazine called Blunt as part of this whole company and we sold a company called Taipei Snowboards which were some friends of ours and we owned part of that”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, being a skateboarder and a snowboarder, uh, you know, I wanted to do that stuff more. So I actually quit working for this architecture firm and ended up moving to Breckenridge, Colorado for two years and being a snowboard bomb. And I was actually friends with a bunch of pro snowboarders. And I looked up to those guys and wanted to be them. But in the end, I just knew I didn't have the talent. I didn't have the skill set that they had. And I saw that. So I moved back to California and went back to college and started studying screen printing, graphic design, graphic layout, all that sort of stuff. And I just really enjoyed it. And I thought, I could, you know, because of my interest in skateboarding and snowboarding, I started designing some shop t-shirts for one of the shops that I was friends with out in Colorado. And, you know, I thought, oh, this would be.”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess because I enjoy the art of architecture, but the only people that get to do the art of architectures are the people at the top. And it takes Either a ton of money or 30 to 40 years of climbing to the top. And I just saw that once I realized being in the business what it took. And I just said, yeah, that is for me.”
2019-01-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #358: Ken Block — The Art of Marketing with a DC Shoes and Gymkhana Legend (500M+ views) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT