Familia offers a clean, low-key environment for its customers, allowing the store to feel more like a gallery than a typical skate shop. Founder Tucker Gerrick explains that thanks to the Internet, more people are turning to local labels to express themselves, making the Familia brand one of the store’s top sellers.

Frank151: Tell us about the history of your store.
Familia: The few of us that came in the shop were kinda all related to various other Minneapolis/St Paul skateboarding something-or-others. Adam Bojee is a rep, Nesser is a pro. He used to ride for a shop called Fobia which was out here for 11 years and me, I used to run Fobia. Fobia had gone out of business so we'd sort of all been doing our own thing for a while, and it kinda felt like there was a need to do something else and bring something good/positive to the skate scene. ’Cause noone else had picked up the reins since Fobia had gone and they even had three locations. So I kinda just pitched the idea around for a while and frankly, tried to talk myself out of it. ’Cause you know skate shops don't make money, most of the time, and they are a lot of work. It's just a handful of dudes going grey before their years, working around the clock. So we said, "Hey, let's go do this thing in St Paul," ’cause there's been shops in Minneapolis before and St Paul, is like, for those who don't know, that's the capital just across from Mississippi. So yeah we opened in March of '06 in St Paul and, shit was good but we had to move a year ago. Just ’cause things changed, you know, the traffic flow changes, areas get older, less cool and whatever. So we moved up over to uptown Minneapolis which is just kinda like a retail zone and which has just been a lot, lot better. Full redesign of the store, kind of a little more aggressive branding, with our own product all over the place. Kinda a nice little fresh start after three years. It wasn't easy or cheap, but it was definitely needed and, I think, well-received.

F151: Were there any other shops that inspired you?
F: Truthfully, I've tried to make the shop not be like a skateboard shop. Because, I mean skateboards kinda sell themselves, I mean there's lots of color, graphics, shit that changes all the time so that kind of stuff sells itself and it's pretty easy to know, "oh, these guys sell skateboards", but that kinda atmosphere, those shops always made me nervous. You know, you walk in and you're bombarded, there's videos, there's all this music, there's posters and graphics and especially with how kids are going with like attention spans and stuff, it's like, "How do you focus?" You know like I walk into a mall and I feel really anxious. So with Familia we were like, "Let's tone it back, let's just let the product speak for themselves and make it like really hands-on, let's make things real self-service." We took that even further with the new store, people walk in and they're like, "This looks like a gallery!", or, "This looks like it belongs in another city," which I take as a compliment. I mean there's a lot of people that don't get it either, they're like, "Well, you guys should have more stuff...", even though that's not the point. Here's the stuff that we really back, hopefully you back it too, and hopefully the presentation is forthright enough for you to understand that.

F151: How would you describe the design of your store? What was the inspiration behind it and what type of environment are you trying to create?
F: We’ve created an environment where, when you're in there, you're calm, first and foremost and the products speak for themselves. They're pushing themselves. If you've got a good layout, you don't need salesmen trying to get you excited, like, "Hey check this out!" Hopefully if you lay things out in the appropriate order and fashion, they tell the story for you, they do the talking. So yeah, I mean, specifically too, looking at skateboarding in general, young folk come in all the time, but they're not spending their money, they're spending their parents' money. So if a mom's gonna come in, she's gotta be like, "Ah, so nice to sit down here and..." Yeah I mean we might still be bumpin' some GZA or something, but she's not inundated with all this stimuli, ’cause parents usually come in with their kids after work, and they're exhausted, and they've got to go home and let the dogs out and cook and whatever, do that whole routine, so, this is just a stop along their day. So, we’re trying to make it mellow. And still like interesting enough for kids so we're not like the freegan shop listening to Morrissey or something. 'Cause that happens too. That definitely happens.

F151: How did you decide on your location? How important has the location been?
F: It's like 100/1 the people that walk in now. I mean, the rent's way higher but I'm sure that's going to pay out, long-term. Just seeing people, it's 100/1. Ridiculous.

F151: What brands do you carry, and which are your top sellers?
F: In footwear, which is our number one category, we do Nike SB, Converse, Gravis For Skate, Vans, Ipath, DVS, Lakai. adidas. We'll be doing HUF footwear when it launches. As far as apparel, we do HUF, The Quiet Life, Elwood, Maddox, Fourstar, Control. Of course Nike SB is really pushing into other apparel categories and it's going to be like ten times bigger than what it was a year ago. And it's doing really great pieces. We're always on board for what they do. Of course we're doing slowly more and more our own apparel, taking care of that. And it's not on the books yet but I think we're bringing in two new brands that people will recognise so... Hardgoods, we do, we kill it with anything deluxe, so Krook3d, Real, Anti Hero, aNYthing, Girl, Chocolate. And frankly, fighting for that number three spot is definitely Familia boards. We have a really great artist named Tom Bratrud, who everyone in the industry is familiar with, and he does all of our artwork: soft goods, hard goods, and we do some pretty kick-ass series every year. We sell the living shit out of that board.

F151: What brands or specific products are you excited about for Spring / Summer 2010?
F: Ah well you know we're a Jansport dealer now, so I'm waiting for my first shipment of that. That's kinda exciting to have an American heritage brand that's not necessarily skateboarding. Every skate kid when they're in their early teen years – if you're like from my generation that was before skate backpacks – everyone had a Jansport backpack and they threw patches on it, so I'm super excited about doing Jansport. The HUF apparel by far is some of the best stuff out there and it's got more integrity than some of the brands that have been around twice as long. The big surprise in footwear from at least the brands that we're carrying already, is that Ipath finally moved their production to the Timberland factory as of late spring. Timberland bought them like three or four years ago and finally the production's ended up in their factory so the stuff is like night-and-day better. Which makes it easier for us to back it harder. So from here on out it just gets way better. I mean that's a brand that's kinda like going up-and-down and up-and-down in interest but we always wanna try and have things for like different types of guys. It doesn't have to be like, always the hype shoe you know, we wanna keep things diverse.

F151: Are there any trends in fashion that you're excited about, both for Spring / Summer 2010 and beyond?
F: I'm excited that men get to look like men again. I shouldn't say "get to", ’cause there's always been that choice, but like dudes are finally catching on like, "Hey, maybe I should look my age, or maybe my shit doesn't have to be glowing..." It's a good reaction to all the hype, all-over prints and all the crazy, "sneakers from the future" of '03 to '07, all that stuff had to get simpler again. I expected that with footwear but it took me a little bit by surprise that men's fashion has gone back to the classic and utilitarian ways because that's the way I've always dressed, to a degree. It's easy for clueless men, to discern, and accept classic stuff like that. So I can tell a 17-year-old kid, "Yo man, you need this Oxford because when you're 27, you'll still have it." They may not always understand the price point and that's where salesmanship comes in, but we're in a period of time where classic, men's pieces are permeating skateboarding and other little outlets and it's going to be easier to sell that category to all different kinds of people. So I'm pumped about that, I'm excited for it to go hopefully a little bit further. Not that we're all going to be wearing J.Crew Ludlow suits but, having some buttons in the closet doesn't hurt, you know.

F151: How has social networking (blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) affected retail for your store and retail in general?
F: Ohmygod! Seriously I need .33 more of me simply for all that stuff. It has taken over so much more of my job. It's just like, "Oh well, these new shoes came in," and if we want to stay top-of-mind for the kids I need to like, shoot photos of it, edit it so it looks nice, then put it in some sort of format so I can email it to people, and of course we have Facebook, Twitter and a blog... I mean, I've made efforts in the past three months to sort of streamline that, because you know MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, blog, email blast, website, that's six. So I took the blog and put it into the website so that's two birds with one stone. Then I got this email-blast thing where I can include Facebook and Twitter as one thing, and I scrapped MySpace. So I took it from having six separate things to doing two for five. So that saves me a lot of time. But it's absolutely, essential. It makes me sad, and on a personal level, it's too much for me and I don't follow shit like that. I'm kind of seeing there's going to be a little bit of backlash. People are going to get too inundated with this sort of digital stimuli. I guess we sort of sense it coming but not anytime soon and not that it's going to be like super aggressive but definitely people are going to be a little more tactful in what they send and how they send it and actually have relevant content. Everybody knows you don't go to websites that don't get updated, but a lot of people are just putting shit up to put shit up. I guess they figure 'cause everybody's got RSS feed they're going to be like, "Oh, new shit!" But I just feel like if everyone sat down for a second and talked about it and said maybe, "Hey, let's just do the good shit." I don't know. I'm all over the place on that one. It's good, it's just time consuming. Just add 17 sighs in parentheses for me.

F151: What about ecommerce? What effect has online sales had on your store and on the broader retail industry?
F: It's a burden for sure. Say if we had a far, far larger private collection. Or, if we were really suited space-wise and financially to be like… like when I ordered the Eric Koston deck instead of ordering one or two for the wall, I'm going to order 1 or 2 dozen. You really gotta be like structurally set up to make the web work, and where we're at, and where I think other little shops are at, you've got to have dedicated staff, dedicated space. So we're not really there yet, we've just been dabbling the last few years. We've got a real basic web store and I update it with just the stuff that I think is going to be relevant. That's okay, and our previous incarnation of the webstore was super costly and never really paid for itself but that's definitely something we want to do, but for us it's the experience. It's like, Juri and I, who are in the store day after day, we want to be the faces of the shop, we want Steve to be the face on a global scale or a national scale, and we really want that experience and that's why we put so much work into the aesthetic. And the vibe. I mean, even the smell is like a brand new place. We want people to be in there because that's like important to the Familia experience. So, web will never be where we go but it'll definitely be something that we do.

As for the huge online retailers, their buying power is out of this world. And they've got some empty warehouse, and you know they pay somebody who's really smart, really crafty to set up a website that hopefully integrates with some inventory management and then they've got just a handful of people to deal with calls or problems, they don't have to have like hourly staff — even though half that stuff is automated — but you got to pay to play on that front and for us I guess that's not really the focus.

F151: What future plans for your store do you have that you’d like to share?
F: First and foremost is to expand the private label stuff. ’Cause what we're finding is that what we do locally, and what Steve does, even on his trips out of town, the image that we've created about all of us, our guys, this shop, that’s become a lot more relevant right now. For a lot of these teens – unless you're Sean Malto, or Eric Koston or Dennis Busenitz – it's just like there's too much information, there's too much media, they might read hype like you've never heard before on RVCA about some kid from who-knows-where, but in two weeks, nobody gives two shits, so that's a by-product of how everything's been sped up by media. So what we can create, on a local level, both in terms of what happens in the shop, the products that we put our names on, or the events that we put on in the local area and the partnerships that we create, that's having a larger impact on sales, at least with hard goods. And in some cases with soft goods too. That stuff's impacting kids more. I mean we have kids coming in like, "I want this new, fresh-ass, Familia tee, or Familia hoody." Or they're like, "When are you guys gonna do new hats or when's your new season boards coming out," besides those two distributions of our brand that I mentioned already, no one's coming for like the P-Rod deck, or I don't even know who else. No one's coming in like, real specific like, "I need this board, or else I'm walking out the store." But people are like, "WHEN is this new Familia pack coming out," so, at least regionally, we're more relevant than these national brands. So we're not trying to change that but stay in tune with that, it's obviously going to ebb and flow. But also, not only are the margins better, it's something that's tangible for the kids to see and believe in and to associate with, you know. If Steve Nesser and Rick Pratt are killing it, those two are still sponsored so they do have a national coverage, but these kids can be like, "Oh I saw them at Lake Owen, skate camp, I'm gonna come in and buy that dude's board." And I'm sure that happens everywhere, I'm just trying to figure out this whole national versus regional, like completely local product flow. So that's the first thing, is to kind of get in on that stuff. I also would like to associate or partner with  – and I don't just mean collabo – but just really do some like, big, fun projects with like brands and people and groups that we like, and we've kind of taken in what they do as inspiration for the band and the shop, and of course there's always talk of store number 2 but I'd like to get store number one on autopilot first.

F151: What Scion promotional items have been the most popular with your staff and with customers?
F: The CDs, the mixes are the most well-received. I usually give them away at various events.

F151: Do you have a favorite Scion music compilation? Did any of the compilations make it into your store’s music rotation?
F: The one that stands out, I think you guys had a guy from Moon Goons, he's a DJ, his name is Josh Clancy, he's a local guy he did a design for us not too long ago. That guy's ill for design work.

F151: Can you explain the cult following for Scion socks?
F: The socks were tight! A bunch of those ended up going home with me though, haha. Maybe the cult following would be huger if I didn't take so many home.