Skateboard brand’s shop aims to build community
For most Montrealers strolling through the city, coming across a handrail or a park bench doesn’t mean much.
Skateboarders tend to have a different perspective — almost anywhere in the city can become an imaginative playground to practise new tricks, roll around and have fun with friends.
“It was a way to play outside in your surroundings,” said Brandon Johnston, a Montreal skateboarder. “It opened up a new part of my mind”
When he was 18, Johnston attempted a jump trick — called an ollie — off a loading dock and over a fence.
“My feet clipped on the fence, and I went flying,” Johnston, who is now 25, said. “I knocked myself out.”
Skateboarders are known for being unafraid of danger, unconventional and historically dismissive of authority, not to mention loud. Sometimes that means they get looked down upon, or considered as outsiders by the rest of the population.
Dime MTL, a skateboard company established in 2005, wants to challenge that. Its members have found success through the skate community, and want to show that the negative stigma is unwarranted. They also want to give local skateboarders a place of their own.
On Saturday, Dime will finally open its permanent store on the Main.
The company, which is known for leading the city’s skate scene to the world stage, was born when a group of 15-year-old Montreal skateboarders started sporadically posting silly but impressive skateboard videos to their website to the tune of boom-bap, a production style of hip-hop.
A few years later, the company released Dime T-shirts on its website (dimemtl.com), and the brand was built from there.
Today, Dime has more than 105,000 followers on Instagram.
The store will help the company “build a community, and have our own platform in Montreal to sell our clothes and interact with people,” said Phil Lavoie, a founder and marketer at Dime, in a message.
“Since skateboarding brought us to what we are doing right now, we felt it was the right thing to give back to the skate community,” Lavoie said.
Dime’s store will carry their clothing collections including some store-exclusive items. They will also offer products from different brands, like skateboard company Alltimers and outerwear brands North Face and Timberland.
For the past 10 years or so, there hasn’t been a space owned by skaters, for skaters in Montreal, Lavoie said.
There are stores that sell skateboards and skate attire, like Empire, but these companies are franchises that don’t have an exclusive focus on skateboarding.
When Lavoie was growing up in Montreal, there were many skate shops owned by “skateboarders that cared,” he said, like Alena, Spin and Temple.
“We wanted the next generation of skaters to live that. That’s why it’s not just a Dime boutique, it’s also a skate shop where you come to meet up, hang out and go skate,” Lavoie said.
The store is at 3632 St-Laurent Blvd., handy to two classic skate spots in Montreal — Peace Park and La Fontaine Park. Several of Montreal’s best skate spots, such as the concrete tunnel known as the Pipe at the Olympic Stadium, have been featured in publications worldwide.
Most of Dime’s members are from Montreal. While some Canadian skateboarders move to the United States in order to start their skateboarding careers, like Rick Howard of Girl Skateboards and Lakai Ltd. Footwear, the Dime team intends to remain true to its roots.
“It does sound glamorous to claim New York City, Paris or London, but I think Montreal is as cool as all these cities, and we’re extremely lucky to be from here,” Lavoie said.
“We’ll always keep the company in Montreal.”
Still, Dime embraces out-oftowners. Since the company doesn’t have an official skate team, their friends from around the world join the crew, “more in a family way than in a skate team type of way,” Lavoie said.
Dime’s store opening has created jobs for some of the founders’ friends, which Lavoie said is a really special feeling of accomplishment. The best part, he added, is that it all comes from skateboarding.
“A lot of people think we just make noise and destroy property. It’s false, and it feels good to prove it.”