AMHERST — As Peter Hudlicky maneuvered through his garage, he apologized for the mess, the amassed tools and materials leaving narrow trails of floor space.
Among the items was a band saw, a pile of rock maple veneers, a set of 14-inch opening c-clamps, a plaster mold and one failed prototype of an longboard — actually, the only failed prototype of an longboard.
Hudlicky and his friend Zeke Tierkel started making longboards — similar to skateboards, but longer and built for street riding — under the name Ill Capo earlier this summer.
In no time, the pair already has a line of boards, a small distribution deal and a central, affordability-based ideology.
It’s come together quickly in part because Hudlicky and Tierkel have been thinking about making boards for a while. They just had to wait until this summer to do it, because they were busy finishing high school.
Hudlicky and Tierkel both started skating as kids and met each other in high school, shortly after Hudlicky moved to Amherst from Blacksburg, Virginia. He’d been a skateboarder before the move, but Amherst lacks skate parks, so he switched to longboarding to ride the streets.
Tierkel started longboarding with him, and by the time they’d reached their later high school years, the two wanted better boards.
“But we realized these huge companies like Dusters and Loaded were overpricing their boards,” Tierkel said. “Then we realized that people wanted to longboard, but couldn’t afford it.”
Boards can sell for more than $200. Hudlicky and Tierkel thought they could make high-quality boards cheaply enough to sell them for much less. As their high school days came to a close, the duo spent about $1,000 on tools and equipment, Hudlicky said.
Now, the boards they make cost about $46 each — $29 for the seven layers of wood veneers, $5 for a cork veneer that helps dampen the ride, $10 for the glue to hold it together and $2 for varnish.
Ill Capo sells them for about $100, plus an extra $20 to $50 for boards with custom work. The pair said that’s a bargain given the quality of the materials and production. They say their price is more in line with low-quality boards.
“You could easily pay $100 for a board at …,” Hudlicky started.
“Wal-Mart,” Tierkel finished.
Thus far, they’ve pressed seven boards, a process that takes about 30 minutes of hands-on work — mostly gluing together veneers — plus eight to 12 hours in the press.
For Ill Capo’s first series, the Founding Fathers — three boards nicknamed Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, each with different features — the pressing is followed by about an hour of wood burning work to adorn the deck with the Ill Capo logo, a silhouette-based on Al Capone, surrounded with currency-inspired decoration.
Now, they’re focusing on finishing some custom orders from friends and boards for a recently signed distribution deal. A little over a week ago, Hudlicky went to Burlington, Vermont, to pitch Ill Capo to a local skate shop, which then agreed to buy seven boards, bringing in a little under $700 for Ill Capo.
Hudlicky said it’s the kind of business dealing he wants the company to work in.
“The thing in Burlington was our boards speaking for us,” he said. “And it was a locally-owned shop, so I walked right in and the owners were both right there.”
The two hope to begin conversations with skate shops in the Valley soon. Between the Burlington distribution deal, the custom boards and a Kickstarter campaign aiming to raise $2,000 for the company, Ill Capo has an influx of money on the way. If everything goes as planned, Hudlicky said, it would put the company in profit.
“We’ll reinvest all the profits to improve our process,” Tierkel said.
Improving the process wouldn’t mean an expansion yet, but it would mean better tools — a belt sander to replace an orbital one, a laser engraver to eliminate the time it takes to use the wood burner, a spray applicator to speed up gluing and varnishing.
But the production side of Ill Capo is about to get a little more complicated. Tierkel starts school at Champlain College in Burlington this fall, so he’ll focus on business and distribution while maintaining an occasional hands-on production role.
Hudlicky will travel to Prague to work in a chemistry lab for 10 months and will keep working on the business side. He said they’ll bring in some friends with woodworking experience who are going to school locally to take over the production side.
Even though college will be a change of pace, Tierkel said, “I know I can make time for this, because I love this business.”
Those changes don’t mean that Ill Capo won’t move forward with new projects. The Kickstarter campaign promises T-shirts and sweatshirts to people who donate enough, and Tierkel, who has a graphic design background, said Ill Capo could start selling apparel soon.
Tierkel and Hudlicky have also started planning a second board series. Titled “Propaganda,” the series idea stems from two deck designs by Tierkel — one with a collage of Cold War-era newspaper headlines, the other with an assortment of colorful propaganda posters from the same time period.
The teenagers don’t have many business plans beyond the short-term, though. One dream, Hudlicky said, would be to open an Ill Capo skate shop. For now, though, the plan is simple: make more boards, expand distribution and never waver from the ideological core of affordability.
“We could totally sell these boards for $200-plus, and with the right customer base, they would sell,” Hudlicky said. “But that’s contrary to the whole mission.”
Jack Evans can be reached at jackevan@indiana.edu.