Bend family rolls through the daily grind

Photos by Anthony Dimaano / The Bulletin
Scott Seelye, 34, and his wife, Jennifer, 30, with their daughter, Grace, 11, last week in Bend, operate The Longboard Store, a predominantly online endeavor.
A longboard
Bend
family
rolls
through
the daily
grind
for the ride
By David Jasper
Scott Seelye
took several
years to
develop his
Sunriser
headlight
and taillight
system for
skateboards.
The Bulletin
Scott Seelye switched on a light in The
Longboard Store’s east Bend warehouse,
illuminating neat stacks of longboard
decks hooked onto walls and shelves loaded with trucks and wheels.
It wasn’t the first time a bulb went on
over his head.
For a year and a half, the 34-year-old
Bend man and his wife, Jennifer, 30, have
run, with a little help from their 11-yearold daughter, Grace, The Longboard Store,
a mostly online endeavor uniting slalom
and downhill racers, commuters and collectors, with the rides of their choice.
Scott and Jennifer, both born and raised
in Corvallis, had been visiting Bend every
weekend before making the move three
years ago, Scott said.
If they moved to Bend for the lifestyle,
then they also wanted work that would
accommodate that lifestyle. “The number
one thing was ‘What can we do to make
it our lifestyle?’” Scott said. But he was
more eager than Jennifer.
“I always swore I’d never ever want to
own my own business, because I always
knew the hours my mom put in,” she said.
“And that was always my goal,” Scott
wadded.
“Yeah, because he would say, ‘Won’t it
be great? You can work for yourself and
you can be done by 10 a.m. and you can
go up to the mountain.’ I think he’s figured
out,” Jennifer said, laughing, “that that’s a
great concept, but it doesn’t happen.”
Before becoming a seller of as many as
50 boards a week, Scott was an industrial
designer working for others, including a
furniture maker, and also did some freelance work. At the same time, he put his
time and money into his own endeavors,
such as a seamless composite speaker
enclosure and a sturdy, affordable snowshoe, which the couple made and sold out
of their home for a couple of years.
See Longboard / B
“We’re still trying to convince our daughter that this is really a cool career that her parents have. She’s had a friend come in to
buy a longboard, and she was very proud of everything. But day to day, it’s ‘Do I really have to work? It’s boring.’”
— Jennifer Seelye
Longboard
Continued from B
Another of the products he
created was the Sunriser, a headlight and taillight system that fits
squarely between the bottom of
a skateboard and the top of the
trucks (the turning mechanism
on a board), enabling skateboarders to see and be seen at
night up to two miles away.
In their first foray into the
skateboard industry, Jennifer
went to a trade show in San Diego in January 2006. She also
stopped in at board manufacturers and other businesses
throughout California and Oregon on the way back north.
She’d been fighting a cold,
she recalled, and her trip was in
question until the last minute,
but it paid off.
“She stopped by manufacturers, like Fibreflex, and she’s like,
‘There are some companies buying these, but they happen to be
the longboard companies,’” Scott
explained. “It wasn’t the skaters at the skatepark. It was the
longboarders.”
If you’re scratching your head
and wondering what the difference is, short-board riders are
generally more interested in
board-battering tricks on streets
and transitions, i.e., skateparks
and ramps. Such a light is more
practical
for
longboarders,
who for the most part use their
boards for transportation, downhill speed-boarding and carving
on sidewalks.
Scott began doing longboard
research at home. “I looked it
up, and it was like, there wasn’t
really anybody selling just the
longboards.”
Anthony Dimaano / The Bulletin
The Longboard Store includes the Sunriser headlight, seen here, and taillight system on some of the
complete boards it sells. The lights are also available individually.
“Scott called or e-mailed and
(said) ‘Why don’t we do our own
retail for this as a way to sell our
own product and, hopefully, not
be going back to work.’
Then, a few hours later he
called back with, ‘We now own
the domain name thelongboardstore.com.’ And I said, ‘OK.’”
“Before you know it, a year
and a half later, we’re this big,”
Scott said.
Absent are the racks of clothes,
skate shoes and other boardsport trappings that usually
crowd shops. This is longboarding deconstructed.
Scott let out a small chuckle
and said, “Yeah, it pretty much is
the Mecca for longboards.”
After three months in its present location, the shop is starting to see more foot traffic filter
in. The Seelyes want to expand
the shop into the adjacent space
and plan to hold an open house
event for the public. A neighboring businessman has told them
that a lot of people stop by when
they’re not around, Scott said.
“We try to work normal hours.
Once the weather gets warmer
we’ll probably come in earlier
and stay later.”
Jennifer added that they get
daughter Grace to earn a little
spending money by helping out
around the shop four hours a
week.
“We’re still trying to convince
our daughter that this is really
a cool career that her parents
have. She’s had a friend come in
to buy a longboard, and she was
very proud of everything. But
day to day, it’s ‘Do I really have to
work? It’s boring.’”
Trust us: Mom’s right. It’s pretty cool.
Although The Longboard
Store has a sign on the front door
saying it is open to the public, 99
percent of sales are done online
through its Web site, www.the
longboardstore.com. When the
Seelyes first began, they worked
out of their Old Mill-area garage.
It was chaos on wheels. Now,
in the warehouse, things are
streamlined and orderly.
The warehouse has 950 products, and Scott said he hopes to
up the number of products to
“well over a thousand” by the
end of summer.
“We’re trying to specialize in
the hard-to-get stuff,” he said.
“I’ve been searching for guys,
people who are working out of
their garages and making these
beautiful boards. This is mahogany and it has maple stringers,”
he said, taking down a Honey
Cruiser deck from the wall of
boards. It sells for $155 on the
Web site.
Scott, who still dabbles in inventions, said, “Now I’m playing
around with boards. You know,
we do the mid- to high-end, and
then a lot of parents are calling
and saying, ‘I want to buy one of
your boards. I want to buy one
for my kid, but I can’t afford it.’”
As a solution, Scott came up
with a more reasonably priced
Longboard Store Basic, $40 for
just a deck, $125 for a complete
board that’s ready to go. “We sold
18 of those last week,” he said,
sounding surprised. “And that
was the first week we brought
them out.”
In the process of all this, Scott
has become an avid longboarder
himself. If he gets caught up on
putting together and shipping
boards, he might have more time
to do some riding. Business has
been a little more brisk than he
expected.
“It’s been crazy,” Scott said.
“It’s ridiculous what’s been going
on. It’s growing so fast.”
A few antique boards also
adorn the walls of the warehouse, purely for display. One
ancient-looking board, assumed
to be from the ’70s, looks like a
harbinger of future longboards.
They found it at a garage sale.
“I think it was five bucks,”
he said. “Typically, on Fridays,
we go to garage sales. So in the
mornings, you probably won’t
see us. We really built this thing
around our lifestyle.”
David Jasper can be reached
at 383-0349 or djasper@
bendbulletin.com.