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Salad Days Skateboard Co. Part 1: Sick & Tired of Being Sick & Tired (page 1) (2) I mentioned in the previous post that during my younger years, I wanted to start a clothing company called Khali. I had a lot of designs for shirt layouts (which I still have) but, I didn't really understand how to start & run a business. Back in those days it wasn't as easy to get information about how to do it, as it is today. There was barely an internet, much less today's high-speed internet with an enormous amount of content & the ability to do research on such matters, or to get actual in-depth information from people was limited from scarce, to none. Plus being in my twenties, all my priorities & agendas back then, were to chill & party. All I thought that I had to do was make the designs, get someone else to print those designs for me & when I got the shirt, everything would take care of itself; after I sold it. One of the first designs I ever printed back then was the Salinas COTS logo. Which is the design that spells Salinas in numbers, instead of letters. Inspired by a Slap magazine sticker, I wondered if the same could be done with Salinas; so I went home & sketched it out. I met with a screen printer who sat down with me & ran me through the process. I wound up getting a dozen shirts made, black on white & white on black, plus he threw in one that was printed on a half-sleeve baseball tee which I kept. Once I had them, I already had some pre-orders made & had no problems getting rid of the rest. I still have the list of those names & posted the t-shirt in the archives section of this website. However, even after such a positive success of selling, the numbers didn't add up for me to carry on. Plus other factors were at play during this time. I just graduated high school & was venturing out into the world. I moved to Santa Cruz, which at the time took my focus off of truly starting Khali with any seriousness, much less investing full energy into it. As time went on, Khali always was in the back of my mind, but as I did more research over the years, I came to the conclusion that it was almost impossible to create a successful clothing brand; without some sort of superstar attached to it. Including other factors like production costs, knock-offs & just overall selling out. So I scrapped the clothing company idea & focused more on skateboarding. While the ideas never stopped, the reasons for doing it did, which ultimately was for money & not for passion; which is why I feel nothing more became of it. From 1996 - 2008, all I did was search for the skateboard industry as much as I could & for over 10 years, I skated & traveled & lived where I felt was the closest I could get to seeing it here in California. (page 1) (2)