![]() ![]() That was where Benzien met pro-skater (and former Flogging Molly accordionist) Matt Hensley. Before long, a buddy invited him to join a pro-skateboarding tour in 1999 as a "Rep-Flow" rider. He worked for the prestigious Connecticut firm Rolland/Towers before he lost patience with the slow pace of building ("Five years from design to construction?!" he says) and switched to a freelance career in graphic design in New York. The need to make his art practical lured him to study landscape architecture at the University of Arizona. Solving problems beautifully but within fixed limitations defines Benzien's direction as an artist. "And you're fiddling, y'know, and then suddenly, it's off." "but you move it around and do like this, and like that." Benzien's hands are moving as he speaks, miming the way he'd move the ring along the chain. "You look and it's, like, man, it's impossible," he says, The trick is to find a way to free the ring. He described for me the classic puzzle in which two horseshoes are attached by a pair of chains. Models like this only get limited runs, but they attract the kind of trend-setting lifestyle consumer Dekline needs to grow.Īs a kid, Benzien did this kind of free-form art, but he also had a thing for puzzles. "The shoe ends up much better than what I could do alone, or what the artist could do alone," he says. Spoons' four-legged "whale-agator" mascot, Killer, sleeps on the side of the shoe, and his dream of iridescent stars and moons spreads over the top and sides. He's got a shoe on the shelves right now that he built with Portland-based artist Bwana Spoons. To break free of routine, Benzien will partner with the more freewheeling imaginations of artists or professional riders. "Then I sit down to the computer and design it." "I let the ideas scramble around in my brain for a while," he says. He draws inspiration from everything around him: A recent sneaker combines tweed and leather, like the sport coat of an Oxford Don, while a new high-top shoe combines the functionality of an ankle brace with a boxing-boot look. When he uses colors, he keeps them simple and bold, like bright red with a white stripe, or a subtle pattern of green and black. "I do that with texture and materials-using pinstripe material, or flat black with some reflective material." "If it's a black shoe, how's it going to separate itself from all the other black shoes?" he says. His shoe designs mirror his subtle but distinctive personal fashion. Our meandering conversation is peppered with shoe and skater lingo, his sentences traveling elliptically around each subject until suddenly veering into the heart of the matter.ĭekline's offices are casual, wide-open spaces, and Benzien himself is dressed low-key in a black hoodie, blue jeans and, of course, sneakers. For all his technical virtuosity, he still looks and sounds like a skater, with a laid-back tone reminiscent of Tommy Chong's burned-out stoner on That '70s Show, especially when he forgets he's being interviewed and verbal tics like "man" and "y'know" mix with the technical terms. Lanky and with a close-cropped haircut, Benzien at 34 still loves to tear up a shoe to see how it works, only now he knows what all that stuff is. At last month's Action Sports Retailers convention in San Diego, skate and shoe sellers repeatedly referred me to Dekline as the It company in the field. ![]() In just a few years of existence, Dekline has established itself as an industry leader in look and feel. Last year, sales of skate shoes grew 34 percent, faster than any other segment of the footwear market, according to retail market researcher NPD Group. ![]() Benzien co-founded the company in 2002 with Kevin Furtado, just as skate shoes began the transition from skateboarder-specialized regalia to hipster and hip-hop fashion. "When the shoe was done," he says, "I'd just slice it in half and say, 'Huh, I don't know what that is.'"īenzien and I sit in the showroom of Dekline Footwear's Logan Heights headquarters, where he's the lead designer. He bought them and wore them everywhere, until he wore them to death. August Benzien shakes up the skate shoe worldīack in 1985, 12-year-old August Benzien worked odd jobs for two months around his Stratford, Conn., neighborhood to save enough money to buy a pair of Nike Air Jordan Ones - the basketball shoes had hit the shelves just a year earlier. ![]()
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