After you quit enjoi on Valentines Day, you did the Jenkem interview announcing Jacuzzi Unlimited pretty much right afterwards. What's it been like since the brand has actually developed into a real thing?

I'll be super honest. We did that Jenkem interview literally the day after I quit, so a lot of the things that I was saying were things that I said out loud for the very first time ever. It was pretty gnarly. I broke down and I cried actually during that interview.

It was a super emotional time for everyone involved. The main takeaway I got from the interview was that you we're going to move forward with Jacuzzi and make it an actual company.

Yeah, I think that sometimes you have an idea and it's just an idea. But when you say it out loud, it puts it out into the universe and it starts the wheels turning without you even intentionally doing it. You have to remember, in one form or another, I've been taking care of dudes for 20 years. The very last year of enjoi had a lot of hardships and put a lot of weight on my shoulders. It was hard, dude. In a way, when I quit, I was letting go but with the jokiness of starting a brand. But then people started rallying behind it and it gained traction. When I say people, I mean people like John Dilo or Dru James getting excited about it. It was like, ‘wait a minute, dude. I was half joking. You guys really want to follow me

into another whole adventure?’ It was crazy to throw that out into the universe and have people start to gravitate towards it. Once we started to see that momentum it was like, ‘well, we really have to do this now.”

Absolutely. From the first few Instagram posts, there’s been overwhelming support based on the team riders you’ve got involved - before even seeing any graphics.

Yeah, I said this a couple times already but most people die and then get that kind of admiration shown to them. It was very unsettling and strange to quit and have that outpouring of people showing encouragement and respect.

It's like you went to your own funeral online.

Exactly, dude. I was like, ‘maybe we shouldn't do Jacuzzi. Maybe we should just ride this off into the sunset.’ My biggest worry was that I didn’t want to let people down so it almost worked against me that everybody was so excited about it. If it wasn't for Jeff [Davis], really being like, ‘Yo, we're really doing this, Lou. This is really going to happen.’ I just didn’t want to make something that’s not as cool as what we had before.

For sure. But I could imagine that after taking care of guys for so long, it's in your nature to want to continue building a home for them.

It's funny, right? I went from being self-loathing and feeling like I couldn't fix this problem that was unfixable to switching gears and figuring our factories and graphics. We just switched gears. It's like you break up with your girlfriend and then you go out to the bar and there's all these hot girls and you say, ‘Alright dude, I'm back!’

It's like you instantly rebounded.

You could say Jacuzzi is my rebound! It's something that we always talked about doing in the van anyway. You drive around and go, ‘Dude, if we had a sister team, what would it be like? What would the vibe be? Who would be the squad?’ We already had everything in our heads, we just had to put it to paper. It was really motivating to have people get so excited about the Jacuzzi thing; it really made me feel like there was a lane for us. Sometimes you don't know what your worth is. At the end of the day, I fall down and my elbow gets bloody just like everybody else but I get up and I keep trying. Some people just ooze confidence but that's not really me.

I suppose so. Although after all those years at Dwindle, I’m sure you had a pretty good idea of what had to be done to make this a reality.

Totally. We’d be in meetings back in 2002 or 2003-ish when I was going to LA to lay out enjoi ads. I was like, ‘You guys paying me to fly down and stay a hotel room and I'm gettinga crash course in Photoshop.’ I would joke with Bod [Boyle] all the time and say ‘I just want to learn this so I could go get a .com job and make real money.

The reality is, when we started to do Jacuzzi, I was like, ‘These are the things that work really well, these are what we need to focus our money on and this is how we need to spend our money’ because I got paid to get the education of doing it.

It's almost like you got a scholarship.

The same holds true for starting Sidewalk Distribution. It was really rad when we decided we we're going to do this for real. We knew what was strong points and the weak points of Dwindle were. We'd all been there for so many years that we knew everything, like what distributors to work with and which ones not to work with.

Without going too far down the rabbit hole, can you speak a bit more about what you wanted to do differently with Jacuzzi / Sidewalk Distribution? I know restructuring rider pay has been an important part of this new equation.

Great question, dude. When Bod quit Dwindle, I spoke to almost everybody who was still there. I tried to reassure everybody that guys like me and Ernie [Diaz] had been there for 25 years or so. We'd seen presidents come and go. Some had come and done better stuff, others did worse things. I told people this wasn’t the end but this it was an opportunity to fix or to change anything that we didn’t like about Dwindle. I got a list together of people's complaints and what people thought our strengths and weaknesses were. In a strange way, I got a cheat sheet of all the good points and all the the bad points of Dwindle.

In starting the new distribution, the biggest thing for me was to make pro skateboarding worth it again. To give kids hope and rekindle that dream where, if you become a pro skateboarder, you're going to travel the world, be able to buy a house and buy a car. When I was younger, that was the dream among my peers. I was going to skate at Quimby School but Marc Johnson was going to Amsterdam on a Maple tour for the summer. Those are the things where you're like, ‘Damn, I want to get there someday.’ The driving force was figuring out how to create a distribution where we make pro skateboarders important again. The way to do that, in my mind, was to structure the entire distribution around pro skateboarding.

The idea of being able to do it as your full time job - aka your “profession” - so to speak.

Exactly, dude. What we strive to do now is create a new pay scale where it gives guys a bigger, better opportunity to make more money at it. The sucky thing about it is that the inflation of life hasn't quite been the same as the inflation of skateboarding. It sucks because as a pro, I struggled with that for years.

Can you speak a bit more about the idea of transitioning to a role where your priority is creating opportunities for the younger dudes that are starting to enter the pro ranks?

Yeah, there’s this thing that people always go back to about skateboarding and and how it keeps you young. I was thinking about it the other day. When I slam, it doesn't feel like I remember it when I was young.

Tell me about it.

I came to the self realization that I feel young because I never stopped progressing. Maybe I don't skate big handrails anymore… or a handrail at all anymore, let’s be honest.

Hubbas are close enough.

I'll still mess with a hubba. There’s a lot more safety features to a hubba. (Laughs)

But I was thinking about the progression thing and how you don't have to physically progress in skateboarding if you're constantly mentally progressing with what's happening. The second you decide, ‘this is is my era and I'm not going to think about what's happening now,’ all of a sudden, skateboarding passes you by and then you get old. Skateboarding doesn't necessarily keep you physically young, but it keeps you mentally in tune with what's going on with everybody else. Even with trick selections, you see older cats and they're like, ‘Dude I was doing slappys and no complys in 1991.’

All the time.

It's what's happening now. That's what people are doing and it's fun. Why do you have to knock it? It's progression. You have to have a young eye with everything and I think an important thing for me having guys like Jeff [Davis], Tony [Latham], Gus [Bus], Dru [James] and those dudes who are young and they're doing it. If you're just a guy behind a desk, you're not part of the progression of skateboarding, so by staying active and out in the streets with those guys, you’re progressing with them. I'm definitely not going to stop wearing Dickies, but I see what they're wearing now, how they're acting and what stokes them out. For for better or for worse, I'm still a skateboard fanatic. I see it all and I try and take as much of it in still as I can.

I agree, it’s all about observing those guys living their lives and seeing the style that emanates from how they act on and off the board.

Definitely. There's been a few trips where it's like, ‘Lou, you gotta get a trick’ or ‘Lou, what spot do you want to skate?’ I'm always like, ‘Lou had his time. Lou doesn't need any of this. Lou's enjoying seeing you guys have your time and succeed. Lou doesn't need to go out to the bar and get shit faced drunk, but Lou definitely wants to see you guys do that and hear the stories, you know?’

You at least gotta have a trick or two for the new video though, right?

I'm filming a fucking a full part, man! I didn't say getting older means you could be a slacker.

That’s the spirit! Any other closing thoughts about what you’re cooking up with this new crop of Jacuzzi riders?

It is a fine balance and it is tough. You don't want the brand to be about you, you want the brand to be around the squad. You want the brand to be based around the vibe. For myself, it’s tough when you go to a demo or something and people want to see me, even though it’s really time for Tony [Latham] or for John [Dilo] to shine. I guess I’m the draw to bring people there and being okay with that role is a huge part of maturity, which a lot of skateboarders don't have. It’s a very important lesson to understand your role and try to use your role to propel others.

I had a lot of people around me that gave me that opportunity. On those early enjoi demos, people were showing up to see Rodney Mullen. They didn't know who the fuck Louie Barletta was. Rodney gave me that opportunity and he gave us that moment to shine and become whatever we wanted to become. I feel like for myself, the number one thing I go back to is that this isn't Louie Barletta Skateboards. I’m just facilitating for everybody else because this is their time.

Interview | Louie Barletta

Interview | Jake Yanko