An Interview with Eric Koston

Hows it going Eric, busy year?

Yea, an extremely busy year, I’ve been all over the place. I just got home a couple weeks ago but it feels like I’ve been gone for much longer, just out of LA for the most part, since like April. Well, at least that’s what it feels like.

How does it feel to be back on Oakley?

It’s been good, especially with what I’m doing now. Before it was really just your typical sponsorship deal. It’s been awhile, but this time it’s better, things have changed over there (Oakley), especially with the brand and what they want to do with me, but also what I want to do with them as well. Oakley is being really open about what they do, letting me do what I want, more or less. Also, back then it wasn’t like it is now, I wasn’t trying to design bags while giving much more input on product.

Speaking of your product, it looks great man, the bags are really simple yet pack a punch. How much of a hand did you have in the design process?

With these bags, I kind of based them on an existing silhouette, it was really the quickest thing we could do to get the ball rolling. I didn’t want the design to be a totally different aesthetic than what the Oakley customer is used to, so I gave an existing silhouette my own touch while using my ideas, concepts and all that. With the Frogksins too, it was just about taking the wood grain idea that we had and applying it to the sunglasses. It was a bit easier this time around, because once we got that going we focused on what we wanted to do next year.

Was there a particular inspiration behind the design, maybe tying back to skateboarding a bit?

It was just something simple and really cool. Once we sampled it up, it wasn’t initially supposed to feel like wood but once you look into it, it actually feels like a lightweight wood within the texture of the plastic.

Its pretty safe to say your excited about it?

Yea, totally.