I grew up spending every single day around things that were loud and fast.
Motorcycles, snowmobiles, monster trucks, you name it and I was into it. I started riding and wrenching on my own stuff by the age of 5 and was racing motocross and snowcross by age 10.
I quickly rose through the amateur ranks in Canada, winning a lot of races and championships along the way before stepping up to race with the big boys in the pro class at age 15. Around that same time was when freestyle motocross and snowcross were gaining popularity and let me tell you, I was obsessed with it. From the time the very first Crusty Demons Of Dirt and Slednecks videos came out when I was a kid, I was out there trying all of the tricks I saw in those videos when I wasn’t racing, and sometimes when I was. All the way through my amateur career I was winning the halftime jump contests at the local tracks against grown men and as much as I loved racing, thats what I really wanted to do. Shortly after I stepped into the pro class I got the call of a lifetime, a promoter was starting a real deal world championship tour for freestyle snowmobiling, the first of its kind in the sport, and I was asked to try out because someone saw what I was doing at the races.
At 15 years old you can imagine my excitement, I was fucking pumped! I ran out of class, ditched school and went home to tell my parents that I was about to be a real pro rider competing against all of the guys that I watched in those videos growing up. Fun fact: at my first pro contest, I went through the locker room and got everybody’s autograph before I had to ride against them later that weekend. At the start of that first season I was a nobody, just a kid who got last place in the first event. By the halfway point of the season, I was winning events or always on the podium and had a laundry list of sponsors. Before that first season was done I had dropped out of high school and was riding full time, and for nearly 10 years I rode all over the globe as a professional freestyle snowmobile, freestyle motocross and freestyle sportbike rider. I competed in some of the most prestigious shows and events including winning the FSX tour championship in 2005 by winning 9 of the 12 events. It was a wild ride that gave me a lot of cool experiences and stories to tell.
Eventually it came time to retire and get a real job at the ripe old age of 25. Money in the sport was drying up, things were getting more dangerous by the day and my heart just wasn’t in it anymore. I worked as a parts counter guy at a bike shop, a construction worker, a welder and a cable guy. I discovered over those few years that after living like a wild hooligan for most of my life that I wasn’t a big fan of taking orders from anyone and a real job wasn’t for me.
So I decided to go back to school to become a certified motorcycle mechanic, I wanted to start up my own shop. Thanks to all of my years of working on my own stuff and working with some of the best mechanics during my pro career, I breezed through school and graduated 4 months early. Shortly after, Thirty8 Ride Shop was my first business. I worked out of my home garage to start out and quickly got a lot of attention with a fully custom built Yamaha Yz450F FMX bike that went viral on social media, and a Harley-Davidson Dyna Low Rider that I built for myself. I had a few really cool client build projects and things were looking good, but I realized that I didn’t really live in the ideal place to build high end custom bikes having a 5 month riding season here in Canada, and I wasn’t really enjoying the daily motor and suspension rebuilds on clapped out bikes that I was doing every day to get by. So it was a tough call, but I had to let that dream go.
Around the same time was when the Harley stunt scene started up and I was already taking out my failed business frustrations on that Dyna I built. Destroying tires, fenders and tail lights on a daily basis. I decided to film a lot of this stuff to try to put together a cool little video because I had a big interest in video editing from my days of riding with the Slednecks team. My first video “Stoke Or Broke” landed on youtube on September 2, 2015 and was a hit for a channel with no subscribers right out of the gate. People wanted more and I had so much fun making it but there was one problem, it took all summer to shoot and edit that thing and there was no way that I was going to be able to put out that type of video on a regular basis.
That’s when a friend told me about motovlogging. To be honest the name and the concept both sounded stupid to me. Someone riding around with a camera on their face while speaking their thoughts into a mic…who the hell would want to watch that? It turned out a lot of people did. I found a ton of channels with huge followings and I also learned that these people were doing this as a full time job. I thought “fuck yeah, sign me up”! I figured that if I was able to combine that style of video with some cool wheelies and stunt riding that I might have a chance to turn this into a living.
The first few videos went ok, one did very well, but I wasn’t having fun with the filming and editing portion. It just felt stale and boring and even though I was riding on a higher level than the other motovloggers, something was missing for the viewers and for myself. Thats when I really started getting into Youtube and found Casey Neistat. My mind was blown. This guy was making a video every single day, sometimes about the most mundane things, but they all somehow told an amazing story and looked cinematic as hell. I must have watched every single video he made twice and was extremely inspired, that’s what I wanted to do. So video by video I practiced and pushed myself. My shots got better, my editing got better and I eventually developed a style of my own that grew the channel to 20,000 subscribers over the next 2 years.
By this time I was hoping to be making a living doing this but it just wasn’t in the cards. I was constantly breaking my bikes, my video equipment and all of the money I made was going back out the door double time. As fun as it all was it just wasn’t working. I was running on empty and had a few hundred bucks left in my bank account. I was terrified of the thought of getting a normal job again so I took one last ditch effort with the last few hundred bucks that I had…I was going to start a clothing brand and market it through my channel.
It was way out of left field for me, but again because of my riding career and working with many sponsors over the years, it was something I had an interest in but never pursued. Everyone told me that I was fucking crazy but I didn’t care, I was going to give this a try. I made an “office” in a little room in my house that was really just a laptop, a plastic table and a metal folding chair that rearranged my ass bones forever, and then proceeded to spend every dime I had (including lots that I didn’t have, thanks Visa) to build a website, a logo, and made my first small batch of product that included 3 tee designs, a hoodie, a windbreaker and some stickers. I even took the time to spray paint my logo on all of the shipping boxes to try to make the brand look and feel like something higher end than it was. I was all in.
At 12:00am on July 21, 2017, Thirty Eight Ride Co. went live and to be quite honest, I was shitting my pants. This had to work or I was done. I wasn’t expecting instant action but at 12:03am the first order came in and the feeling was incredible, someone wanted what I was making! Then another one came, and another, and another. I can still remember feeling both surreal excitement and crippling fear at the same time because I had no idea what I was doing when it came to running an online store or shipping orders. By the time I woke up the next day over half of my stock was gone and by day 2 it was completely sold out. I couldn’t believe it, it was working. I figured out my way through packing and shipping all of those orders and was back to my desk ordering a re-stock.
Over my next few orders I started noticing that the printers who were handling my stuff were doing a really bad job. Really, really bad. The quality level was either poor or unusable, the deadlines were always missed, and they would flat out refuse to make simple things that I now know most intermediate level printers would handle with ease. So I tried another shop, then another. The same shit kept happening no matter where I went in my city. I was finally fed up and decided that if I want things done on the level that I expect, then this is something else I’m going to have to take on.
For the next year I worked my ass off to grow the brand so that I could buy the equipment. With my mechanic background I knew the importance of good tools so I was not going to buy budget gear. Quality tools make quality work a lot easier, that’s just a fact. I started off with a Stahls Hotronix hat heat press for my first piece since I didn’t have a lot of money and hats were a weak point in the brand at the time. I used that hat heat press to make a ton of hats for my brand and to make hats for other people on the side. After enough work I was able to buy a 24” Graphtec vinyl cutter for decals, more hat decorating options and to do custom work for friends. I used those 2 pieces of equipment to save up for my next piece, a Sawgrass SG800 sublimation printer. That thing was honestly kind of a turd but I was printing coffee mugs and water bottles for people like crazy until I was able to buy a Stahls Fusion IQ heat press. That thing was a dream to me and I still use it today. With that press I was able to start decorating all types of clothing, bags and a lot more combining it with my vinyl cutter and plastisol transfers that I was sourcing from a few places.
This is when the concept of Rogue Lab came to be. Suddenly I was becoming just as busy with printing for clients as I was with my brand and I foresaw it growing into a full blown print shop one day, so it was time to take a huge step. I called up the good people at Ryonet and ordered a complete start up screen printing shop package. Not a starter kit, a professional manual shop package worth tens of thousands of dollars. An 8 color press, conveyor dryer, flash, exposure unit, full reclaim setup and all the goodies you could imagine to start off with. Again, everyone told me I was fucking crazy to dive that far in without any sort of screen printing experience or knowing if I would even enjoy it, but I knew that I had to do this for my brand, my growing side jobs and I had it in me to make it work.
During this time I hadn’t really been making Youtube videos for nearly a year prior. I wasn’t riding much anymore because I was spending most of my time behind a desk or packing orders which didn’t really make riveting content as far as I was concerned. But I really missed it and wanted to get back behind (I guess in front) of the camera so I thought to myself “maybe this new printing thing would make cool videos”. The more I thought about it the more I could see the creative possibilities with the shots, the edits, and the stories. So I took a good look around Youtube to see if this was already happening and sure enough it was. The popularity of the subject was definitely there, but I didn’t really find creators that were making videos in the way that I knew I could. My decision was made on the spot. Motorcycle videos are out, screen printing videos are coming in.
If I was going to put these videos out to the world and have clients take me seriously as a home business at the same time, I knew I needed to stand out and look like a pro. I simply didn’t have the money to lease a commercial space because I had just spent it all on screen printing equipment that I wouldn’t ship to me for a month. So I got creative with the space I did have and tore the entire basement of my house apart. I worked day and night every single day for a month. Ripped out carpet, ground the floors down, knocked out walls, added the necessary plumbing and electrical, and threw down many gallons of paint and epoxy to turn that thing into a clean, professional and bad ass looking space to set up this new print shop. It looked incredible and the day that truck full of equipment showed up was the day that I shot my first video in the print world.
Those first few videos felt great. I was finally making the type of content that I had always wanted to and felt like I was hitting my stride as a creator. One problem, the existing subscribers of my channel absolutely hated it. I get it, they were there for Harley stunts and things of that nature, but I got hundreds of comments and messages talking about this being the death of my channel and how this new direction was stupid. I lost half of my following overnight. But then something happened, my new videos started to find their audience. Slowly I started to gain that following back with those first few videos while I was showing everyone the build up of my little shop and learning how to use my equipment for the first time.
Youtubers have a bad habit of being happy and positive all the time, only showing life being great. Thats bullshit and something I can’t stand. I made the decision to show all of the mistakes that I was making along the way (something I still do today) because that’s real life, and those mistakes could maybe help people. It turned out that viewers really connected with that and within a handful of videos I had gained back most of those subscribers that I had lost and even made screen printing fans out of the ones that stuck around.
Then the big one came. I made a video touring my home shop in its entirety and it took off, like a lot. Home screen printing setups have existed forever but nobody had ever built one like mine before. Apparently the internet agreed and that video spread like wildfire gaining hundreds of thousands of views within the first week it went live. My channel went from 20,000, down to 10,000, then back up to 40,000 subscribers in a month and a half. It felt good to prove to all of those doubters wrong, nothing says “kiss my ass” better than that.
Fast forward to today. Rogue Lab is thriving and growing into the new, much larger (still not large enough) home shop 2.0, filled with equipment I once dreamed of. We grew to offer screen printing, DTG, heat transfer printing, stickers, vehicle wraps, graphic design and more. I’ve made a ton of videos covering all aspects of the business, tutorials, really anything I can share that may help or entertain, and I’m happy to hear that it’s making an impact those watching. The channel is growing daily and was the first print channel ever to cross the coveted 100,000 subscriber mark to claim the Youtube silver play button. I got my own signature squeegee with Ryonet and EZ Grip which is fucking cool and a serious honour. I’ve developed partnerships with a lot of the top brand names in the industry who help me out greatly. I started a community for printers on Facebook called Rogue Printers that has been an insanely valuable resource to everyone involved and has grown in ways that I couldn’t have imagined thanks to its awesome members. Thirty Eight Ride Co. is about to make a comeback which I am extremely stoked about. I now own another clothing brand called N9RTH that is about to launch and I have high hopes for. And the story doesn’t end here, there are plenty more cool things on the horizon that I can’t talk about just yet so you’ll have to watch this site, my videos and my social media accounts for news on that.
If you’ve read this far, I want to say thank you for taking the time to read a little bit more about me. I hope the main takeaway here is the one that people know me for best, which is…
