DC Shoes
The chunky skate shoe whose star-and-DC logo got stickered onto every 2000s binder. Damon Way and Ken Block launched it in 1994 as the footwear arm of their Droors Clothing, Danny Way and Rob Dyrdek wore it pro, Quiksilver paid $87 million for it in 2004, and then Block's Gymkhana videos, in The Drive's words, changed car videos forever.
Damon Way and Ken Block started Eightball clothing in 1991 with Damon's younger brother, the pro skater Danny Way, then rolled out a run of brands — Droors Clothing, Dub outerwear, Blunt snowboard magazine — before founding DC Shoes in June 1994 with Clayton Blehm in Carlsbad, California. The letters stood for Droors Clothing. Danny Way was the first pro on the team; in the first ad for his signature shoe he stood still, because he had hurt his neck surfing.
Rob Dyrdek came aboard around 1995 and got his first signature shoe, the RD 1, that same year — the start of a twenty-year partnership and 29 signature models. A skit he wrote for the 2003 DC Video, in which he hires Christopher "Big Black" Boykin as a bodyguard against security guards, became MTV's Rob & Big in 2006, and in 2005 he and DC built the Rob Dyrdek/DC Shoes Skate Plaza in his hometown of Kettering, Ohio. On March 8, 2004, Quiksilver bought DC for $87 million; Droors was sold the same year, and DC became simply DC.
Block, meanwhile, went rally racing — Rally America Rookie of the Year in 2005, Subaru Rally Team USA with Travis Pastrana in 2006, X Games medals — and on November 11, 2008, a clip titled "DC SHOES: KEN BLOCK GYMKHANA PRACTICE" went up on YouTube: Block drifting a Subaru, DC branding everywhere. The Drive later wrote that "the stunts are tame compared to the sequels you've seen since," and there were many: Gymkhana Two, "The Infomercial," in 2009; the Hollywood backlot "Megamercial" in 2011; Gymkhana Five in San Francisco, which drew 5.1 million views in its first 24 hours in 2012.
Damon Way left in 2008 for Incase, the brand moved into Quiksilver's Huntington Beach headquarters in 2010, and it relaunched with a new flag logo in 2011. Ken Block died in a snowmobile crash on January 2, 2023; DC dropped Danny Way from the team that November; and in February 2025 Liberated Brands, which ran the DC retail stores, filed for bankruptcy and closed all of them. The shoes, and the stickers, are still around.
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