![]() 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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