Article below from Solo Skate Mag

Full Article available here http://www.soloskatemag.com/frog-it-up

TEXT BY

Pontus Alv

PHOTOS BY

Matt Price, Jared Sherbert, Colin Sussingham

POSTED IN

Interviews

Skateboarding is all about fun and doing what you like. That’s what everybody will tell you. But then in the end, most people are too scared to really do what they like and just follow the trend, don’t take risks, and try to look cool. Chris Milic and Jesse Alba are one of the few that truly don’t give a shit. They don’t care about being pro skaters and don’t try to make Frog the biggest skateboard company in the world. They prefer doing childish doodle art, piss hippie jumps, and just being a bit weird. Pretty loveable, isn’t it?

Chris Milic

Chris, where are you from and what’s your skating history?

I used to rollerblade and I always rollerbladed to my friend’s house, but my older brother had a skateboard that he didn’t use and once for my birthday I got new rollerblades and they took way too long to put on my feet [laughs] and so I started to skate with my brother’s skateboard to my friend’s house. Then I skated on for a long time and I ran into some kid and he asked me: “Can you ollie?” I was like: “What’s that?” Then he did an ollie and I was really stoked on skating after that.

How did you then get on Welcome?

I don’t really know. Let me think about it. [laughs] I was with my friend Logan [Devlin] and he was showing me skate videos of this guy Nolan Johnson and I was blown away. We were in San Francisco on the Cardboard Cat Tour at that time and he was also showing me these Welcome boards at the Deluxe shop. At that time I was only riding shaped boards, the Krooked Zig Zagger ones and Girl had a lot of shaped boards. Then he showed me this company that only makes shaped boards, so I tried to buy one on the internet and then Jason [Celaya] hit me up on Facebook and was like: “It’s cool, I just send you boards.” From then on I started riding his boards for a couple years. He asked me to ride for them a year before that through my friend Ryan Reyes. Ryan told me: “My friend Jason wants to know if you ride for his company.” And I was like: “No.” [laughs] He didn’t tell me anything about it, but then I ended up riding for his company a year later.

Jesse & Chris

Long story short, you quit Welcome. You wanna talk about the reasons?

Nolan was quitting and it was just getting kinda weird over there. It just didn’t feel right after Nolan quit. Logan Lara had quit, and then Logan Devlin and Kody Karnahan quit and me and Jesse were joking about quitting and starting a company called Frog. At the same time Alex [Olson] asked me if I wanna ride for his company 917. I was riding for 917 for about a month and then they were like: “We can’t do it right now”. They had some business problems for a little while. Then we thought about what if we were starting that company we were joking about and we hit up our friend Pat [Gallaher] and then the Frog was born.

What’s the idea behind the name?

I kinda liked the name Frog before that. I think I was drawing frogs at that time. Then Welcome was looking crazy and all our friends quit. We were just not into it anymore and thought: “What about Frooog?” [laughs] We were making jokes and looking at pictures of frogs and how funny it would be if we would make a bunch of crazy shit.

I guess you’re the art director of Frog and you do all the drawings.

Right now Jesse is doing some drawings and I had my friend Pat do some drawings too. Everybody on the team does some little drawings in the whole scheme of things.

How did you actually start after you decided to do your own company?

I just drew a logo. It was the first logo I ever drew and I drew it first try and I still use that one. I just asked a bunch of friends where they get stuff made and then I started really small. The first time I made shirts, I only made 35. The next time I made more and then more and more and more. I keep making more, but I still make a small amount of stuff, so it’s manageable. Cause I do all the shipping and stuff and all the graphics. I mean it’s not super hard to run a company, but sometimes there can be a lot of shit. How do you feel running your company?

I guess I started at the same situation. One day you stick with a name, you start with some graphics, they turn into production files, and that turns into finding a place to produce boards. Then you have to pay a couple of thousand dollars for some boards. So you produce 500 boards, sell those, and have the money to produce another 500 plus another 250. You organically grow and keep the money in the company. You add shirts and so on. But how’s your company going? Do you want to do it as a real job or is it just a side thing?

I really don’t know. That’s one of the reasons why we quit Welcome, too, cause the guy Jason wanted it to be the largest skate brand, what is cool, but we liked it just to be a group of friends and he wanted it to be the biggest skateboard company in the world. He was selling so many boards at the time too. We kinda just didn’t care, I don’t really know, we just wanted to do our own thing. I think sometimes when something gets too big, it loses its special quality. I’m not really sure what the goals are. [laughs] We just wanna keep doing it and making stupid stuff. That’s important to us, to make stupid stuff or even stuff that doesn’t sell or look super cool.