Biz Buzz: Landlocked surfer turns passion into business venture

Brian Lopez, a self-described landlocked surfer who grew up far from the ocean, has turned an obsession into a startup skateboard business that's slowly gaining an international clientele.

"Since I was younger, I always had an attraction to surfing," said Lopez, an architect who has combined his design background and love of the waves to become a custom skateboard builder.

He owns Glide Skateboards.

Lopez, who still works part time for a local architecture firm, started the company a little more than a year ago. He works in a sawdust-coated space shared with two artists in a back alley off of West Broad Street downtown.

The handcrafted boards are made from recycled materials and designed with surfboards in mind.

"I've always been infatuated by the form of a surfboard and I always wanted to (capture) its aesthetic," he said.

Each of the boards, which start off as planks of unused flooring, are handmade and take weeks to complete. It's a painstaking process that includes breaking down huge chunks of material and turning them into usable planks that are then combined to make the boards.

Lopez makes about 10 boards a month.

Creating the line of boards "is just a way of keeping me connected to what I love — surfing," Lopez said.

Glide Skateboards sells its boards through retailers and on the Web.

His big break, however, came from Carytown.

The owner of West Coast Kix, a shoe store on West Cary Street, saw Lopez's boards one day and asked the designer to put a couple in the store. Shortly thereafter, a vendor visiting from California saw the boards and contacted Lopez.

Glide Skateboards placed boards in the vendor's showroom near Los Angeles and recently got an order for 21 boards from a retailer in Tokyo. Other orders have come from as far away as Australia.

Craft store closes

The Ten Thousand Villages store along 14th Street in downtown Richmond closed Sunday after a four-month trial.

The store was a temporary location to test to see if the retailer of handmade crafts from underdeveloped countries could operate a second area store, said Karin Taylor, the store's executive director.

Ten Thousand Villages has a location at 3201 W. Cary St. A store has been in Carytown since 1995.

"This was a pop-up store and that was our intention," Taylor said of the 14th Street location. "It was not our intention to establish a second permanent store."

The temporary store performed well, she said. "It was wonderful. We have a great time. Hopefully, we will be back. We will have to wait to see what develops."

This is the second retailer with plans to vacant space along 14th Street.

Home-decor retailer These Four Walls, which opened at 14th and East Cary streets in 2006, announced this month that it was liquidating merchandise at its store. It should close by mid-February.

Dealer moves

Mobility Supercenter has taken over the former Pearson Honda dealership on Midlothian Turnpike.

It moved from its longtime home on German School Road.

Mobility Supercenter, operated by Mobility Center of VA, carries products geared toward people with disabilities, including wheelchair accessible vans, driving aids, scooter lifts, stair lifts and ramps.

The space became vacant last year when Pearson moved its Honda franchise to Hull Street Road at Spring Run Road in western Chesterfield County.

The Honda dealer had operated a store near the former Cloverleaf Mall for more than three decades.

Bike shop to move

Carytown Bicycle Co. is moving. Where is a mystery.

Co-owner Braden Govoni confirmed the shop would be moving from its current space at 3224 W. Cary St. but kept mum on the new location to "build suspense."

He did say the shop was staying in Carytown.

"We just outgrew" the store, Govoni said, who expects to move by early March.

Carytown Bicycle has been in its current space for nearly five years.