Another one of our Skater Collection collaborators is Alex Olson, a Los Angeles-based skateboarder, yoga and surfing enthusiast, and healthy lifestyle adherent. The T-shirts he helped design are as simple, natural, and beautiful as his life in Los Angeles.
Pro skateboarder Alex Olson grew up with his mother and grandmother in Santa Monica, California, until the age of 12 when he moved 18 miles (30 kilometers) west to Malibu to live with his father, Steve Olson—himself a legendary pro skater. He picked up skateboarding because it was a popular pastime among the kids at his new school and soon fell in love. Olson’s pro career lasted from 2007 to 2021, during which time he founded two brands, Bianca Chandon and Call Me 917. Olson lived in New York City throughout the 2010s but moved to Los Angeles a couple of years ago. Now, his life is occupied with meditation—he takes an hour every morning to practice three different forms of meditation—and surfing some of LA’s best waves.
“I was inspired to start skateboarding in 1996 thanks to the Welcome to Hell video from Toy Machine,” says Olson, referring to the company owned by skater and artist Ed Templeton. “Donny Barley’s part had an especially significant impact on me. As I got older, I started watching older videos. When I was 15, I was really impressed by Jason Lee’s style in a video from Mark Gonzales’s Blind Skateboards. No one skated like that when I was growing up—it was so different.”
Olson says that as a shy child growing up with learning disabilities, he was profoundly impacted by skateboarding and other physical activities. (“I liked video games, too, but my mom was against me playing them!” he adds.) When he started skateboarding while living in Malibu, there were no dedicated skate spots; he and his father would take a bus to Santa Monica and skate to the West LA courthouse where all the pros were hanging out.
“It was a fascinating time because skateboarding was transitioning to a new generation from the old, and I was able to watch it happen in real time. I would often tell my father about wanting to become a professional skateboarder, and I got very lucky in that. My father homeschooled me, which gave me more time to skateboard. I don’t think I would be in the place I am today if he hadn’t made that decision. I badly wanted to travel and see the world, and skateboarding was the only way I could do that. Skateboarding is simply about exploration, whether it’s discovering skateboarding through combinations of tricks or developing a curiosity about terrain and architecture by exploring one neighborhood and the next. I wasn’t interested in anything else.”
Olson moved to New York from his childhood stomping grounds in California in 2006, only to return to the West Coast in 2020. His first visit to New York was in 2005, when Olson sent a message to Jason Dill—a pro skater at his peak—on a whim, saying, “Hey, I would love to come to New York.” Dill responded by buying him a plane ticket. Olson moved to New York the following year and ended up staying for about 14 years, making a name for himself in the skating and cultural scenes of the 2010s.
The next turning point in his life came in March 2020, when he visited his family in California to go surfing. He was scheduled to DJ in San Francisco, but COVID-19 broke out while he was on his way to the event. California issued a stay-at-home order, and Olson ended up staying with his grandfather and father in Oceanside to wait out the lockdown. That was when he discovered that he had so many more interests in life.
“All I wanted to do during that time was go surfing, make music, cook vegan food, and meditate,” he says. “I know many people had a hard time during the Covid lockdown, but when I look back, I was able to do all these things that I’d been wanting to do for so long. I didn’t have to work or even think about work, and it was such a nice break.
“I’ve been skateboarding my whole life, so I’m ready for a new chapter,” Olson continues. “I have explored as much as possible within skateboarding, and it’s been exciting, but now there are other things that hold my interest, like surfing. When you’re surfing, you’re part of the natural momentum of Mother Nature’s energy. Your sense of time or reality slows down in that moment. It’s like deep meditation or like when you’re a child and you discover how much fun slides are for the first time. Surfing is about understanding the ocean and being a part of its natural terrain. It’s very hard to explain and can come off as cliché, but that’s how I see it. Surfing, skateboarding, and owning a business have taught me that meditation and yoga are irreplaceable tools that deepen my understanding of how we as humans are and evolve. I’ve become more disciplined with my sleep and eating hours, which has tremendously impacted my life.”
Skateboarding, surfing, meditation, music. In Olson’s eyes, his interests all represent “an open source of creativity without many rules or boundaries.” He has recently discovered a new hobby and is teaching himself to build wooden tables and chairs and make surfboards. At age 36, Alex Olson still has a long, rich life ahead of him.
PROFILE
Alex Olson | Olson was born in California in 1986 and skated professionally from 2007 to 2021. He currently lives in Los Angeles and runs his brands, Bianca Chandon and Call Me 917. He is also a talented DJ, musician, and photographer whose interests include surfing, meditation, and yoga.
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© Alex Olson
