From the Archives: A Chat with Petrolicious

In August 2016, Neil had the opportunity to have a conversation with Ted Gushue for Petrolicious about his love for cars, his time working in advanced product development at Oakley, and how the culmination of his life's experience gave rise to Discommon and the team's signature automotive-inspired designs.

Every once in a while we get nostalgic for the landmark moments in our little company's growth, and this conversation was a lot of fun to revisit. You can read it HERE.

Highlights:

NF: ...Discommon Goods, the product, is born from my anger toward instant gratification. You can do and create things so quickly now that I vehemently wanted to stay away from flash-in-the-pan-type items. When you look at the type of things we make, I hope they all have the ability to be around for a second generation. They’re pretty basic items, but we take the time and effort to make them “right.”

TG: How much of that philosophy came from your time at Oakley?

NF: All of it. I don’t have a single bad thing to say about the education I received at Oakley.

TG: Also how much people like waiting in line and waiting for permission to do things and an environment like Oakley sounds like it’s not an environment where people are told to just sit around and wait for their turn.

NF: No way. A great learning from my boss, Carlos: things that slow you down are just walls. A wall is not an insurmountable thing. You can go through it, you can knock it over, you can go around it, or if you’re really good, you can jump or figure out a way over it.

TG: You can machine a ladder.

NF: You can do whatever you want. You can build a motorcycle jump, but his point was always, don’t come to me and just say, “You’re stuck”. I have given you all of the tools in the world to get around or over it, so please try and do that, or come to me and tell me what tools you need. The automotive world can be pretty darn slow. They get stuck in a lot of walls. At Discommon, we now say that we’ll simply “aggregate the correct skillsets to solve the problem”.

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