Pat and I approached my partner at Birdhouse, Per Welinder, to see if he was interested in getting our distribution company, Blitz Distribution, involved. Like other skate company execs, Per was concerned that Blitz and its related brands would chase away some of its core customer base if the company moved into the 12-and-under market.

We disagreed. We figured older kids wouldn't care what younger kids were wearing, and we also knew from our own experience as parents that children as young as five or six were, for better or worse, already judging brands based on their cool factor. We were determined to create a cutting-edge skate apparel brand for kids. As long as it stayed authentic to the culture, we believed it could succeed.

Without Blitz's help, we had to start from scratch in regard to design, infrastructure, production, distribution, and marketing. I agreed to use my name to help build the Hawk brand, but wanted to eliminate the "Tony" part in the hope of retaining its longevity.

For start-up money, Steve, Pat, and I dipped into our savings accounts, which we quickly burned through creating samples, attending trade shows, and going into production on a small line of T-shirts and hats. Turns out, apparel is a risky, money-sucking industry, with a long and bumpy road from conception to market. And even if you get that far, profit margins are thin.

But I knew from experience that there was a void in the market. I could see it every day as I traveled around the country. Kids as young as five were starting to skate, and taking it seriously.

Short on cash, we put up our houses as collateral to get a small-business loan—no small task. Pat came up with the prospectus and financial plan, Steve wrote the mission statement, and I was the pitchman. The bank bit.

The year Hawk Clothing was born, 1998, Americans spent $5 billion on surf, skateboard, and snowboard gear and apparel. By 2008, that figure had more than doubled to $11 billion. We were at the right place at the right time but had no idea how long it would take to make any money at it.

Pat and our first employee, Jared Prindle, worked out of Pat's house for about a year until the boxes of T-shirts in her garage began to spill into her driveway. Jared, who's still with me, is a renaissance man. His father was the founder of Prindle Catamarans, so Jared had learned to sew sails at a young age. Pat's college degree included a minor in fashion design, so she could design and sew, too.

Our line initially was limited to T-shirts bearing cartoon graphics: robots, airplanes, and such. We'd buy pre-constructed T-shirts, silk-screen graphics on the front, and replace the labels with our own. Shirts and shorts were limited in styles and made locally in Santa Ana. Not exactly couture.

To help with marketing, we hired a publicist, a former colleague of Pat's from the music business named Sarah Hall, who's also still with me. I was already known in the skate world, obviously, but the general public had little idea who I was. As I've mentioned, two big things happened in 1999 that drew a lot of attention. I landed a 900 at the X Games, and Activision released my new video game, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. Almost overnight, I was doing interviews with magazines and newspapers and television shows that had heretofore dismissed skateboarding as a fad.

All that press obviously helped jump-start Hawk Clothing, but it wasn't the only thing. The video game, aiming at authenticity, embedded several skate brands throughout its virtual world, including the Hawk Clothing logo. That added up to millions of impressions.

As my name began to creep into the mainstream, we decided to try to push Hawk Clothing beyond skate shops. Pat flew to New York for a children's apparel trade show, where they sandwiched our little one-person booth between one company that sold Tweety Bird products and another that featured Snoopy. She spent most of that show explaining to bemused buyers who this "Tony Hawk" guy was. But we got some orders.

We also showed at the Surf Expo in Florida that same year. My other sister, Lenore, had invested in the company by then, so she, Pat, and I squeezed into a hotel room in Orlando for three days. At least now we were showing the line to the right crowd. At the Action Sports Retailer show in San Diego the following year, the buyer from Nordstrom decided to test the line. That was our first major account.

We didn't always play by the rules. The day before one of our first big trade shows, the samples for our cut-and-sew shirts (meaning they had buttons and collars) still hadn't arrived from our supplier. Pat went to a local surf shop, bought a few Quiksilver shirts, changed the buttons, replaced the labels and tags with our own, and silk-screened a small Hawk logo onto it. She told customers that the samples showed only the style of the shirt, and that the actual product would come in different colors. This was, of course, illegal. Years later, Pat told this story to some folks at Quiksilver, which has its own pirate origins. They laughed.

When we finally got big enough to rent a warehouse, we looked to San Clemente, which was no more than a 30-minute drive for any of us. Also, the surf-skate industry is centered in Southern California, so we had ready access to good vendors and influential retailers. We spent those first few years printing and embroidering T-shirts, fleece, and hats using local manufacturers. It was a ton of work, and for the most part a family affair. Pat ran the business, and her husband, Alan, a professional bass player, ran the day-to-day office operations and even shipped boxes when he wasn't on the road. Steve put together the catalogs and helped hire a sales team. Lenore and her husband, Dick, erected and dressed up the trade show booths. When we needed models, we used our kids.

Before long we hired a designer, Skot Werner-Longo, and a production manager, Carol Ianelli, both of whom taught us much and were crucial to the company's early growth. We eventually began to notice that our "Accounts Receivable" drawer had almost as many files in it as our "Bills Payable" drawer. But we were still a long way from pulling out any kind of profit. The problem was cash flow. Any growing company needs more cash to produce more goods, so profits go right back into the machine. As sales increase, the cycle accelerates. Also, most of our vendors were demanding payment upon delivery, while our customers (often small skate and surf shops), sometimes needed up to 90 days to pay.

It's a common business dilemma, and we considered our options. Should we ask our bank for a larger credit line? Bring in more investors? License the brand to a larger company with adequate cash flow?

We knew we had to do something, because the car was gaining speed and we were still learning how to drive. In addition to Nordstrom, the brand had been picked up by such chains as Pacific Sunwear, Tilly's, and Bob's Stores. We also cut a deal to sell outdated inventory at discounts to Marshalls and T.J.Maxx.

By now, we had five full-time employees, and our little warehouse was bustling. We were designing for future seasons, creating catalogs, web sites, and marketing plans, producing goods on- and offshore, taking orders, packing and shipping boxes, and building a sales team.

In 1999, Pat consulted with an attorney, Ladd Lonnquist, who specialized in the apparel business. After reviewing our books, Ladd said the brand appeared to be a solid idea with a good start and much potential for long-term success. But it would take us 10 or 15 years to see any kind of real profits, so he suggested we start looking into licensing the brand to a larger, existing apparel company.

It didn't take us long to find some people who were interested, but none of them seemed to really understand our mission, which was to build a mainstream audience outside of skateboarding while staying true to the culture on which the business was built. Because of his years at Surfer magazine, Steve knew some top executives at Quiksilver, the big dog of the surf industry, which had grown into a $500 million company using essentially the same mission as we were. Quik was (and still is) a respected brand among serious surfers, while also managing to sell its hoodies and T-shirts and boardshorts to kids in Kansas who've never dipped a toe in the ocean.

In late 1999, Steve and Pat drove to Quik's headquarters in Huntington Beach to meet with Danny Kwock, the company's head of special projects. (We'd all met with Bob McKnight, the company's CEO, a year or two earlier, but that was mostly to get advice on trademark protection and other start-up issues.) As soon as they sat down, Danny made it clear that he was meeting us only out of courtesy and that Quik had no intention of pursuing a merger. He'd already met with McKnight, and they'd agreed that he should say thanks but no thanks. But as Pat and Steve told the story of Hawk Clothing's swift rise, and of the success the brand was having in Middle America, it was like a switch flicked on in Danny's head.

Here's how Danny told the story 10 years later: "The only reason I even met with them was because Steve was a bro and I had to do the polite thing. So I walked into the room thinking, 'How am I going to tell these guys thanks but no thanks without hurting their feelings?' But as they gave their pitch, it brought me back to the early days at Quik, when we also had a little warehouse with the single roll-up door. And I was pleasantly surprised by Hawk Clothing's designs—they had the sizing down, the graphics, the colors. They were honed in to the under-12 market.

"Quik had struggled with that age group. To get into that market, we'd have had to start a new brand, and that's a huge struggle. And here was one already dialed in, attached to a person with deep roots in skateboarding. It stayed true to the sport's core values but also had potential to scale. And I realized this was one of those rare feel-good business opportunities, where you can partner with people you respect and who have the same passion and vision.

"So I went back to Bob and said, 'My intuition tells me we should do this deal. I think this could blow up.' Bob thought I was spun, and the marketing guys were all, 'What are you tripping on?' But, you know, the easy answer is always no. So we did it, and it worked. It ended up being a big feather in my cap personally at Quik."

Within six months, we were signing papers, and Quiksilver became the owner of Hawk Clothing. We initially hoped to license the brand, not sell it. But Quik was only interested in buying the whole company, so we cut a deal that included a purchase price and future royalties. Although the deal has worked out well in the long run, and Quiksilver has been fair, if we had it to do over again, we wouldn't have allowed a larger company to take ownership of the brand, which in this case included the "Tony Hawk" trademark for apparel. And that's one piece of advice I give all the time: Never sell full ownership of your name to anyone for any reason, no matter what the price.

Quik also signed a separate endorsement deal with me, paying me to wear their Quiksilver-branded clothes and appear in their ads. (I'd approached Quik in the 1980s about a sponsorship, but they turned me down; skating wasn't big enough at the time, I guess.) I was stoked to join Quik's team of athletes: It's a solid company run by people who know and care about the surf, skate, and snowboard cultures. Ten years later, as I write this book, they're still my clothing sponsor.

The transition to Quik was amazingly seamless; we lived in the same world. The company also had an army of talented designers with years of experience creating action sports-inspired apparel that's both fashionable and functional. They kept up with trends, and went to great efforts to keep their brands authentic and edgy. Although their origins were rooted in surfing, they'd been making clothes for skaters and snowboarders for years. It was an easy fit.

Quiksilver distributed Hawk Clothing to specialty retailers and department stores throughout the United States, and also expanded into Europe. As a result, the brand grew steadily over the next five years.

In 2005, the Kohl's department store chain cut a deal with Quik-silver to offer a full line of adult- and kid-size Hawk apparel exclusively through its massive chain of stores. This was a huge shift, because it meant we'd be selling the clothes through a single mainstream outlet that was a far cry from neighborhood skate shops. But after attending many meetings with Quik VPs and the Kohl's team, I realized we could extend action-sport fashion to an audience who hadn't had access to it before, at better prices, and without sacrificing quality. Kohl's had lined up similar partnerships with such high-end designers as Vera Wang and Ralph Lauren. We understood the skating subculture, and Kohl's understood price points and how to market to a broader audience.

When Kohl's began to design the first season's line, along with the marketing materials to support it, I grew worried when I saw that they wanted to use my full name, Tony Hawk, instead of just Hawk. They planned to plaster my name across every shirt, every pair of pants, and every hoodie. Suddenly, I was not involved in the approval process when it came to marketing my name, which Kohl's also planned to use in TV spots and newspaper ads. That scared me. A lot.

I trusted Quiksilver to have their eyes on all of the ads and in-store marketing materials, and initially, I was relieved. The first TV spot Kohl's created was actually pretty cool. It showed a guy's hand as he steered a miniature fingerboard across racks and stacks of Hawk clothes. I played a bit part as a stock boy who stops to watch the action. I was in the spot for about two seconds.

But then the first print ads appeared. They featured models holding skateboards, and it was clear to me simply from the way the models gripped the boards that they weren't real skaters. I cringed. It's the kind of nuance that goes unnoticed by the average non-skating consumer, but any skater would immediately spot the difference and call bullshit on it all. Even though they had legal right to do whatever they wanted with my name at that point, I had to chime in. We needed to emphasize that the marketing materials were just as important as the clothing design when it came to skate culture.

We reached out to Quiksilver and found out they were also concerned. Fortunately, the Kohl's marketing people were receptive to our input. A Quik rep and someone from my team began to attend the ad photo shoots, and we provided used Birdhouse skateboards to help control authenticity. My production company, 900 Films, did a photo shoot for print ads they placed in skate mags, and in the end I was happy to see the main Hawk Clothing logo (a stylized bird skull), on a T-shirt worn by a real skater in a serious action shot.

Since then, my relationship with Kohl's has been great, and they've expanded into such categories as hats, belts, underwear, pajamas, socks, and backpacks. Eventually my company, Tony Hawk Inc., penned separate licensing deals with Kohl's for a full line of footwear and wristwatches. In those deals, I didn't sell the brand, just gave them the license to sell stuff with my name on it.

I also appreciate that Kohl's and Quiksilver have supported many of my other outside initiatives, including sponsoring my HuckJam and Birdhouse Tours. And they've been generous sponsors at fundraisers for my charity, the Tony Hawk Foundation, which builds skateparks in low-income communities.

I suppose the big lesson here is that if you're looking to forge an ongoing business partnership with a bigger company, and you have a choice between suitors, go with the one that you trust will continue to respect your expertise, and who will make adjustments based on your suggestions. In that regard, we scored with Quiksilver, and then later with Kohl's.