Shop owners are chairs of the board

Alicia Robinson

There are few sports teams that feature a guy with an eight-inch

magenta Mohawk.

But if you can skate, surf or snowboard, Newport Beach

entrepreneur Pat Newett will welcome the craziest hairstyles. Edgy

punk style seems to be par for the course to him.

A few months ago, Newett, an artist and Newport Beach native,

started the skate, surf and snowboarding clothing company Vacant with

his wife, Kim. The fledgling company sponsors a team of surfers and

snowboarders that already has five members and is ready to welcome

more.

“Not many people are really on teams around here, especially for

snowboarding, because we live at the beach,” said 19-year-old Vacant

team member Ian Dow -- the one with the Mohawk.

Dow has been snowboarding since he was given a board at the tender

age of 7, and he’s been tender ever since.

“There’s always a lot of injuries,” he said.

While he’s never broken any bones, Dow said he’s separated and

torn just about everything that can be separated or torn.

The Vacant team’s other snowboarder, 15-year-old Mickey Gardner,

said the snow doesn’t hurt as much as concrete, but he’s broken a

hand and a foot while snowboarding. He was in nine competitions last

year, and he spends as much time practicing as he can.

“It’s hard when you have school, but I try to go every weekend,”

he said.

The team also includes three surfers, and Pat Newett said he’d

like to add skateboarders and get some girls who skate, surf or

snowboard.

A longtime dream, the Newetts’ company and the team are just

getting off the ground. How they have time for it all is the big

question: both work full-time.

Pat Newett is a graphic designer and sign maker for the city of

Newport Beach, and Kim Newett works as a toy sales representative for

Kathleen Milne Co. They also have two daughters, Hayley, 8, and

Amelia, 4.

They run the company from their home on the Balboa Peninsula. Pat

Newett describes Vacant as “more of a do-it-yourself, grass-roots

kind of thing.”

A former art student at San Francisco State, Pat Newett said his

designs reflect a late-1960s, early-1970s influence as well as the

punk music and skateboarding scene he grew up in.

Pat Newett said he had a hard time finding clothes he liked as a

teenager.

“You couldn’t go to the mall and buy a punk rock T-shirt, so we

had to make our own,” he said.

While there’s stiff competition from other skate and surf clothing

companies, particularly from within the area, the Newetts did some

research and thought they’d be able to carve out a niche.

The team is something that sets them apart. While most major board

sports companies sponsor teams that compete, Kim Newett said, few of

the numerous smaller companies in the area do.

“I don’t think it’s been a focus for a lot of the small guys,” she

said. “I think this is working great for us. ... The kids that we’ve

got are so self-motivated and are doing it because they love it.”

For the next year and a half, they expect to work on making their

products and their logo known.

“The exciting part is having people off the street recognize us

and go, ‘Oh, you’re Vacant. I’ve seen that before,’” Kim Newett said.

They just launched a Web site at https://www.vacantindustries.com

and plan to start online sales in a few months. They also will add

snowboarding clothes -- thermal shirts, hats and the like.

While they hope to expand the company and the team, the Newetts

said they don’t want to lose their roots and become corporate.

“We kind of shy away from doing that because we don’t want to give

up control and get people who are just looking at the numbers,” Kim

Newett said.

While Dow said he hopes to turn pro, he and Gardner are just

enjoying being on the Vacant team for now.

“I’m stoked to have the opportunity,” Dow said. “It’s getting

recognized for something I think both of us love to do.”

* ALICIA ROBINSON covers business, politics and the environment.

She can be reached at (949) 764-4330 or by e-mail at

[email protected].