Paul Everest: To Hell And Back

Unit founder, Paul Everest, speaks for the first time about the collapse of the iconic Australian action sports brand that he built from the ground up, then watched fall and rise again…

Paul Everest was the designer of freestyle motocross magazine, Freerider MX, and I was the Editor when he first showed me the logo for a new action sports brand he was getting ready to launch. That was back around 2002. I thought at the time, ‘Unit, interesting name for a clothing brand’, but I’d experienced working with ‘Evo’, as I called him, enough to know he had a wild imagination and was gifted with design, and that anything he set his mind to, he’d achieve. What I didn’t realise at the time is just how successful the brand Unit would become.

Four years later after ending my role at Freerider and travelling around Europe for 18 months, I returned to catch up with Evo at the Unit HQ and found myself gobsmacked at the size of the warehouse and stock he and his brother, Ian, were moving. The brand had gone from selling a bunch of tees to a multi-million dollar company during this time. Evo was riding a huge wave of success, and it didn’t look like it was going to stop anytime soon. 

Flash forward to 2012 and I found myself working for Unit as their Athlete/Communications Manager – a role that lasted 18 months and ended the day a large crew of men in black suits walked through the door and told us the company was in receivership. It was a heavy time, but not for Evo, who was fully burnt out and on the edge of a breakdown. For him, the day was actually a blessing in disguise. Eight months later, I gave him a call to chat about what the hell happened, and how he’s coping with life now he’s not at the helm of the brand he created from nothing.  

Grant: Paul, wow… The Unit ride is well and truly over for you… WTF happened?
Paul: The best way to explain creating and building a brand is to think of it as a merry-go-round, where at the beginning you’re trying really hard to get it moving and it’s got heavy inertia and you’re on the verge of giving up all the time. Then, one day, you notice it’s actually moving, and next minute it starts accelerating which is really exhilarating. Total strangers in the street are wearing the logo you scrawled in your maths book in high school, even tattooing it on themselves and emblazoning it on everything they own with pride. Why? Because you have created an icon that represents something beyond the mediocrity and boredom of daily life. An aspirational, ethereal belonging that hasn’t been expressed before. However, the merry-go-round has a dark side … it can, on rare occasions, spin so fast that you lose a sense of where the horizon is and where it was you got on. Suddenly it dawns on you that you CAN’T GET OFF.  It’s spinning so incredibly fast that jumping off would kill you instantly. You just hold on tight and do what you can to keep yourself from throwing up and blacking out. The ride had enormous highs and massive lows. I got to experience all types of things along the way and I’m so grateful for the journey. Imagine being in your early twenties, barely being able to afford a sandwich at lunch and then overnight you notice you have millions in your bank account. I went out and bought houses, boats and sports cars – it was a totally surreal moment, an absolute dream come true, it’s really beyond words. Huge parties came next, with helicopters, girls, houseboats, and everything else you can imagine. If I ever misplaced something I just bought a new one. I think I own five of every basic household item now (laughs). Winning the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year award and being in BRW magazine was surreal. Open up a magazine and your photo is next to Hugh Jackman’s and Casey Stoner’s on Australia’s Young Rich list. I need to point out that I worked my ass off, though – it was no accident or lucky break… I was doing hundred-hour weeks and I remember bleeding from my brain all over my keyboard one night. Along the way, plenty of other bad shit happened. The Unit warehouse would get ram raided several times a year. We were constantly dealing with counterfeiters ripping off the designs all over the country. We had random death threats and thousands of haters that didn’t like witnessing the success of Unit. At one stage, I had a near-death experience where I was rushed off in an ambulance and was brought back to life in hospital after a wild Unit christmas party. I just lost my sense of reality. I couldn’t get off that merry-go-round until it basically threw me off – it spun so fast it broke off its own axis (laughs).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quzpjmeLVxM

During my time working at Unit over those last 18 months, I could see you’d lost the drive you once had. When was the point you just put your hands up and said, ‘I just can’t do this anymore’?
Great question. It wasn’t long before Unit went down. I remember pulling into the car park at work thinking to myself, I just can’t do this anymore. I just can’t f#%king do this. I didn’t want to get out of the car. I sat there looking blankly through the windshield for an hour because I didn’t want to walk into the office. I had been severely burnt out. I was designing the bulk of the products and advertising for the front-end of the business. There is so much pressure to deal with everyday in running a big business with two offices on two different continents (Australia and the USA). I did have some great people around me, who were excellent and are still close friends of mine to this day, and like all businesses we had our fair share of toxic people, although I didn’t know it at the time, and it all just became too much to manage. Around this point, something changed within me and I started feeling a gravity pulling me towards art. It became my saviour because I could turn the negativity and pressure I was experiencing into powerful creativity. I started making sculptures and paintings that helped me remember that life was actually a ‘real’ thing. That’s also why I built my mirrored studio. Looking back, I guess I was attempting to build myself into a parallel reality – kind of like building a spaceship or something (laughs). One of the paintings I made after I nearly died was a surrealist representation of the roof of the ambulance – it was the last thing that I remember seeing as I was passing away. I called it ‘Last Goodbye’.

^ Last Goodbye – 40 inches x 60 inches: “In late 2010, I almost died in an Ambulance. As I was laying there looking up at the roof of the ambulance, and I remember thinking, ‘This is the thing I’ll ever see’. Luckily I survived (just) and I decided to paint what I remember seeing.”

Why did Unit collapse in the end?
We just had the business too highly geared so when we did have issues like the Australian economy having its worst downturn in history (remember Billabong went broke), and a very large US customer going under, a domino effect began that we just couldn’t recover from. Unit was also arguably becoming everything I didn’t want it to be – a big business with rules, procedures and corporate protocols. At that scale, with 100+ staff, it’s very difficult to maintain the personality of the brand – being defiant of authority and being against the general subordinatory nature of the mass population.

It must have been hard trying to put on a brave face for the staff during this time.
I actually never thought we were going to lose it. Even though my heart wasn’t in it anymore, I didn’t think it was going to come to that. It just happened so quickly. The business relied on me heavily to take care of design and marketing, which I really enjoyed, but because I was so burnt out I didn’t have the time and energy to delve into the back-end of the business to the extent I should have, which is one of my regrets. I was also managing a growing family with three kids under five, so Unit quickly became number two on my priority list.

Looking back now, how do you feel about what you achieved?
I’m astonished at what we did with the brand, actually, now that I look back. We showed everyday people like us that you can achieve anything you set your mind to. Building a global action sports brand from a garage in less than eight years with no capital or experience doesn’t happen everyday. ‘From Nowhere With Nothing’ is one of the phrases I put on our branding at the time to describe this transcendence. It was always important to me that Unit be an inspiration to others. Its actually written in the Unit company charter that I wrote. I know of many brands and businesses that started because Unit proved it was possible. People have personally contacted me via email or approached me at random BBQs over the years to thank us for inspiring them. All you need in this life is a crazy dream backed up by belief and hard mother-f#%king work.

^ “Fort Lytton MX club, Queensland, 2002. First Unit tee I ever made. Riding my RM125. It was Chad Reed’s ex-practice bike. It got stolen a few weeks after this photo was taken.”

What was the key in building the Unit brand so successfully in a short space of time?
I think we created themes and designs that had an addictive spirit and soul that was TRUE to the sports we loved, which was mostly motocross and BMX. We had a Rage Against The Machine attitude. We weren’t a corporation like most of the other brands available. We were real. We had a few offers to buy us out at different times but we turned them all down because we knew the soul of Unit would vanish the minute a cheque was pushed across the table. We remained raw and uncensored, still said things we got in trouble for right up to the very end. And that’s what people appreciated and respected about Unit. They didn’t want to be thought of as a consumer market – they wanted to be a part of a community of people that loved these sports and way of life. We did things other businesses would have never done, especially helping our athletes push the barriers. Dane Searls (RIP) with his World’s Biggest Dirt Jumps, Jed Mildon and his Triple Backflip, things that didn’t make money but helped push the sport forward. This is the thing I’m most proud of when I look back at Unit’s journey. I look at riders like Jed Mildon, Wheelz, Andreu Lacondeguy, Kyle Baldock, Tom Pages, and what they are achieving, and I feel that’s where the sport is really most alive right now.

http://youtu.be/8aSpdpOdPeg

If you could wind the clock back six years, what would you change?
I would say keeping the business smaller. We just got too big too quick. I’d never run a business before. I was a rider who loved art and design and along with my brother we just figured it out as we went along. We made some good decisions and we made some bad decisions. I wouldn’t change the past for a second, though. I’m still young and am now free to do what I really want to do with an enormous amount of experience and knowledge behind me.

^ “Garage in Benowa, 2002. No money for signage so I made it myself with a large stencil.”

Once it all collapsed, how did it feel?
A huge shock at first followed by a huge feeling of relief! I just remember feeling like I’d been freed from a jail that I was living in. When I look back, I think subconsciously I’d already moved on so something was going to happen eventually. In life, ‘You can’t look over your shoulder or you’ll run into things’. I only look forwards and always have. So many amazingly good things have happened to me since that terrible day. I’ve got a fresh perspective on life and now believe destiny could actually be real. I’ve got time to think about what I want to do. Motocross was the centre of my universe when I created Unit back in 2002. Art is now the centre of my universe and it’s absolutely limitless. It really has been a spiritually fulfilling period for me. Walking away from Unit is probably the best thing that could have ever happened to me.

^ Mirrored Design Studio – 3 metres x 5 metres: “I noticed that my mind was most creative on an airplane or in a planetarium. I wanted to harness this isolated, extra-dimensional type of environment on a daily basis so I covered every surface of my office in mirrors – the floor, the ceiling, the walls – everything. There is no horizon, just the infinite streaming away in every direction. I built my own ‘design immersion pod’ that sits in the centre – a full reclining chair with aluminium scaffolding holding a screen above my head, surround sound speakers and oxygen tank. The room becomes mostly oxygen after around four hours. This helps with brain computational power and the creative process.”

Looking towards the future, what have you got planned?
First, I want to say that Unit is by no means finished. It has been picked up by a local business and we are all hoping they keep it rolling and hopefully retain some of its original spirit and design flair. I wish them all the best of luck and I will always see Unit as a great chapter in my life. I’m only looking forward now though … about to launch a new brand. Its nothing like Unit – it’s very fashion-forward with art at its core, with a touch of the Rage Against The Machine spirit which people will recognise. The brand is aimed at a completely different audience. I guess it’s what I wanted Unit to be originally, but it ended up having to become more of what the market wanted than what I wanted it to be. So yeah, feel free to join me launching the new brand along with my first solo contemporary art exhibition at the Hinge Gallery, Currumbin, Gold Coast, on Friday, December 12 at 7pm. It will be good to see you there!