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From the vaults: Riding the local craze



Sydney entrepreneur Leo Kalokerinos has launched his professional career on a skateboard so to speak

Kalokerinos fulfilled a lifelong ambition by studying at university and graduating into a profession by day while he ran the country’s first skateboard factory on the side.

Now, at 41 a junior member of his profession, he has the satisfaction of seeing the business which he started 12 years ago ride high on the nation’s biggest kids craze since the hula hoop and emerge as probably the major supplier of the Sydney market, the biggest in the country.

At a time when there isn’t a hilly suburban street without its quota of wheeling and circling dry-land surfers and where even major arterial roads are atracting kamikaze skateboarders – the Kalokerinos-made Surfa Sams are being produced at a rate of more than 1,000 boards a week. And his distributor, Ray Fleming Pty Ltd says it has a back order list of 8,000 it can’t supply.

Originally published in The Australian Financial Review – 23rd September 1975

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