Zarosh Eggleston

Out past the wineries and winding roads of Carmel Valley, deep in Cachagua, is a comfort zone for Zarosh Eggleston. His spot provides stark contrast to the dirt roads and oak woodlands of these rural hills, and feels more like it belongs in a hip urban neighborhood. The place consists of a concrete oval, complete with inset vertical ramps and grinding rails.

Almost a decade ago, 31-year-old Eggleston started to build his world – a skatepark for himself and his friends – because there wasn’t anywhere else he liked to skate in Monterey County.

After a stint working in the skateboard industry in San Diego, Eggleston returned home and started his own design business, Platiplus Concave Screenprinting. It’s a workshop that operates out of his Monterey home, where Eggleston screenprints cartoonish, brightly-colored designs, many of which feature his red truck and pet bulldog, Honeybun.

The business came out of a hobby that was motivated by the fact that he didn’t want to do anything else with his time. “I was never into anything else except skateboarding,” Eggleston says.

Eggleston comes from a family of artists. One of his brothers, Rushad, attended the Berklee College of Music on a strings scholarship and is known around the country for his funky approach to the cello. His cousin Forrest is an abstract painter based in Carmel.

The Weekly caught up with Eggleston to talk about how he successfully converted a passion for skateboarding into a career:

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Weekly: How did you get into skateboarding?

Eggleston: Around 1986, the girl who lived across from me in Carmel when I was a little kid gave my brothers and me some really crappy board and we loved that thing. The moment I realized I didn’t have to play baseball and soccer, I just went full into skateboarding. I was obsessed. I even dropped out of high school so I could skate full-time, and I did seriously skate eight hours a day, back then at least.

How did you turn it into a business?

When I was 17, I moved to San Diego to get a job working at a skate factory. I got into screenprinting with Alias Distribution. It was my dream job and felt like it lasted forever, but it was only about two years. In 2003, the whole industry changed and my job [was eliminated]. To lower costs, board logos started being heat-transferred, and no one liked them.

I saw that [Monterey County] needed high-quality skateboards; there are a lot of skaters here. I bought [all the screenprinting supplies] I could fit into my brother’s truck.

Other than skateboards, what do you print?

I’ll print anything. I’ve done the signs for Vinyl Revolution, Mundaka, Lilify and Bright Coffee. In a good month, like this one, I’ll print 300 skateboards. Sunshine Freestyle has been distributing my boards for a while. I wish more went locally. The rest of my market is the United Kingdom, Japan and Sweden, which is on track to become one of the biggest countries for skateboarding in the world.

What makes a good skateboard?

Standard boards are made in China and no one has a base for comparison. Everyone is riding around on these boards that break in two weeks. The best wood is hard rock maple. It comes from Wisconsin and is manufactured in Southern California.

Why did you build a skate park at your Cachagua home?

There was a lack of places to skate around here, so I built a park out on some family land. We started it in 2007 and spent about five years building it.

Besides your place, where do you like to skate locally?

The local high schools are really good around here. Monterey High has a ton of stairs and great rails. The Monterey Transit Center is also really good; it is an institution in the skating community. I have a photo from a 1988 Transworld magazine of a bunch of people skating it at night.

Where else do you like to skate?

In San Diego, we built a skatepark under the Washington Street bridge and it was my favorite. The city let us build it. Every single day after work, we skated.

What do you love most about skateboarding?

It’s so hard to just balance on the thing, and you can slam so hard for no apparent reason at any given moment. It’s just the greatest buzz.