Avril Lavigne Helps the Sk8r Bois (and Girls) of Palisades Skate Shop With Wildfire Recovery Merch Launch | Exclusive

When Erica Simpson returned to her Paliskates skate shop four months after it was destroyed by the Palisades wildfires, little progress had been made in clearing her lot.

Caution tape warning of asbestos lined the perimeter of the building; a sign declaring the property had passed its hazardous materials removal was perched outside. The rest of the building looked similar to what Simpson had seen just one day after the fires ravaged her neighborhood in January. 

Art from her former skaters still survived on the property – Charlie Edmiston’s cartoon-like back alley mural and Garrett Wasserman’s brick portrait brought life to the storefront’s tattered remains. Even before the fires left Paliskates a shell of itself, its exterior made it stand out alongside the high-end shopping destinations of Rick Caruso’s still-standing Palisades Village.

Wedged in between a luxury fragrance shop and Mauricio Umansky’s real estate brokerage, Paliskates never quite fit in. Caruso’s $200 million shopping and dining center opened in 2018, surrounding Simpson’s neighborhood skate shop she founded nearly 20 years earlier in 1999. Paliskates stood as the longest-running woman-owned skate shop in the United States.

Palisades Village remained intact after the January wildfires thanks largely to private firefighting crews hired by Caruso, who protected his properties. Paliskates burned.

Simpson thought her 25-year-old skate and surf shop survived the January Palisades fire when she was watching the local news Jan. 7, but it wasn’t until her teenage skate team sent her a picture of the remains in the blaze’s aftermath that she learned it was gone. 

“We came up here as soon as we found out. We were told we were safe, and Wednesday morning, all of a sudden, we weren’t,” Simpson told TheWrap. “We didn’t believe it.”

While all of the other buildings on her block remained intact, protected by those private crews, Simpson’s haven for teenage skaters did not. 

Just a few weeks after the dust settled on Paliskates, Simpson was approached by a Grammys producer asking to highlight her business on national television with an ad spot. She brought in her skate team along with teams from across Southern California to participate in the commercial, which drove sales to her new online storefront.

“That was right at the beginning, too, when we shot it, so it was a good event. It was positive for them,” Simpson said of the teen skater clientele, many of whom had lost their own homes in the fire. “Then they told me right before that they had a special guest coming.”

Avril Lavigne — the ultimate Y2K skater girl and Grammy-winning “Sk8r Boi” singer — made a cameo for the commercial as the brand’s “new model,” calling on skaters far and wide “to support this amazing small business and the skater boys and skater girls.”

Simpson told TheWrap that even her Gen Z skaters — “especially the girls” — were over the moon to work with Lavigne. “They said, ‘We know her. She’s OG. She’s cool,’” the owner joked.  

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After the commercial aired during the Feb. 2 Grammys telecast to over 15 million viewers, Simpson said orders to the Paliskates site increased five times over in one night. And that wasn’t the last of Lavigne: The singer approached Simpson after the commercial shoot wanting to launch a sweatshirt line with the Palisades skate shop. That clothing line dropped Tuesday.

“When I left that shoot, I was immediately inspired to continue the relationship with Paliskates,” Lavigne said in a statement to TheWrap. “The recovery from the fires is going to take a long time and take all of us coming together to continue to help. This merch collab is just a small way I can help Paliskates, a place that does so much for the community.”

The pop-punk songstress added she was inspired by Simpson’s story as a female-founder and wanted to support her mission. 

“These shops are run by bad asses who have built something cool for their community. I’m sure when Erica first started, there were a lot of people telling her no, or skateboarding is for the boys, but she didn’t listen and instead she built a 25-year-old staple of the community,” Lavigne continued. “Her perseverance and how she had this dream and accomplished it – I loved that she felt connected to ‘Sk8er Boi’ which came out only three years after she opened.”

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The exclusive Lavigne merch dropped Tuesday, featuring a custom-designed sweatshirt that blends her punk-rock aesthetic with Paliskates’ gritty, skate-forward roots. Designed in collaboration with local artists and screen printed in Los Angeles, the sweatshirt is “a symbol of resilience, community and the culture that Paliskates has nurtured for over a decade,” according to a press release announcing the line. 

As Simpson looks down the road towards rebuilding, she said she still doesn’t know if she will be able to come back to her shop on Swarthmore Avenue in the Palisades, but she wants more than anything to keep her community of skaters thriving.  

“I’ve had kids who have very messed up parents – many of them come in and tell me, ‘[Paliskates] was my home. You’re like my mom,’” she said. “I never meant for that to happen.”

She is grateful that founding the skate shop has also given her the “gift of being a cool mom or cool aunt.” Simpson noted that the road to wildfire recovery for her teenage skaters will also be long.

“It’s crazy to see the changes in the kids,” she said. One of her skaters has stopped communicating with the group altogether, while other kids, she said, are closed off and depressed but not admitting it. Now dispersed across Los Angeles without a primary home and or even their Paliskates home-away-from-home, Simpson said the teens are shutting down. 

“I grew up spending a lot of time at the Napanee skate park. It was where I got to hang out with my friends and find out about all the cool music. I would definitely call it a second home, so I know how important a place like Paliskates can be for a community,” Lavigne said. “For the Palisades to lose an institution like Paliskates would be detrimental to the future of skateboarding.”

“People in the neighborhood are like, ‘You have to go back. You have to go back right there, so that they can see you still survive,’” Simpson said. “Right now the goal is to come back to the Palisades for the community. I don’t know yet if I want to be on the street or not.”

Simpson expressed that it never really occurred to her how much power billionaires in the Palisades had until her own business was in shambles while Caruso’s stood strong, but the female founder said she will remain resilient.

“I’m a survivor. I’m a fighter,” she said. “When something’s not right, I will stand up for things.”

The Avril Lavigne-line sweatshirts are now available exclusively at paliskates.net/avril/. Fans can also donate directly to the shop’s rebuilding efforts via paliskates.net/donate. 

The post Avril Lavigne Helps the Sk8r Bois (and Girls) of Palisades Skate Shop With Wildfire Recovery Merch Launch | Exclusive appeared first on TheWrap.