episode 049: Dickson Li

To know Dickson Li is to love him. A sales veteran in the skate & snowboard industries, he’s represented a variety of major brands for over a decade: OBEY Clothing, Taikan, Dragon, thirtytwo, and more. He’s also co-founder of popular dumpling brand Dicky’s Dumps, something he launched a few years ago with his life partner Pearl Lam. He grew up on the Kowloon side of Hong Kong, until he was eight. His parents did well for themselves—his dad was higher up in the insurance division of HSBC, his mom worked at a shipping company. In 1990, they decided to move to Canada in order to give their sons the best education, and Dickson spent the first two years here in ESL school. As he assimilated into North American life and culture, he discovered roller hockey and then skateboarding, after a group of older boys noticed him with a board one day and offered to teach him to skate. When he found snowboarding, his career took off. A work placement as a tech at Sportchek and volunteering for events on the local mountains allowed him to meet and make friends in the industry, landing himself jobs small and big at The Boardroom, Endeavour, and finally at NLA, where he’s been for the past 12 years. In this conversation, we go into his life as a kid in Hong Kong; what it was like adjusting to a foreign culture in the 90s; his engaging story of how he became part of the skate & snow worlds; seeing people of colour in the industry and what meant it to him; his passions for cooking and continually sharing & supporting Chinese culture; a dive into our shared love for space, aliens, astral projection & other unexplainable phenomena; what he’d say to his friends & homies that gave him a chance along the way; and more.