Ian Williams founded and owns Deadstock Coffee, the world’s first coffee shop for sneakerheads. Their motto is Coffee Should be Dope. Ian and his crew operate out of a small shop in Old Town Portland, serving drinks to Portland’s creative class and traveling sneakerheads from all over the country. Ian is no small part of the attraction. He is a gregarious and welcoming personality, and visitors to the shop are as drawn to Ian’s vibe as they are to the coffee and the sneaker culture. He is known to many as the unofficial mayor of Old Town; he’d get our vote. What does it mean to make coffee dope? For Ian, it’s about breaking down pretensions and banishing snobines. He serves up extremely tasty, hip brews that anybody and everybody would enjoy. He does so with his particular blend of humor, inclusiveness, and an overcurrent of sneaker culture. If corporate coffee is manufactured culture, stodgy hipness, and fake elitism, Deadstock is real culture, real people, and a warm openness to anyone who walks in the door. It’s dope. It turns out that Ian is also a snowboarder. Growing up outside of Portland, he learned to snowboard as a teenager making trips to Mt Hood, and it quickly became a real passion of his. He would be the first to tell you, he didn’t see a lot of other black snowboarders or skiers in the lift line. But Ian’s the type of personality not to be dissuaded by the lack of diversity in skiing and snowboarding. Instead, he has become something of an evangelist for snowboarding in his community. I first met Ian in 2019. I was drawn to Ian and Deadstock Coffee immediately, and I recognized our shared perspective: Deadstock’s light-hearted subversion of corporate coffee culture and TREW’s own mission to soften the edges around backcountry skiing and snowboarding. After a few years of spitballing ideas and each of our businesses surviving a couple interesting years, we’re stoked to finally start collaborating with Deadstock and to bring a taste of his brew to our community and, hopefully, make our world more dope. To us, making the backcountry more dope means showing backcountry skiing and snowboarding in a new light to a whole new community of people. Just as Ian is serving up fancy lattes to a bunch of sneakerheads who wouldn’t be caught dead in a Starbucks, we hope to open up the mountains to new people that never saw themselves as skiers or snowboarders, or backcountry explorers. Enjoy the brew and we’re stoked to show you what’s next... 👀
