Lost Art has seen a huge rise in popularity in recent years
Dave Mackey was unemployed when he decided to start Lost Art(Image: Andrew Teebay Liverpool Echo)
Whether you’re shopping in your local supermarket or enjoying a drink or two in a city centre pub, the chances are that you have likely come across someone with a t-shirt emblazoned with the Lost Art motif across the chest. From humble beginnings, the skate shop has experienced a meteoric rise since Southport-born dad Dave Mackey first conceived of the idea in 1999.
As tourists and locals alike flock to the city centre shop everyday to buy graphic t-shirts, hoodies and all manor of skateboarding paraphernalia, Dave said that he originally didn’t have grand aspirations for what he wanted the business to become. But, in recent years, his shop has received international recognition with collaborations with some of the biggest names in sportswear and skateboarding, with the likes of Nike and New Balance both putting their trust in Lost Art.
While the brand is now on a steep upwards trajectory, the seeds for its success were sown in a 1970s skate park in Southport. Dave Mackey told the ECHO: “I think when I was 11, I was going to the fair with my sister and cousin and I remember just seeing people skating in that park and I told them I didn’t want to go. [I said] ‘I’m going to stay here and watch these skaters’. So they went off and I spent pretty much the rest of the day there, watching these guys skate. That was it then, my love affair with it kind of started, it was something I’d never seen. This was before Back to the Future had come in 1985. When that came out, obviously skateboarding became huge, it was the toy of choice for Christmas, everyone seemed to be skating at that point in time.”
Lost Art is currently located on Brick Street in the Baltic Triangle (Image: Andrew Teebay Liverpool Echo)
Like thousands of other teenagers who indulged in the subculture during its heyday in the 1980s, Dave’s love affair with skateboarding continued to blossom into adulthood. But, finding himself unemployed a couple of decades after first falling in love with skating, he was at a crossroads. It had initially been a toss up between working in his local supermarket or finding a factory job, but it was the rigmarole of making a weekly trip from Southport to Manchester that set the ball rolling on him opening his own business. He said: “I mean it wasn’t my aspirational wish to set up my own businesses or own my own shop. But having been made unemployed, with very few prospects other than maybe going back to working in the supermarket or a factory, it seemed like the door had opened when there was no skate shop in [Liverpool]. We were having to travel to Manchester for boards, shoes, clothing etc.”
While funds had been an issue due to his current employment status, Lost Art was only able to get off the ground thanks to a Prince’s Trust loan. He said: “I was like ‘I’m unemployed, I have an opportunity to apply for a Prince’s Trust loan and maybe I could open a skate shop that would potentially just service myself and my friends with products that we had to go to Manchester for.’ It wasn’t like I had this aspirational vision to open a Lost Art empire.”
Lost Art is currently located on Brick Street in the Baltic Triangle (Image: Andrew Teebay Liverpool Echo)
After securing a loan, he finally landed on where to open his first premises, in the now closed Quiggins centre in the city centre. He added: “In 1999, having secured a loan from the Prince’s Trust, I opened Lost Art in the Quiggins Centre. I was able to open a small skate shop within this community of other like-minded, small independent businesses of all walks of life and all shapes and forms. There was a cafe in there, it was definitely a community hub for independents and music, than I would say exists in Liverpool anymore.”
Since the closing of Quiggins in the mid-2000s, Lost Art has been reincarnated several times over, with a store on Bold Street, then again above the Merchant pub on Slater Street, and since 2023, they can be found on Brick Street tucked away in the Baltic Triangle.
For Dave, he has always seen the shop as more than merely a means of earning a living. Down the years, Lost Art, in its various different guises, has become a beacon for Liverpool’s ever-growing skate community, with it being just as much a place for people to socialise as it is a retail space. He said: “The community is everything to us, we’ve seen it from very humble beginnings. People come up to me, who say ‘oh I was at the Liverpool game and I saw so many Lost Art t-shirts’. For me, I didn’t even set out with the goal to go ‘oh if only we could sell to the football crowd or if only we could sell to the music crowd’ we never set out with those goals, it just organically happened. People have just seen something that they like in Lost Art and they wanted to support and represent it.”
However, Dave has always been eager not to stigmatise those that aren’t part of the skate scene. He said: “We try to make it inviting to everyone, you can come in and have a coffee, people can come and see gigs, or you can come and have a drink after work.”
Dave Mackey (middle) with Liverpool-born skateboarders and close friends Geoff Rowley (left) and Charlie Birch(Image: Supplied)
He added: “You can walk in and be like ‘oh I don’t know what any of this is, I shouldn’t be in here’ and that’s always been the mindset, it’s like lets make it as inviting as it can be for everyone. But, for the people that really get it, that understand skate culture, when they come into the store, they’ll instantly love the space. There’s old VHS tapes, there’s magazines, there’s photos on the wall, there’s videos playing on the screen, there’s skateboards everywhere.”
Away from running the business, Dave also raises his two children, Baxter and Fabienne with his partner, Kells and says that “they’re immensely proud” of what he has created with Lost Art. However, he joked that his parents were somewhat confused by his career choice initially. He said: “My mum and dad are still here with me, so I’m blessed. But, I don’t think they’ve ever understood it really, I don’t think skateboarding was a career choice that they thought I should be making. But they’re proud of what I’ve done with my life.”
Dave said that his family are “immensely proud” of what he has created(Image: Andrew Teebay Liverpool Echo)
After starting the business on the back of a Prince’s Trust loan in 1999, it is almost inconceivable to think that Lost Art has climbed to the heights that it has. Recent years have seen them working together with the likes of New Balance and Nike on joint projects to produce footwear and clothing. He said: “Working with big brands has its challenges, but it is definitely a feather in the cap for any store to work with or any brand to work with these larger sportswear brands, it’s definitely a huge accolade and it’s not lost on me just how amazing it is.”
While it is collaborations with New Balance and Nike that catches the attention, Dave says that the big brands don’t get any “preferential treatment”. He said: “At the same time, I attribute the same amount of time and energy to a Nike or New Balance collaboration as I do with any of the artists that we’ve worked with over the years. I think for me and the people around Lost Art, we only ever treat these big brands the same, they don’t get any extra preferential treatment from us.”
Besides working with some of the biggest brands in the world, Dave has always been committed to supporting local creativity and has a long running partnership with universities and colleges in the city. He said: “A long time ago we started working with the university and colleges. They would set tasks at the start of a year for the class to conceptualise ideas for Lost Art or pitch an idea for a brand to us. That kind of relationship really led to a lot of those students that were there at the art college at the time, becoming long-term collaborators with Lost Art.”
After over two and a half decades in business, Dave has his full focus on the future and trying to replicate the success that has held them in such good stead down the years. He said: “We want to do more of what we’ve done previously and update the formula and try and be as true to ourselves as possible and represent Liverpool in the right way.”