Keith Hufnagel, the skateboarder who turned his street-style fashion sense into the popular Huf line, died this week at age 46, his company said on Thursday. The cause was brain cancer.
“Keith loved skateboarding and the culture around it. He did things his way and did them for the right reasons. He inspired so many of us across the globe,” said the statement from HUF Worldwide.
Born and raised in New York City, Hufnagel moved to San Francisco in 1992, when he was 18. Ten years later, he opened a store at 812 Sutter St., in the Tenderloin. “I was skating everyday and just needed something that I could focus on outside of skateboarding when I wasn’t pushing around,” he told an interviewer in 2013. “From all my travels I saw something that was missing in SF, like a boutique-type skate shop, and decided to go for it.”
The store sold skateboards, clothing, shoes and accessories. Hufnagel started designing T-shirts, which led to his branded clothing line.
The store closed in 2011, when Huf took its retail operations exclusively online. Three years later, a Los Angeles store marked the line’s return to brick-and-mortar, and it now has eight stores, five of them in Japan.
On his profile on Huf’s website, Hufnagel had listed his “current projects outside of skating” as Huf and “the battle of my life.”
He is survived by wife Mariellen and their children.