The first Artless® Skate Branding piece examined some significant 2010s(ish) board brands.

Before we get into our next topic, let’s recap look at three key findings:

• The “founder” of a hardgoods brand is more important and more visible than ever.

• A new brand needs to creatively fill a need in skateboarding.

• Brands have a better survival rate if they produce video content frequently.

As discussed in the prior piece, “skater-owned brands” are part of skateboarding’s lineage. Social media and online media—specifically outlets that cover skateboarding-adjacent fashion—have turned some skate brand founders into figureheads.

Before we entered the 2010s, media (including skate media) rarely cared or covered a skateboarding brand’s Creative Director. Sure, if you liked Toy Machine, you were probably aware that Ed Templeton was the person behind the brand’s visual language and, if you paid attention, you were aware of other artists who created the graphics you liked, but the New York Times or fuckin’ Adweek wasn’t profiling The Tempster or Sean Cliver.

The “street fashion” universe initially mainstreamed by Complex, Hypebeast, and Highsobiety changed how broader culture thought of “skateboarding” brands as well. They report on celebrities wearing skate company merch and a microtrend is born. Did you hear about the latest “core” that’s trending? This results in the average consumer having more knowledge, or at least, a larger vocabulary to talk about what they enjoy (online).

It’s all fairly new, but also feels like it’s been over for a minute.

1990: A SHIFT IN PERSPECTIVE

STILLS TAKEN FROM G&S FOOTAGE (1990)

To understand where we are now, let’s go back to a time where the performative male didn’t exist and the words “merch,” “collab,” and “drop” were not colloquial.

Exemplifying how a skate video could communicate more than tricks, three and a half minutes into his part in G&S Footage (1990), Neil Blender offers some blunt criticism about (then) current skateboard graphics:

“A robotic monkey… pretty clever graphic, but it’s not gonna work in 1990. Corey O’Brien, popular back in 1989, a lot of kids bought it. It’s 1990, boys, let’s get rid of the skeletons.”

Blender’s commentary signaled a change in aesthetics. Skulls, dangerous animals, and weapons had become tropes. People wanted something different as much as he did.

That same year, Blender would join Chris Carter and Mike Hill to create Alien Workshop, bringing several G&S crew members—including a young Rob Dyrdek—along. Balancing Blender’s loose drawing style with minimal logo placements, Alien Workshop’s visuals explored anything from extraterrestrials to everyday objects. Released in 1991, Memory Screen, Alien’s debut full-length, became one of the first skate videos to blend avant themes and suburban surrealism with raw skateboarding.

Throughout the 1990s, the “face” of brands became as important as skateboarding’s aesthetics. We’ve collectively over-indexed on the influence of World Industries and its sub-brands, but what Steve Rocco did better than anyone was make the average skater think about who owned the company they bought things from. It sounds ridiculous now.

So just as Rocco started SMA World Industries Rocco Division as “his” brand, he worked closely with Rodney Mullen (who owned part of World Industries) and helped Mark Gonzales, Natas Kaupas, Mike Smith, Mike Ternasky and Danny Way, and later Kareem Campbell launch brands. Heavily influenced by Mullen’s tinkering, World’s board shapes and wood became the gold standard in skateboarding. To the dismay of their sponsors, pros and ams who didn’t ride for World would often be seen riding World boards and Blind Jeans in videos and photographs.

Rocco and World Industries proved that “skateboarding” preferred brands run by skateboarders. It’s a simple idea that annoying people call “proof of concept,” and other pro skaters followed his example and started “small brands. Real, Birdhouse (Projects), The Firm, Planet Earth, the aforementioned Alien Workshop, New Deal, Girl, Chocolate, and more are graduates of Rocco’s school of thought.

The 90s reframed what it means to own a skateboarding company.

The 2010s elevated brand owners to cultural figures larger than skateboarding.

MOVING PICTURES: NEW MEDIUM, NEW MODEL

IMAGE TAKEN FROM THE MAN WHO SOULED THE WORLD(2007) - ART DIRECTION BY MARC MCKEE

World Industries also introduced a new approach to skate videos in the 90s that changed the industry’s pace. Allowing each brand to have its own defined aesthetic, the brands under World Industries consistently produced long and short-form video. What would have been considered a “promo” was now repackaged as a “short video” that people could buy at skateshops for less than a full-length.

Instead of relying solely on print ads and magazine coverage, World, Blind, Plan B, and 101 could promote and document their progression through video projects that outpaced their peers.

But Rocco wasn’t the only company owner with ideas. Santa Cruz’s Strange Notes VHS video magazine launched in 1989 as a continuation of the NHS-published print magazine of the same title. The Strange Notes video mag didn’t last, but the title was used for a few NHS projects in the ‘90s and resurrected in the 2000s as a video series for their affiliated brands and riders.

Eventually, 411VM came into the picture, and print magazines, primarily Thrasher and Transworld Skateboarding, became more active in the medium, with other video magazines to follow, including ON Video. Ever the innovator, World Industries’ print magazine Big Brother also made video magazines, setting up the Jackass franchise.

Check out this chart that tracks the number of videos released from the start of skate videos to the time of publishing.

That chart depicts a massive rise in videos and eventually contributes to the decrease in “big” print media. Fast-forward to the 2010s and video becomes this bullshit called “content.” The term “content” is reductive. A fuckin’ oil painting someone spent months creating is not the same as a 90-second branded content piece about why a “creator” chose to embroider a hamburger on a T-shirt… and make it yellow.

THE PRICE OF EVERYTHING: FREE AIN’T FREE

IMAGE TAKEN FROM THE BERRICS ABOUT PAGE (NO CREDIT AVAILABLE)

As video became more accessible to produce and share in the 2000s, we got… more “content.” Because people could stream and access video in higher quality than before, a skate brand could use its website as a channel or mini video magazine, as Crailtap did for many years. Print magazines saw their URLs as a logical place for content. Starting in 2007, The Berrics became a content factory, producing recurring segments and the popular “Battle at the Berrics” contest series. Soon, episodic content became the norm.

Whether or not you share my distaste for the term “content”, there’s strong evidence that a brand needs to make a lot of it to be successful. Memories are short and repetition is rewarded. However, what’s the cost of “more”? Magazines suffered; that’s apparent, but was there a downside in the democratization of media, specifically video?

As someone who likes to write things that get printed in physical magazines, I’d be inclined to go off about the value of print media, but I’m going to offer a different take here. Sure, the traditional full-length lost its potency, but it wasn’t all bad:

Being able to own, operate, and create outside of the industry’s traditional model has given us a lot of great independent media, brands, videos, and skateboarding.

Technology has made it easier to make things—that’s undeniable. A lot of the old production steps aren’t necessary anymore. For example, most people using the medium know how to edit video and can do it on the fly. There was a time when this required going to an outside studio and sitting with someone technically proficient in editing machines/software and showing them where a trick went.

Video became the most powerful marketing tool in skateboarding, opened up new types of skateboarding and gave people independent of “the industry” a platform. Not all of that video is going to connect with you, but good things have more lanes to find an audience.

Like music, we used to pay for skate videos and those videos were a nice revenue stream for brands. Later you could download pirated copies of videos and now, you rarely buy a hard copy of anything. Videos have become boutique items or souvenirs, but they still cost money to produce.

If video is how we consume skateboarding and video still costs money and time, why is it all free? And why isn’t the expense of making all this “content” factored into why the “industry” is hurting? Kind of weird, right?

Not only has skateboarding collectively decided that almost all video “content” is free, our expectations for free shit have also changed dramatically. We want it fed to us, constantly. Drip, drip, drip.

Here’s an example: Zoo York was founded in 1993. The brand quickly established its presence through expertly designed ads and graphics, but didn’t produce a full-length video until Mixtape in 1997.

Can you imagine waiting that long for a (free) full-length from a brand now? (OK, one not named FA)

Video is still a brand’s currency. Yes, there are renderings, mock-ups, pre-orders, and all kinds of things you can buy, but video has more weight than any object. People who “used to skate” still watch them! A product is a thing. You use it for its intended purpose. A video presents ideas in motion and those ideas can inspire other ideas. I guess that’s a more difficult way of saying a good video can get you “hyped to go skate.”

THE BLUEPRINT: BEEN THERE, DONE THAT, DO IT AGAIN

ALVA TEAM 1998 - PHOTOGRAPH BY STEPHEN GROSS

History is pretty fucking cool because if you care about it, it’s easy to see how and why something happened. If you don’t care about history, you can be mad all the time and have a lot of “hot” takes, which is very cool to some people as well.

Marketing a “crew” is hardly revelatory. It’s skateboarding. Dogtown… the Zephyr Competition Team, right? That’s how it all started, whatever “it” is. The most common crew-volution is a group of friends who skate together, leaving their sponsors to start something new. Skateboarding famously saw this when Rick Howard and Mike Carroll formed Girl and Chocolate Skateboards with Megan Baltimore and Spike Jonze a fallout with World Industries. Of course, the original Girl and Chocolate rosters were proven commodities, but there was a massive risk leaving World and becoming Rocco’s competition.

Far from “shop homies,” but not yet skate household names, in 1994, Subzero released Real Life, a Dan Wolfe full-length that introduced skateboarding to the style and approach of Ricky Oyola, Matt Reason, Sergei Trudnowski and affiliated locals. Why am I omitting Fred Gall and his last part in Real Life? It’s not that Freddy is from New Jersey (Ricky is from NJ as well), it’s because the trio was the core of the crew, that’s all.

Real Life, Eastern Exposure 3: Underachievers, and the Philly Crew’s subsequent productivity opened a lane for Oyola, Trudnowski, and Reason to launch a sub-brand under Zoo York called Illuminati. Existing mostly as stickers for much of 1996, Illuminati weaved magik, conspiracy, and Philadelphia’s brand of skateboarding into cryptic ads and graphics created by Eli Morgan Gesner. Though it became regionally popular, legal issues led to the operation ceasing quickly, with the trio leaving to start the short-lived Silverstar under ECU (East Coast Urethane).

When their stock was high, Sub Zero could have manufactured shop boards instead of making those famous board-sized stickers. Could Eastern Exposure become a brand? There was no precedent for an independent video to do that in 1996. Also, Eastern Exposure was perfect for a video series, but a brand? Eh. Doesn’t sound as cool as Static.

Neither Illuminati nor Silverstar made a video, but they raised the profile of East Coast Skateboarding and being a “crew” was a crucial part of the recipe. There’s something about the “underdog mentality” of a crew that we root for. A brand is selling you something; a crew gives you a feeling without the products… until they make products.

So can an entire crew become a successful brand?

1998 was a biblical year in Video Crew Skateboarding. 5901 Warner Ave. #225 Huntington Beach, California 92649. Baker Bootleg.

In a semi-contentious Jenkem interview from 2012, Jay Strickland spoke about the crew concept (edited for brevity):

Baker started off with my independent videos. Which people still get it twisted and those dudes still try to swipe it under the rug but like, Baker Bootleg and Baker2G weren’t Baker Skateboards videos. (…) Those independent videos were the test; Dustin and Greco had to prove themselves in Baker2G for us to even get the opportunity to start Baker Skateboards. They took the biggest risk, because it was sketchy. Letting me make a video which people thought was probably not gonna work.. but then it worked and it popped off.

Andrew Reynolds spoke to Living Proof about Baker’s origins in 2025:

I think it was just seeing what Rick and Mike (Girl and Chocolate Skateboards) had done and what Jamie did with Zero and Ed Templeton did with Toy Machine. We used to talk about it. How that’s the next step? (...) We were always skating together and we just thought this would be cool if we had our own brand that was just us. Heath Kirchart had started riding for Birdhouse, he came from Foundation.

He brought with him the team manager from Foundation, which was a guy named Jay Strickland. (...) Once he was part of the picture and he was filming us, we just all would talk about it like, “Dude, we should start a brand, that would be sick.” He was just kind of like, “I can help you guys make it happen” and fully just helped us bring it all together. We couldn’t have done it without him. I mean, we were just skating and didn’t know how it all worked. He put together a little line sheet thing of some graphics and ideas just started to form.”

Essentially, Baker Bootleg was an underground mixtape that set up Baker as a brand. This led to the sister brand Deathwish, as well as the Shake Junt griptape empire, which also started as a crew video.

As skateboarding rolled into the 2000s and the living feared Y2K chaos, how video was produced, edited, and shared was going to change. This not only resulted in more branded videos, but also allowed independent videos to offset the commerce. And as much as indie videos became a DIY alternative to high-production brand full-lengths, they also kind of replaced the traditional “sponsor me tape.”

I have a theory.

Brands have people DMing them footage all day (don’t do that). Watching “sponsor me” footage can become a chore, or so I’ve heard. Watching the latest indie video is something you do for entertainment. In our quest to see what’s new, we watch these videos and edits, and not only are they often enjoyable, our minds identify the “standouts.” That context is crucial, especially if you’re a brand looking for new talent, because you get to see Skater X’s level compared to their peers. Then Stand-Out Skater X starts to appear in our Instagram feeds; they have followers, and eventually, this type of skater has a higher probability of getting sponsored because they already are “something.”

VIDEOS BECOME BRANDS: OUT WITH THE OLD, IN WITH THE CREW

Launching a brand is more competitive than it’s ever been, but making a video is dependent on how much time and effort you have to devote to it. Time is money, but there’s a difference between investing your creativity to film skateboarding and maxing out a credit card to have a bunch of board boxes become a new roommate in your apartment. Filming your friends and, possibly, some guest pros, sets a different tone than a promotional video for a brand.

Also, when you watch a skate video, how often do you notice the actual boards, let alone the graphics on the bottom of them?

It’s pretty rare. As a “sales tool,” skate videos don’t showcase the actual products, unless those products are softgoods. Hats, shirts, hoodies, pants, shoes, and accessories are more visible. Softgoods are also more profitable than skateboard decks.

A crew is liquid. People come and go, clothes and tricks change, and the aesthetic can be loose. Because a crew isn’t “selling” anything, the focus is on how they are presented by the director. Internet streaming is usually around 30 frames per second, so you’re essentially seeing 30 photographs for every second of video. Not only does video outperform on social media, one fucking second of it is 30x more powerful than a single photograph (in theory).

And crews can become brands and those brands are great promotion for both the riders and the people making the videos. As much as a video can sell product, a video can sell ideas, acting as a visual business card for the director.

If the 2010s gave skateboarding a boom of boutique hardgoods brands, it also set the table for video brands to thrive. Crews. Groups of folks making stuff independently without a plan… until they need one.

Please note, the brands selected for this exercise are from different eras (eras are so short in skateboarding), but each of them began with videos and evolved from there. From making hard and softgoods to community organizing and even… a production house (or something), you can see how wide things can spread from crew videos, hangouts, meet-ups, and general life shit.

LATE NITE STARS

Excerpt from “Talking Respectfully With Chase Walker” Village Psychic 2022

Chase Walker: Local videos hit it off first for me. 2009-2010 I got really into watching my own scene here in Houston. Dudes I’d see around the skatepark actually made the sickest videos! Filmers like Nik Lavigne, Eric Nguyen, Phillip Leach and John Danielson helped me fall in love with filming skating.

As I branched out, I got inspired by a lot of the videos coming out of Arizona at the time, like Jackson Casey - like Boyish and Worship Friendship were the two I’d watch on repeat. Diego Meek was also one of my favorites. And then around the same time, I got into the Bronze videos around 2013-2014. Paul Young’s videos as well - Bleach was an inspiration. Can’t forget the Static videos either.

FANCY LAD

Excerpt from Is This Skateboarding. The Fancy Lad Interview. Skateism 2017 (no byline listed or names credited for the quotes)

Fancy Lad: The company formed in 2011, although many of us had already been making videos together for years beforehand when we met at the Coliseum Skateshop. We have always had a passion for creative skating and didn’t really see anyone pushing the limits of making full-length videos that veered away from conventional professional skateboarding.

I feel like we are still trying to find our niche, which is a good thing because we are not afraid to try something new even if it fails miserably. Our first graphic of the old VHS skate video stack is because we are huge skate nerds. It’s also a reminder that skateboarding has a short history thus far that kids don’t really even pay attention to because of the surplus of content on the internet, but back then, when they could only be seen through video release made them extra special. I consider the 90’s the golden era of skateboard video.

BRONZE 56K

Excerpt from *An Interview With Bronze [Very Rare] [Mature Audience] [18+]* by James Lee Jenkem 2014

Peter Sidlauskas: Just make a skate video you and your crew would want to watch. The skate industry doesn’t know what it likes. When I made the first Bronze video, I was really over skateboarding at the time and didn’t really find anything in the industry that motivated me, so I just wanted to make something that was insanely brain-dead that me and my friends would enjoy. Had no idea it would make anyone feel some type of way. But if you really want attention, come to NYC, film skating on cars and trucks and all that shit, people will be like, “OMG, yes!” Maybe get a trick on black hubba too.

Skate video-wise, Photosynthesis. I used to watch that 50 times a day. Even before I started skating, I would watch it. I just bought the original orange VHS tape off eBay for $47. Couldn’t pass that up! E.S.T 2.0 was a big one as well. Mosaic, Jump Off a Building, Bootleg 3000 are up there. Suppers Ready by the Green Apple Skateshop had a real big impact on me. That was the first video where I saw dudes who had 30 seconds of footy but skated to 2 songs, and all the parts just transitioned so well into each other.

Non-skating videos, late 90’s basketball was a big part of my life growing up. Infomercials at three in the morning. Videos from the first file-sharing programs, like downloading Faces of Death on Kazaa, or things that were labeled **BANNED IN USA, EXTREMELY GRAPHIC***. Yeah, those things had a big impact... kinda fucked me up though.

HARDBODY

Excerpt From Hardbody, Mushrooms, and Cancel Flips With Antonio Durao by Ian Michna Jenkem (2024)

JENKEM: Let’s talk about the big news, getting on Hardbody. What was the process like?
Antonio Durao: I was on another board company at the time but was filming for The Hardbody video, and all the while E.J. [Emilio Cuilan, Hardbody brand owner and filmer] was trying to make it a board company, so I was like “I want to stay doing this and filming with you, can you just make Hardbody a clothing brand?” He wasn’t sure where he wanted to take it, but then became pretty set on a board brand. At the time the board company I was riding for was kind of stagnant, so I was like, “Fuck it.”

It was all up in the air for a bit, and starting something from the beginning can be hard and unpredictable. Numbers [one of the previous brands Antonio rode for], for example, you just never know what can happen, so I had second-guessed it all at first. When I heard Hjalte [Halberg] might join, it gave me more assurance to be a part of it. I’m stoked about how it’s something new and I feel like E.J.’s taking a different approach to branding. Nothing feels forced, and he’s not doing things for the wrong reasons.

EC MELODI

Excerpt from A Great Use of Your Time - EC Melodi’s “Wasting Time” Video (2025) Quartersnacks, no byline listed

You can always tell the difference when a crew locks in for the video. There is a subtle shift in the end goal: it transforms from “the video comes out when we have enough clips” to “the video comes out when it feels done.” Think the multi-year hiatus away from full-lengths before Bronze’s It’s Time, or the long crumb-trail of Insta edits before John’s Vid.

Wasting Time feels like that new arrival video for Melodi.

Everything from the caliber of skating, to this ungodly right-place-right-time ability to capture the best B-roll possible (“word”), the one-second backstory paragraphs over the footy you have to pause for, the production value, and care placed in every cut is a level up from Melodi’s already-great lineage of videos.

DIME

Excerpt from ‘What Is Dime?’ — An Interview With Antoine Asselin & Phil Lavoie Quartersnacks (2015) no byline listed.

What is Dime?

Phil: It’s a bit different than what it started as. Now, it’s a brand, but it became one accidentally. At first it was a crew, and we just skated together and made videos.

Antoine: It started as a shitty website that we never updated. We were fifteen years old, just posting shitty web clips. We started making full-lengths and it grew from there.

It’s kind of a good era with the internet and all to have the luxury of not knowing what you’re doing.

P: Our goal is to skate. Anything to keep us around skateboarding. That’s what we like to do. I’m never going to become a professional skateboarder, so I might as well make something I want to do in skateboarding. Antoine makes money off his sponsors and all, but I quit my job to focus on Dime.

GENESIS

Excerpts from Under Exposed With Ian Ostrowski by Alex Fazekas-Boone Adjacency Bias (2024) and Spotlight: Ian Ostrowski by Luca Lotruglio LVL3 (2025)

Adjacency Bias: Yeah, for sure. I really like the idea that the camera you have on you is the best one haha. How do you think you developed your filming style and perspective? Was it thought out and deliberate? Mimicking your inspirations? Completely random? Just going with the flow? All of the above?

Yeah definitely a mix of all of the above! Kinda just happened naturally being a kid and mimicking things I liked. At first I wanted to be Delistatus, then Sk8rat, then Illegal Civ, then Strobeck, then 917 and it kinda just warps into a combination of all those things. I was really focused on making things colorful and vibrant though; I think that came from watching a bunch of Odd Future music videos in high school. Oh, and Wes Anderson movies definitely play a big part in the things I make today.

LVL3: How did Genesis begin & what has the journey been like as it’s grown into a board company?

Genesis started as a small crew of friends that skated Jefferson Park in South Seattle. Me, Troy Gipson, Bao Nguyen, Xavier Holte, Jasper Levine, Pablo Otero-Royer, and Cooper Phillips were at the helm of it. It really just started with us fucking around at the skatepark and filming videos there, later venturing out and looking for more street spots. In 2017 we put out our first full-length skate video and a few hand-screen-printed tees and it’s kinda snowballed from there. Our crew has doubled since we’ve started and we now have riders in Denver, New York and Tokyo.

SABOTAGE

Excerpts from Ryan Sabotage and Brian Panebianco Interview Skate Jawn no byline listed

Skate Jawn: Tell me a little about what’s in the video besides skating?

Ryan Higgins: It has a lot of flashing nostalgic NES gameplay in it, along with TV commercial/news shots I filmed while tripping on NyQuil. Bums being bums, graffiti writers writing on shit.

Brian Panebianco: The box smells like the inside of a new car. The older DVD boxes used to smell like beef jerky.

UNITY

Excerpt from Jeffrey Cheung: Unity and Community, One Board at a Time by Eben Benson Juxtapoz Magazine (2018)

EDITOR’S NOTE: Since There Skateboards is a hardgoods extension of the Unity Crew, I chose to focus on Unity for this piece.

Jeffrey Cheung: I started Unity Skateboarding as a DIY and personal way of supporting myself and my queer friends because I loved skating but always felt like I had to hide being queer. Now it seems like more and more queer people are coming out skating and learning how to skate and be themselves. When queer, trans, and people of color simply exist visibly, are active in their communities, and take up public space, they can change the narrative both in and outside of skateboarding. A new movement is happening and it is amazing. — I feel that seeing this happen is really inspiring to me, knowing that we might actually be making changes in skateboarding together, at least within our immediate community.

GX1000

Excerpt from Hypebeast Magazine #33 GX1000: Wild Men on Wheels by Jonathan Smith (2024)

But GX1000 might have stayed just a video series if it weren’t for Garshell’s longtime friend Stephen McClintock. While working at a bar in New York, McClintock reached out to Garshell and suggested he make some product to accompany the increasingly popular videos. “He was like, ‘Don’t you want to do cool stuff, go on trips with your friends, and be able to give them free stuff?’” Garshell remembers. They started with simple t-shirts around 2014, eventually moving on to more ambitious products like screen-printed jackets embellished with patches, plus collaborations with artists like Dave Schubert, Michael St. John, Petra Cortright, Peter Sutherland, and others.

SHAKE JUNT

Excerpt from Gary Rogers’ interview with Shane Heyl for X-Games (2025)

“I wanna put out a video part to this song called “Shake Junt.” I pick up a video camera and start filming my homies. I pick up a laptop and it’s got iMovie on it. Baker had some leftover footage from Baker 2G. They gave me the footage for the video. A group of homies who wanted to film a video. What are we gonna call it? Shake Junt!” There was no meaning to make it a company; then the movement happened like a crew.

There was a Baker apartment and they would spray paint “Shake Junt” on their grip tape, like Piss Drunx. Griptape was a company anyone could ride for, just like Shorty’s or Diamond.”

ILLEGAL CIV

Illegal Civ may no longer be an “active skate brand,” but I believe including them in this dive is important.

IC began as an Odd Future-adjacent skate crew led by Mikey Alfred. In 2021, the content house released a film titled North Hollywood that reportedly earned $50,000 at the box office, “due to pandemic restrictions hampering the release.”

Alfred’s brand suffered from work practice/filmer controversies, rider departures, and general criticism. After a long period of inactivity, Alfred responded to a YouTube comment in May 2026 with the below:

These beefs are well documented, but I wanted to highlight the content IC created with Uproxx for the brand’s Doritos collab.

About 20 seconds into the video featured above, Alfred says “there’s something powerful about the triangle shape.” Yes, a Dorito is a triangle with rounded corners, but also, there’s like… a pretty popular brand whose visual identity also resembles a Dorito. OK, but then we get the quote:

“I think that Doritos is connected to skating in an authentic way, ‘cos when you’re on a skate trip and you’re in the middle of nowhere—stop at a gas station, those Doritos start tasting like steak, bro.”

NUMBERS + TAKEAWAYS

We could gauge bot follows, get into views, engagement, and other numbers, but these two chats show that different platforms are entirely separate worlds. Also, there is little correlation between subscribers, followers, and view counts, especially when some videos live on Thrasher first.

The numbers don’t really tell us shit, do they? Late Night Stars is the “bottom half” of both charts, yet they recently released a collaboration with Asics Skateboarding, right?

Since everything ever made has basically been uploaded to the World Wide Web (for free), there’s a massive mood board to pick from and how you arrange the pieces is key. Conversely, when you do so in a pleasing way and juxtapose it with skateboarding, your brand ends up… on mood and vision boards at ad agencies.

I haven’t used the word “curation” yet, but we have to. I’m sorry. The people who make skateboarding videos are judged by their choices. The camera, the frame rate, the people, the songs, the length, the parts, the spots, the graphics, and so on. The more obscure and interesting choices you make, the more enjoyable your video can be to watch. So when it comes to creating a brand informed by those videos, a visual language has already been developed. Pretty neat.

In a sense, making a video is visual research which you can then apply to making skateboards, clothing, and other products. Videos help create an aesthetic that can scale to products in a much different way than starting a brand from the ground up. As painful a comparison as it is, making videos can be someone’s “10,000 Hours” of brand mastery.

Perhaps the “Crew to Brand” pipeline only needed technology to catch up for it to become a viable model. These video franchises were already “brands,” but the perspective changes once they have a formal team, an eComm site and start doing collaborations.

Pure opinion incoming, but I think “we” like the fluidity of video-first brands. The anticipation feels different, even if product inevitably follows the release of a new video project. Buying a hoodie from someone who makes cool shit feels more like a tip than a transaction. It sucks, but screens are how we connect, so thank you to all the folks who give us free things to watch, the loyalists who make physical media, and, of course, the people in front of the lens that keep skateboarding moving.

The rise of Crew Video Brand™ is an evolution of skateboarding in the best way. Some of the most celebrated videographers didn’t run brands. Regardless of the reasons why or the barriers that may have stunted their creativity, visual directors starting brands—with their crews—tightens ideas up. They bring documentation and brands closer together.

Earlier in this piece I mentioned how cool history was. For some readers, those lines may have created an expectation that I was going to mention something about crews, but then I didn’t.

Well, maybe this piece’s ender will provide some relief.

Released in 1988, Powell Peralta’s Public Domain positioned a group of young talent in a section known as “The Rubber Boys. Featuring Ray Barbee (spelled Barbie on screen), Steve Saiz, Chet Thomas, and Eric Sanderson. The Boys skate around Los Angeles and, sure, it’s not the first time we see a crew skating together in a skateboarding film; but Stacy Peralta’s execution of a “regular day of skating” is exciting and relatable.

Peralta was a pro skater. He came from a crew and co-founded one of the most influential brands in skateboarding history. Turning a crew into a team, and later a “Brigade,” Stacy Peralta and CR Steyck III understood how to market a group of skateboarders through product, ads, video, contests, and tours. As an original crew guy, Peralta understood that video was going to change skateboarding. Anyone with a camera and some access could have documented skateboarding, but the decisions that went into those original shrink-wrapped VHS cassettes kicked off more than a new medium and era.

Whether or not any of the independent videographers today have seen Public Domain is irrelevant. They also see and understand how to capture a feeling as Peralta once did.

When a crew becomes a brand, it’s an evolution of tradition. When it’s done well, you don’t even notice the brand part. How you build, project, and protect that voice is the art of skateboarding. The audience decides the rest and everything else… is what we call “business.”

The people who interest me the most are timeless. They aren’t timeless like a pair of Levi’s 501 dungarees. They’re artists, they’re musicians, they’re writers, they’re people who tap into what they love it and share that in way that’s so compelling that you become invested its origins. They use their talent to unlock more for those who connect with it. That’s depth, not the performative depth we’re so used to.

Marc Johnson was timeless. He was a rare person whose mind existed beyond and before the years he was with us.

He was one of the most prolific skateboarders ever and he shared everything with skateboarding. He loved the Velvet Underground, a band who broke up years before he was born. He loved Charles Bukowski’s Ham on Rye, a book published when he was five years old. He spoke openly about everything. He was interested in the physical and metaphysical: history and the future. You could see this in his graphics and his tricks, specifically the references and breadcrumbs he left for us.

As much as Marc Johnson was present, he was always seemed to be somewhere else. And when he had the opportunity to communicate, it was often with a flurry of ideas, culled from the things he was fascinated by.

Like most of us, I’ve been thinking about Marc Johnson. My marathon viewing and reading led me to a full interview excerpted from Lucas Beaufort’s DEVOTED: A Video Documentary On Skateboard Media (2017).

I like to read old record reviews to see what people thought about music at the time or old news articles, written shortly after something significant happened. Released in 2017 and most likely filmed in 2016, Johnson’s commentary is possibly more relevant and poignant than it was when he and Beaufort originally spoke.

I transcribed some of Marc’s thoughts from the past on the future.

All quotes from Marc Johnson via his DEVOTED full interview by Lucas Beaufort and edited for brevity and clarity.

50 to 75% of online content is throwaway. It’s a race to get the most worthless, pointless filler because if all you posted was amazing, you wouldn’t be posting very often.

How fucking boring is the climate in skating?

It’s almost hard to continue to appreciate what you’re seeing because you’re seeing so much of it. Every day, every five minutes, a new video comes out, and it’s like, “Oh my god! He nosegrinded a 35 stair handrail! He nosegrinded a 36 stair handrail! He nosegrinded a 37 stair handrail! After a while you’re like, “Eh, seen it.” Still amazing. You can acknowledge it for being as mind-blowing as it is, but it doesn’t get you sparked to go skate.

You got to post something. TBT to something I’ve posted four times in the past two years. I’m gonna repost this thing I posted six months ago because nobody’s gonna know. Nobody has an attention span anymore. How could you remember that when you see a thousand images and fifty videos a day? There’s no room in your hard drive.

Every video that goes in, every photo that goes in, pushes an old one out.

[Instagram] People use it for different reasons. It’s like, “Look at me, I’m at this restaurant with these people. I’m at the bar with these people.” It’s not real. They construct a fake idea of who they are. “My life sucks, but I went to Six Flags with fuckin’ Eddie Murphy… one time.” Get your likes and comments, but nobody’s life is that fuckin’ rad.

In the future, there is no future. It doesn’t exist. If people want print media to exist, they will fuckin’ make sure print media exists. Just like somebody invented the internet. How crazy is that? The future is something that you build and you’ll never see the future.

When I started skating, this gnarly connection was made. It was like a language that I learned how to speak. You’re learning and progressing and changing and getting better at something, and it becomes more precious to you. Skateboarding saved me from my life before skateboarding. That’s so special to me. It made my life so much fucking better.

It’s something I hold on to. I fucking value it. You go play on a toy with your friends, that’s all it is in reality. What it’s done for me…. forever.

BRANDING: “the strategic process of creating a unique name, design, symbol, or image that identifies a product, service, or company and distinguishes it from competitors.”

Notice the word “strategic.” If you’re a Skateboarding Understander, you’ve read or listened to a lot of brand founders talk about how they “didn’t have a business plan, man, we just had some sick ideas and figured it out as we went along.” Figuring it out isn’t necessarily a strategy, but that’s skateboarding; ideas often outweigh the formal plan. We don’t really dig plans because they feel lame.

Hardgoods brands—the makers of skateboarding decks—have a unique value in skateboarding. The skate-careerist hopes to join a brand that makes sense with their brand of skateboarding. Paychecks and opportunities are cool too, but brand affiliation is mostly about “optics.” Regular skateboarders are also finicky about brands. Board brands are the pillar of our skateboarding diet and (most) people who have been skating for a minute are very specific about what they consume. And great brands tend to be particular about pretty much everything, even if their beginnings appear fun and innocent. Maybe taste is the real strategy in skateboarding.

Taste. So much of skate “branding” comes down to taste and taste is subjective. The best and worst part of starting a skateboard brand is that it can be anything. There are cool brands, uncool brands, legacy brands, religious brands, and even functionally bland brands. Bland even rebranded as Beige (and it still sucks). Bland can survive and bland can make money, but there’s always a thirst for “something new that really shakes things up.”

Let’s reframe that sentiment:

Brands that fill a need in skateboarding often last the longest.

Let’s go back to 2013 and revisit a written essay for Jenkem by Andrew Murrell that later became the video piece above. (Please watch it)

Using Girl/Chocolate’s Pretty Sweet as a flashpoint, Murrell’s piece details the comings-and-goings post-Pretty Sweet, followed by a new swath of rider-driven board brands that came out of the rubble and other important events. (For real, watch the video).

Also of note: In 2013, Instagram introduced video to the app. 15 whole-ass seconds of video, but those seconds changed our entire relationship with Instagram along with skateboarding and, fuck, in a broader sense, all of society as we know it.

This Artless® exercise uses the piece and the year 2013 as a jump-off and also includes some notable“small brands” that started in or close to the 2010s. (That’s in quotes because the majority weren’t small for long.) For example, Palace started in 2009, but they’re in the mix, OK? Also, we’re going to focus on FA and not FA/Hockey.

While some of these bands pushed (and continue to further) the idea of what a brand could be, they began operating within the existing structure of skateboarding. Some of these brands would “break” that, but you had to build something new first. A future piece will explore other examples of brands that operate outside of the traditional model by creating new spaces from emerging communities in skateboarding.

Our last note, the video counts were pulled from SkateVideoSite and reflect the time of publishing.

SAMPLE SIZE: 3D, Call Me (917), Fucking Awesome, Frog, Isle, Magenta, Palace, Polar, Primitive, Quasi, Welcome, and WKND.

3D

3D had things lined up. It’s worth noting that in the 1990s Matthew Landon (RIP) started a brand in Connecticut, which later relocated to Boston, Massachusetts, called 3d Innovations. They made clothes and videos and were influential in the Northeast. Brian Lotti (briefly) rode for them as well as Matt Reason, Jahmal Williams, Robbie Gangemi, and East Coast stalwarts. This 3D was intended to be Brian Anderson’s (also from Connecticut) creative outlet. The brand had promise with Alex Olson, Austyn Gillette, and Tom Karangelov on the roster, but it didn’t last long and we have our first casualty on the list.

In an interview with The Good Problem from 2016, Anderson said, “It was really tough every season to make a whole new batch of board graphics, try to skate… I was getting so burnt; I was so sick of going to airport. I had already been flying my whole career for tours… I wanted to do something for me. So I went to SF with the intent of telling Brad that I was over it… told him, “No, I actually don’t even want to do it anymore. I want to just pull the plug.” And Brad says, “All right. How are we going to handle this on social media? We don’t want to say we failed, because we didn’t.” And then he joked with me, “Well, you know you can always ride for Skate Mental.” And I said, “You know what, I’d rather just be your friend.” (laughs) We’d already been through so much stuff doing 3D that was painful.”

CALL ME (917):

After quickly bailing on 3D, Alex Olson kicked a few names around before landing on Call Me (917). Olson also started making clothing and graphics under the label Bianca Chandôn including the popular “Lover” graphic which Urban Outfitters “borrowed.” For a minute, it seemed like everyone in NYC or who was NYC-adjacent rode for the brand. Their first video, The (917) Video, featured Aidan Mackey, Aaron Loreth, Nik Stain, Hugo Boserup, Stu Kirst, Nolan Benfield, Cruz Mendez, Vincent Touzery, Cyrus Bennett, Max Palmer, AO, and more. Fuck.

In 2013, he told Jenkem, “Long story short, to me it (3D) just kinda looked like Girl. And I was kinda on the idea like, let’s do something like what Palace is doing.” While 917 had somewhat of an anti-aesthetic, with graphics darting around Olson’s riffs on old graphics, NYC signage, clip art, and house music references, cars, and dolphins. The brand also used a Duster song in their first full-length, possibly adding to the slowcore band’s “unprecedented level of popularity in the 2020s, attributed to the usage of their songs on TikTok.^”

FA

In May 2013, Anthony Van Engelen and Jason Dill leave Alien Workshop via an Instagram post (as noted in Murrell’s piece and video). As rumored, Dill’s Fucking Awesome clothing brand/project evolves into a hardgoods brand by 2014. Like Girl barely waiting to start Chocolate, they quickly created Hockey in 2015. Leaning into Dill’s collages and art explorations, along with the “kid portraits,” FA unlocked the “golden ratio,” often putting rectangular graphics between the trucks.

FA immediately differentiated themselves from competitors with split veneer decks, unusual graphic applications, and distinct video treatments… and the word “Fucking.” Bolstered by the success of Bill Strobeck’s “cherry” (2014) for Supreme, featuring several FA riders, FA quickly became a dominant force in skateboarding.

WELCOME

Purposely breaking our alphabetical list, let’s talk about Welcome. Welcome was responsible for reviving shaped boards—and maybe rails—by modernizing money bumps. With that, Welcome immediately felt like an “older” brand from its inception, with founder Jason Celaya’s tastes and artwork shaping its look. Their original squad was purposely a bit oddball, somewhat park-coded, and fun, but not goofy.

I could write more, but the “Our Creed” section on their website does all the heavy lifting. I mean, just having a consumer-facing mission statement is branding 101:

Welcome is a brand built on the foundations of creativity, individuality, and nonconformity. It is a celebration of the unexpected, a nod to the power of juxtaposition and the beauty that can emerge from unlikely combinations. We are more than just a skateboarding brand - we are a community of individuals who believe in breaking boundaries and forging our own paths.

Our team is not made up of just the most technically skilled skateboarders, but rather individuals who inspire us and make us want to skate. We believe in fostering a sense of community and family, both within our team and with our fans and consumers.

We see skateboarding as an art form, and our products reflect that. From the design of our boards and apparel to the way we present ourselves as a brand, we strive to bring joy and inspiration to those who engage with us.

If these beliefs speak to you, you’re WELCOME.

FROG

In 2015, Chris Millic and Jesse Alba left Welcome and started Frog with the intention of making “purposely dumb and pointless graphics.” Fun Fact: We almost didn’t have Frog, as Alba and Millic were supposed to get on 917.

Millic discussed the 917 situation and the brand’s look with Quartersnacks in 2023 in an interview conducted by Adam Abada, saying “The exact graphics coming out in skateboarding at the time, but they were pretty legit and professional. I remember Jesse and I thinking it’d be really funny to counteract that with some really simple, stupid graphics. I was almost trying to make the graphics look like you got your board at Target or a non-skate brand first skateboard.”

The Frog concept worked and continues to work because the actual skateboarding—even when presented as light or wacky—is great skateboarding. This is not shocking.

ISLE

Nick Jensen and Paul Shier left Blueprint in 2012 and announced Isle in 2013. With Jensen’s fine art background driving the visual direction and a talented squadron, the brand was instantly embraced. A friend of mine said, “Does that dude make coffee house friend art or like, real, actual good art that could be in a gallery?” Isle was the latter.

Their debut full-length, Vase (2015), by Jacob Harris became an instant classic. Then skateboarding happened. In 2021, a chunk of the team left to join Harris’ expansion of Atlantic Drift into a hardgoods brand, but due to Harris’ health issues, it never came to fruition. Isle carried on until March 2025 when they announced they’d cease operations.

MAGENTA

Going from England to France, and predating Isle by a few years, we have Magenta, founded in 2010 by Soy Panday and brothers Vivien and Jean Feil. Their location gave them a lot of artistic license, or at least, this is how an American may perceive their brand. Panday does the majority of their graphics and that loose, yet often detailed style defines Magenta and complements their skateboarding output. Magenta is consistent. This is important. Just when you’re wondering what Magenta is up to, some Magenta happens.

Someone called Magenta’s brand of skateboarding “acoustic.” I dunno, but Magenta is definitely not as loud as Creature.

PALACE

Prior to Palace, one wouldn’t imagine a skateboarding brand collaborating with major museums, fashion houses, and the Happy Mondays. That’s a fraction of what Palace is able to cohesively present to the world. Known for their “unconventional” product descriptions, Lev Tanju aimed high and continues to do… unthinkable shit with Palace. Perhaps the captions are a bit of a smoke screen, because Palace absolutely employs strategy or at least, they probably do.

I pulled this bit from NSS Magazine:

To carry out his project, Tanju turned to Fergus “Fergadelic” Purcell, an acclaimed graphic designer known in the London skate and fashion scene, who had previously collaborated with Stussy and Marc Jacobs. To put Tanju’s demands into practice, Purcell was inspired by the iconic Penrose Triangle by Swedish artist Oscar Reutersvärd. According to the geometry texts, the Penrose triangle or impossible triangle is an impossible object, that can exist only as a two-dimensional representation and cannot be constructed in space, since it presents an impossible superposition of lines with different perspective constructions.

Palace video content is key (11 videos and counting). There’a new Palace video, you watch it and you think about Palace as a skateboarding brand. They make a short commercial about a collaboration and maybe you don’t watch it. Or you can enjoy both. That’s the cool thing about having a choice. I watch Triple D but don’t really care about food. Americans still have rights… just kidding.

POLAR

Malmo, Sweden, 2011. Pontus Alv brings Polar to skateboarding. With a smart logo, strong videos, and Jacob Ovgren sending us his sardonic view of the world through outsider cartoon graphics, the brand pops off and eventually gives us Big Boys. From the start, it was obvious Alv was curating a world with a lot of intent and reverence for skate history with careful references and homage as a storytelling constant. Alv told Jenkem in 2014, “It’s a really scary thing to grow bigger and lose what you want to be.”

Pontus is headstrong and while Polar has gone through its iterations, it’s still Polar.

PRIMITIVE

Paul Rodriguez’s Primitive seemed to follow Mike Ternasky’s original vision for Plan B, or one could argue, the Varifex model of creating a brand with the highest level of talent available. Starting as a brick-and-mortar in 2008, when P-Rod left Plan B, everyone noticed the gold foil boards and Primitive was born in 2014. P-Rod’s brand quickly followed a very streamlined DTC model (while still selling to shops), which was also very of the time.

Like some of the other brands we’re looking at, Primitive could also be considered a “lifestyle brand” in that they make a lot of things used during life outside of skateboarding. They make bags, belts, socks, and even Christmas Stockings. And when they make a video, you know you’ll be seeing the most technically sound skateboarding in the marketplace.

WKND

Founded in 2015, Grant Yansura and WKND also understood the “golden graphic ratio” and leaned into the Forbidden 14 canvas back in 2015. Yansura told Jenkem in 2015 that “We need an outlet for our fun and silly video ideas, because there’s no other place for them.” Yansura, formerly of Rip N Dip (in some capacity), created WKND’s branding with a mix of humor, homage to shit he and the team think is cool, and by leveraging the absurdity of skateboarding with elaborate skits.

Using Hollywood-style production value, said skits appeared even more ridiculous without detracting from the skateboarding. They even (kinda) had Koston for a minute. RIP Stove Skateboards.

QUASI

Lastly, we land in Ohio’s Mother Collective/Quasi. I understand the comparisons to Alien Workshop, but that’s an easy, if not dismissive take. Not “Interpol just sounds like Joy Division, man” lazy. This is different. Comparisons distract from the obvious work, care, and thought put into the brand. After a short stint as Mother Collective, the brand pivoted to Quasi, which is a nicer-sounding name and also was a pretty neat band.

Quasi keeps a liquid identity, changing wordmarks and logos often. They make hard copies of their videos too. Led by Chad Bowers, their graphics immediately tapped into an interesting space where analog and digital are the same thing. From printed collateral shrink-wrapped with their decks to audio curation, Quasi built a world by using every output available. It doesn’t really matter what Acid Ply Technology® is; it’s just cool that it exists.

CONCLUSION: What’s the common thread here?

The now-defunct brands (3D and Isle) along with the somewhat dormant Call Me (917) didn’t lean into video.

That’s really obvious and not a slight, just an observation. On some quality over quantity type shit, Isle and Call Me (917) also left us with important contributions to skate videos. But it’s hard to argue that more isn’t more.

With two of the brands utilizing numbers in their name, maybe numbers aren’t a strong brand strategy. 5Boro and GX1000 are still around, though. Hold on, I forgot about Antonio Durao’s former sponsor, Numbers Edition, which also started in the window we’re discussing. Didn’t last either and remains a “what if?”

More than breaking in 2013, new brands were able to start fresh and decide if they were going to lean into the standard model of distribution and presentation. They had a clean slate and an audience more acclimated to purchasing goods on smart phones or eComm in general. Unlike legacy brands, the digital world offered a new place to exist with the ability to make, delete, and promote in real time. Even if the analog footprints of the past still live IRL or on different platforms, those ads, videos, and graphics exist, often as a collective feeling or perception. That’s hard to break.

If you’re looking for a branding formula or Rick Rubinesque takeaway to turn into a Wisdom-Guy Meme, that’s not going to happen

But as an immediate contradiction to the above, here’s something to chew on.

3D, Polar, Frog, Isle, Primitive, FA, Call Me (917), and Magenta were all founded by relevant pro skateboarders, many of whom were still in that “window” we talk about so much. Rider-led brands or using names as branding is nothing new (Logan Earth Ski, Alva, Powell Peralta, Hosoi), but the difference is that the 2010-ish crop predominantly began with a pointed idea coming from someone who people wanted ideas from.

While Bowers is the head of Quasi, it’s a collective, with the original pros/riders helping to launch and guide the brand. Even with Tanju leading Palace, it felt as if it was coming out of the PWBC and Palace effectively created a feeling with their brand. WKND? Similar deal and also sharing a bit of the same irreverent video sauce. With Welcome, Celaya may have been more of a regional figure, but his point of view is the face of the brand as much as the team.

Of the lot, Palace is in another stratosphere when it comes to collaborations. Many of the brands have done footwear collaborations and explored other brand partnerships, but Palace redefined how a collaboration works.

So what’s left? A lot of regular skateboarding things.

You know, Roster shuffles, rebrands, softgoods, guest artists, activations, print ads, accessories, videos, a flagship shop, tours, demos, and social media… newsletters, email lists, websites, internal shit. Those are some of the avenues available to keep a brand going. You choose from the Capitalism menu, I guess. (These brands aren’t non-profits or co-ops, but maybe that’s an idea.)

When I say social media, it’s mostly Instagram and YouTube. There was never the “TikTok migration” that several trend forecasters have expected for years. In regular brand world, Meta’s ad technology worked very well for independent brands, until they didn’t. But most skate brands aren’t using targeted ads. Well, if they wanted to boost sales with targeted ads now, that shit is not happening anyway. COVID-19 was like 50 years ago.

As the digital landscape changes and becomes more enshittified by the minute, the real world is becoming real again. The thing is, the forecast isn’t awesome. Your local shop is real and they might really be feeling the crunch of the global economic panic. By the way, have you noticed that skateboarding has been like The Gap over the last few years in that everything is on sale… all the time?

Are the survivors from the list going to last another 10 years? Will they celebrate big anniversaries like Santa Cruz or Powell Peralta or even Girl/Chocolate? Shit, will Girl and Chocolate keep going?

It’s easy to drop some state-of-the-state rant like, “Kids (these takes always start with “kids”) are sick of these boutique “cool” brands, man, they want big shit again. I’m selling a lot of Zero shit lately. Y2K is over, thrifting is cooked, even workwear is done… something something about Rocco… but Rocco’s back and that hasn’t moved the needle. It’s like (some other era where shit sucked) again.” But who cares?

Trend cycles were once more visible in normie culture, but now there are subsets of “normal.” We’re in a post-fashion era of skateboarding or at least fashion doesn’t need skateboarding to sell skateboarding’s ideas. I mean, shit, fashion’s almost done with golf, so scrap that idea if you’ve been sitting on a presentation for a golf/skate crossover brand.

Pick up your friend’s phone and open Instagram (if they have it). That’s their skateboarding. Now think about whatever number you believe is accurate for “active boarders,” and you get… millions of skateboarding universes, all doing nothing and everything at once.

In 2026, anyone can make skateboards, but that doesn’t mean you have a brand.

However, something will happen and it will probably be cool. But will that come from skateboarding or will skateboarding adopt someone else’s idea? What? Did you think there was going to be some epic kicker to this piece? This Substack is free.

PART ONE | CHOOSE YOUR IDENTITY In 1994, Toy Machine released Live!, a 26-minute full-length video promoting the pre-Thomas Vision™ version of the brand. I like this brief moment in skateboarding where the flip-and-pray skating of the early 90s is over and everyone is figuring it out by focusing on what tricks they do and how they do them. Sub Zero’s “Real Life” comes out in 1994 as well. I’m guessing most of the footage in Live! is from 1993. Jahmal Williams and “Panama” Dan Zimmerman filmed a bunch of tricks indoors at Z.T. Maximus in Boston, so I triangulate that footage as Winter 1993.

A year later, Toy Machine completely remade their brand with a new squad and new video. Led by Jamie Thomas and Ed Templeton, Heavy Metal refocused the brand, but it took a third team reconstruction before the breakthrough video Welcome To Hell would drop in 1996. Then the Chief then turned his clothing company into a board brand and left Toy Machine to start Zero, roughly 18 years before FA essentially did the same thing. History… it does history things.

Live! isn’t held in the same regard as the Toy videos that followed, but it introduced many viewers to a young prodigy named Ethan Fowler. Yes, the once-beloved “style” guy who proved that looking cool didn’t equal being cool. He opens the video skating to Fugazi’s “Great Cop” and later to a Jane’s Addiction demo version of “City.” However, many of the backdrops don’t appear urban. Most of Fowler’s footage is in schoolyards, parking lots, sidewalks, and behind buildings, with some clips filmed in SF. He’s really good, but he’s almost Ethan Fowler, just as Toy Machine wasn’t fully Toy Machine in 1994.

At age 16, Thomas Campbell and Tobin Yelland picked Ethan up in Iowa City on a trip back from New York and took him to San Francisco. According to a Big Brother interview published in March, 1999, Fowler said he was “on really silly amounts of drugs,” back then. I guess he took at a lot of risks or whatever, but it landed him on Ed Templeton’s bloodsucking skateboard companies TV, Television, and finally Toy Machine.

Live! comes out then he’s off Toy Machine and quickly films a part for Stereo’s first video, A Visual Sound and has last part. In his second part of the year, he somehow appears more mature and more assured in his skateboarding. He’s a true “city guy” on Stereo, who were based in San Francisco at the time. There are film photographs of him in a diner. He has a very 90s buzzcut and sideburns combo, smokes cigarettes, and wears a cardigan sweater.

In an on-the-nose moment, he sits on a sidewalk soft and analyzes the sleeve of a record album. Then he skates very well, to the obscure jazz music of Ululation, often wearing a white dress shirt with vertical pinstripes or plain white T-shirts. Later, he drinks coffee and scrawls on a napkin.

Months after being a 411VM montage looking guy on Toy Machine, Ethan Fowler became Ethan Fowler.

Planned or natural, his transformation from “the other Fowler” to retro guy was great branding. Stereo Guy Ethan Fowler set the table for other versions of Ethan , including the Heritage Rocker look with motorcycles and flared jeans that he rode out at the end of his career.

Two Ads Scanned by Chrome Ball Depicting the Fast Evolution of Ethan Fowler. (R) Toy Machine (L) Stereo

PART TWO | THE EVOLUTION WILL BE TELEVISED Before everyone was invested on Dylan Jaeb’s pivot to Quasi, he had already been doing a lot of other shit… for a decade. Then something happened. At some point in 2025, his IG clips became Must-See-IG.

The Jaebing in our feeds was organic. But it would be kind of awesome if he hired Geese’s PR team and orchestrated all of this with bots or some shit.

While Dylan Jaeb being a PSYOP in 2026 sounds kind of awesome, the reality is that the subtle shift in his skating was intentional.

He Talked To Heckride About This Very Thing In May 2025

As of recently, it feels like you’re trying to break out of the cookie-cutter California perfect spots and have been skating stuff a little more rugged and out of Southern California; I think stuff like that has helped make me not to immediately think of Mike Mo when I see your skating if that makes sense.

DJ: Yeah, I guess I’ve been a bit more careful not to skate stuff that looks super-so-cal. I think I was just skating whatever when I was younger and was into different stuff. It was also a different time when Mike Mo was coming up; people were just trying to do the most insane tricks. I don’t mind getting compared to him (laughs). We do look pretty similar, but I live here, so I’m not sure that I can break out of skating Southern California spots. I’m definitely jealous of New York or places where you can just skate wherever and it looks nice. We got to be careful not to get Palm Trees in the background and shit (laughs).

Let’s go back to go forward.

In 2020, Dylan Jaeb was introduced in a Berrics video as a “16-Year-Old Phenom” from Hawaii. In the video he explains that Jamie Thomas had been flowing him Zero boards since he was 11. The Chief liked and commented on his posts and started sending him boxes. That’s a very modern origin story.

Like Ethan Fowler, Dylan Jaeb had an elder co-sign and things moved quickly. He was on DC, then he wasn’t. He got a bunch of other sponsors. He got on Nike SB and looks right in Blazer Mids. And lot of other stuff probably happened that we aren’t aware of, too.

This man has a lot of footage: 23 credits on SkateVideoSite. But for this exercise, let’s continue to analyze at some recent-ish Jaeb activity leading up to “the video.” In Primitive’s 2024 Am video Daydream, his part starts with archival footage of him attempting—and (predictably) landing—a kickflip off the deck of a quarterpipe while wearing a helmet and a youthful outfit. We get B-roll, then adult Dylan Jaeb does his thing. He skates to the electro-pop of Chromatics’ “I Want Your Love,” a song a lot of people took drugs to in the early 2000s. He wears some button-down shirts and an interesting sweater, but there are also plenty of all-black fits and brown pants. There’s little chance those brown Dickies are a nod to Ethan Fowler. As expected, he shows off his excellent trick selection and does very hard things—he’s joyful and talented, but not showy. He kind of looks like Reese Forbes.

In 2025, Dylan Jaeb a key contributor to Dickies’ Honeymoon full-length. He’s even more awesome in that one and skates to more (mostly) electronic music, this time by Charlotte Gainsbourg—the daughter of Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg—and, briefly, to “Sunless” by Loke Rahbek & Frederik Valentin. Some of the tricks are filmed in New York City. His name is rendered in the style of the Jersey Mike’s logo. It’s very slick, although using sub sandwich branding is working class… or middle America-coded.

1 million views and counting and some beautiful stuff | Nike SB QuickStrike

Again, he’s very very good and cemented himself as a new force in skateboarding with this part—someone who’s going to do things and become a lot of people’s favorite skateboarder, especially if he pulls the right levers.

AND HERE IT IS JAEB | DEBUT

After months of gossip, screenshots, and message-board chatter, Quasi officially announced Dylan Jaeb as their newest team rider on April 14, 2024, with a video post and the caption “It’s mowing season.”

A board release and pro announcement followed—but where’s the part? It’s coming, obviously.

Now we have it. While I didn’t “throw my headphones on for the peak experience”—because my tinnitus doesn’t enjoy high-end frequencies so close to my eardrum—I watched JAEB | DEBUT three times in a row on a television screen.

As evidenced in this video by Jacob Polumbo, presentation matters as much as tricks. His skating is even more distilled and refined than before, but it’s still top-shelf shit. Yes, it lived up to the hype. More importantly, Dylan Jaeb, in this context, feels fresh and natural. It’s a new beginning and one that makes sense. Honeymoon Dylan Jaeb wouldn’t have fit on Quasi. I don’t know why, that’s just how it is.

Going from Primitive to Quasi is quite a shift. Also, Quasi means Almost. I never thought about that until today. Both Primitive and Quasi are distinct brands. One could argue they occupy different ends of elite. Primitive’s branding relies heavily on their talented roster construction. Dylan Jaeb fit that. Really good skaters go there and maybe get a gold-foil board. They really owned the DTC model of running a skate brand, before Meta ads were called Meta ads, often collaborating with big-box companies.

*Select Pieces From Primitive x Rick & Morty (2018)

Conversely, Quasi has worked with Robert Pollard/Guided By Voices and, outside of some co-collabs with pro rider Gilbert Crockett and Vans, they’re rarely selling you anything other than Quasi things. Also of note, Jaeb’s new teammate Gilbert once rode for Mystery and Fallen, two brands once under Thomas’ Black Box Distribution.

Quasi’s brand narrative is intentionally loose, but identifiable. They often employ different logos and wordmarks and leave enough room to experiment with board graphics while maintaining cohesion. They push the video medium in interesting ways. Their solo parts are pleasing and interesting without being “art for art’s sake.”

*Uncle Bob’s Quasi Collage Graphic

With each brand passing the ten-year mark, are Primitive and Quasi entering their rebrand stages? Quasi is definitely in a refresh phase, as evidenced recently by Hard Reset, leaning into blood Jon Rowe, Jason Nam, and Cooper Qua. We can assume Brian O’Dwyer will be officially on Quasi soon as well, so that’s heavy.

*Contemplating the future. Photograph by Michael Burnett.

If anyone thought otherwise, JAEB | DEBUT inserts Dylan Jaeb seamlessly into the Quasiverse. The words “finesse” and “curation” have come up often in reactions to JAEB | DEBUT. There’s not a hugely noticeable difference in his actual skating or look, other than his buzzcut and something we’ll mention later. A few folks have noted the presence of more manual-based tricks and less hucking. That’s fair. They’re excellent manuals.

Mostly, JAEB | DEBUT showcases what someone who can do anything, but these little flashes of expression in his flick and motion make add intrigue. He’s not trying to fit on Quasi or jazz-up his tricks. he’s a twenty-something version of himself, developing a his skate language.

Sonically, we’re still operating in the electronic space, albeit with more BPM, via Fuck Buttons and later, the ethereal sounds of Ssalvia. We expect Quasi to bring deeper cuts into their productions and the song choices are an interesting tell.

Yes, this looks like a Quasi video. There’s probably something to say about frame rates or whatever, but this seven-and-a-half-minute edit is the perfect container for Dylan Jaeb’s high-level skateboarding without being jarring. There’s day and night footage, an assortment of spots, found footage, animations, reactions, guest clips, civilians—and, of course, the ender.

The ender: a fakie kickflip “over the top rope” at Rincon Middle School in Escondito, California (as seen on the cover of Thrasher Magazine), shown three times—two documenting a moment of humility, where Dylan Jaeb seems to surprise even himself. In a white button-down shirt. And a buzzcut. Roll credits

(Ethan Fowler, Not Dylan Jaeb)

*The end of the ender as seen in JAEB | DEBUT.

His boards and a poster are now available. The “Window” board bears his surname and a fried head. His “Debut” model has a fried ascending body, geometric patterns, and a pixelated expressive symbol that looks like a vaporwave Mercedes Benz logo. Dylan Jaeb is on Quasi and a few days in, it feels like he’s always been on Quasi.

As Fusili Grind noted in a recent livestream (subscribe to his channel), “Dylan Jaeb is deftly shaking off his Mike Mo.” Exciting stuff—let’s just hope he never has a rocker phase.

“Wipe the last haole the fuck off our turf!”