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
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
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
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.”
















































