Just for comparison: another very large skate-shoe brand that we all know, DC, has only 18 skaters on their pro-team.Ĭompanies of this size are a net negative to skateboarding. In the case of Nike, they have the expendable capital to offer amazing sponsorship deals, which is why, to date, there are 55 skaters on their pro-team (and this is without taking into consideration the Converse team, which Nike also owns). They take a fat-ass portion of the skate product-distributing pie. This has taken a toll on the local skate shop and ruins the circulation of money within the skate-market. ![]() Zumiez is an explicit example of this, they are in every single state in the country, there are over 600 stores in America. Also, what elicits this response to these brands in particular (Zumiez and Nike) is the tendency for companies with a lot of capital to quasi-monopolize markets. This argument is simple: if anyone should be making money off skateboarding, it should be skateboarders if anyone should determine the course of skateboarding, it should be skateboarders. These simple statements disclose that these people want skater-involvement in the brands that make skate-merchandise, as well as skater-involvement in who distributes the skate merchandise (skate shops). This is the typical sentiment of, “fuck Zumiez, support the local shop” or, “fuck Nike, them executives don’t skate”. company is pretty shitty, outsourcing jobs leads to a lack of manufacturing jobs here in America.īut let’s further examine the local/ skater-owned argument. Also, the fact that its factories exists outside of the U.S. This is opposed by the support local/ support skater-owned movement that contends that because the skateboarding market is solely for skateboarders, it should logically be run by skateboarders.Įxisting outside of these ideological oppositions is the ethical argument that Nike is a billion-dollar company that literally has fucking sweatshops and pays below-poverty wages. He is also mostly talking about taking non-skateboarding related sponsorships (that do not produce any skate-merchandise, placing them outside of the ‘skate market’ I’m discussing, which is an entirely different issue from the one at hand). I’m just using him as an example of this position because he has presented some of the most coherent arguments for corporate-skate relations. I’m not personally attacking Tony Hawk I respect him as a skateboarder and do not blame him for taking opportunities as they were presented (most will act according to their family's interest, and that’s probably a good thing). The Tony Hawk-Olympics-corporate-friendly approach that insist that the point of skateboarding is to disseminate the activity to as many people as possible, and posit that these companies contribute, rather than detract from skateboarding, providing better skateparks and a general influx of money and interest. Now, this is where two ideologies within skateboarding form. And there is no way to determine which company makes the most in skateboarding or establish a ranking system (or at least, I’m not going to do that) but these are companies that make billions of dollars each year from skateboarding. ![]() Now these aren’t the only billion-dollar companies in skateboarding, Supreme is another notable billion-dollar brand. These are both multi-billion-dollar companies. These questions effectively boil down to this: Who the fuck is making money off skateboarding? Since we all love skateboarding, we have an implicit reliance on the market that produces the products that enable us to skate, and this leads us to a question often expressed within skateboarding (although not normally in these terms): Who are the ones that own the means of production to produce these commodities that we rely on? And who do we want to own the means of production to produce these commodities? Who distributes these commodities within the marketplace (skate shops)? And what distributors (skate shops) do we want to distribute the commodities within the marketplace? Since most skateboarders do not produce their own skateboards, this places them in a market as consumer, and renders skateboards, and other essential products, as commodities existing within a market. And integral to the act of skateboarding, is the material-object of a skateboard (as well as the accompanying objects that comprise what is considered ‘essential’ to a skateboarder: shoes and other apparel). Skateboarding is an activity that we all, as readers of this magazine, love and likely participate in.
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