Falling or failing

WRITING ON THE WALL

Fart McGee was angry. Angry enough to create a pseudonymous account on LinkedIn under the name Fart McGee. On their profile under “experience,” they claimed to work for Lakai Limited Footwear as a “coroner.” With that handle and ominous role assumed, McGee got to work. In the comments of a months-old post from the newly minted CEO of Lakai, Marc Roca, who celebrated his acquisition of the ailing shoe company from Japanese brand management company TSI Holdings in September of 2024, was a trail of venom. 

Much had changed between Roca’s post and McGee’s many, including Roca’s post itself. Initially, it thanked Lakai co-founders and professional skateboarding royalty, Rick Howard and Mike Carroll, who Roca claimed gave him their blessing and that the duo would remain a part of the company's future. 

Roca told the Spanish newsletter The GuiriKnowsPost that "[Howard and Carroll] never really left [the company], but it is true that now they will have a greater presence in the day-to-day running of the brand... especially in product creation. Lakai cannot be understood without Rick and Mike." That quote would turn prophetic, as a few weeks later it was revealed that Roca axed the co-founders and the entirety of the skate team would follow, nixing the new CEO's pledge to not only build out the current roster but support them in a more robust fashion with new contracts, salaries, and the promise of multiple new video projects per year.

A little over a month after Roca’s original LinkedIn announcement, all references to the co-founders of his new company were edited out. Lakai, as it had once been understood, was no more. 

It was too cold outside to skate, so Tom Asta stayed in his vehicle. There, in the parking lot of his local skatepark in Reading, Pennsylvania, with a camera steadied on the dash, he spoke directly to his 45 thousand YouTube subscribers. This was a video he wasn’t sure he wanted to make but with the news of Etnies letting go of fellow professional skateboarders Chris Joslin and Aurélien Giraud, and rumours of turmoil at Emerica, he’d been getting a flood of messages from friends and fans who wanted to know if things were okay at éS, his sponsor of over a decade and the third of a trio of footwear brands that had originally started under the Sole Technology umbrella.

On May 24, 2024, the Nidecker Group, a Swiss action sports brand conglomerate that made its name in the snowboarding market, announced that it had acquired the staple Sole Technology brands and their snowboard boot company, ThirtyTwo. At the time, Sole Technology CEO Pierre André Senizergues expressed excitement about the deal and was quoted in a press release saying the Nidecker Group "share the same values, and they represent the next generation with the energy and scale necessary to ensure that our brands can thrive in new and exciting ways."

In a follow-up interview with Senizergues and the Nidecker brothers in Shop Eat Surf, Henry Nidecker was candid, sharing that he and his brothers, Xavier and Cédric, who together lead the Nidecker operation, “know nothing about product, sales, and marketing on the skateboarding side.” When asked if the brothers were concerned about acquiring the brands at such a tumultuous time for the skateboarding industry, Cédric said their decision-making, “...comes more from the heart than from the spreadsheet.”

Tom Asta’s YouTube video was uploaded on January 5 with the title “I no longer skate for eS and this is why….” In it, he details how the Nidecker group didn’t renew his contract, and when he asked why, éS brand manager, Kelly Hart, explained that even after ten years with the organization, the new owners didn’t see the “value” in what he brought to their company.

Bill Weiss had been employed by Dwindle Distribution in some form for nearly two decades. Formerly a professional skateboarder, he transitioned into the role of brand manager for legacy outfits like Blind Skateboards, founded upstarts like Madness Skateboards, and helped find and foster some of the biggest names in professional skateboarding’s past and present. In 2019, Dwindle was sold by Globe Footwear to Transom Capital Group for $1.5 million. Transom, a Los Angeles-based private equity firm, would bundle it into a trio of its action sports concerns, including Bravo Sports and Highline Industries. 

In an interview with Boardsport Source in April 2023, R.P. Bess, then the Vice President of Skateboarding at Highline and Dwindle, recounted the tough spot their businesses were left in following the explosion in demand for skateboarding hard goods and then the sharp, subsequent disinterest in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to extended production “bottleneck” delays, when the product finally arrived, they had no takers, and according to Bess, the companies were bleeding money entering 2023. This called for tough decisions to be made. 

“We were forced to reduce expenses, including staff, or face the consequences of living beyond our means.” Curious phrasing, considering Weiss would face consequences, getting laid off in January of 2023 without "severance and none of the money they owed me," as he'd later tell Jenkem. In the aftermath, everyone from Dwindle president Bod Boyle and enjoi Skateboards frontman Louis Barletta left the company to join forces with Weiss and start Sidewalk Skateboard Distribution and its suite of new brands. The majority of Dwindle’s sponsored riders followed suit. Bess lamented how their decision-making had sparked “a lot of negative comments regarding what we did. Unfortunately, there was no other way forward.”

“Are you stupid? Honest question.” Fart McGee asked one commenter on Marc Roca’s LinkedIn post who had the temerity to congratulate the businessman.

“...god I utterly despise people like you and Marc,” McGee snapped at another who called the deal a “Win for skateboarding.” 

McGee swung wildly against the well-wishes from various business partners, analysts, and managing directors.

“I love how the only people who think this is a good thing are non-skater finance chodes that are playing money games in an industry they don’t know, don’t understand, and don’t belong in.” The layoffs couldn’t have been known to the commenters at the time, but it didn’t matter to McGee.

“...who cares about those poor scumbags? certainly not you finance cucks bc you’re too busy jerking each other off about money rather than giving a shit about the people y’all just put out of a job bc that doesn’t affect your bottom line. Y’all are worthless gross humans. Money sucking scum.”

A CYCLICAL SICKNESS

None of this is new, in business or the business of skateboarding. The booms, busts, acquisitions, private equity pilferings, layoffs, or the disconnect between the core audience of skateboarders and the people selling them products. These are all a part of a pattern that has repeated in earnest throughout most of skateboarding’s brief and bumpy history. Thomas A. Kemp, an economist, skateboarder, and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, describes it as a cycle in his paper “Weak Sauce: Authenticity, Selling Out, and the Skateboard Industry: A Study in Community Resiliency.”

Somewhat parallel to the historical rise and fall of… skateboarding itself, the industry has experienced a regular churn of firms — both in sales and cultural relevance. The churn of industry, however, is only sometimes driven by general social interest. More frequently, it is driven by forces within the core community of active participants… 

This lifecycle begins with leading skateboarders breaking away from an existing company. Often, this break is associated with claims that the company has become too “corporate” (or similar). This claim is arguably correct in some cases, while it is largely fiction in others. The social capital of these skateboarders is transferred — temporarily — to these new skater-owned companies. Over time, relatively strong sales from these new companies lead to an increase in intangible value to build up. Company owners, therefore, become increasingly incentivized to “sell-out” the brand to more significant interests outside the core of active users. That is, to sell out the brand’s intangible value to outsiders. 

This phenomenon, as Kemp notes in his paper, “is well-known among long-term skateboarders.” In 1998, Steven Rocco and Rodney Mullen “sold majority ownership of World Industries brand to a private equity firm… while retaining management positions.” Four years later, Globe purchased it for approximately 46 million USD. Its value would crater and in the years since, the company has been picked up and passed around by a variety of private equity concerns, sporting goods conglomerates, and as of September 2024, it is in the hands of SeaJack LLC, the parent company of brands with names like Flojos, Volatile, and Sbicca.

That World Industries still exists, strung along like a corpse in its decrepit department store bargain-bin form, is a reminder that messy sales like Lakai’s, layoffs like those at Sole Technology’s former properties, and private equity destruction like that wrought on Dwindle are familiar territory. However, there remains a pervasive sense that things are not well in the skateboarding industry. 

Behemoths like Vans Footwear and Supreme have continued to whiff on their financial targets in recent years, leading to constant corporate restructuring and outright sales. There are seemingly seasonal layoffs of team riders and staff at DC Shoes, Nike SB, Converse, and more. Board brands like Alltimers, Umaverse, and Isle can no longer cut it. Most sponsored skateboarders make little to nothing from their brand-name benefactors, with many taking on part-time or full-time work to support their skateboarding careers.

Even the non-endemic, corporate leech wing of the industry is faltering. Liberated Brands Group, which had previously licensed Volcom, Element, and later DC, RVCA, Billabong, and Element from Authentic Brands Group in September of 2023, had those licenses pulled shortly after in December 2024. In February 2025, Liberated filed for bankruptcy, closed all its brick-and-mortar stores, and laid off more than 1,400 employees. Whatever is left of those brands is now at the whim of whoever Authentic licenses them out to next.

That’s what raises concern: these are not isolated incidents. They continue to happen, month after month. It’s a somewhat confusing reality given that skateboarding’s public profile and cultural relevance is as high as it has ever been — from opening up subsequent Olympic games to PROs walking runways at Paris Fashion Week — and exists in a period when, at least according to some market analysis (whose mileage may vary), the most people ever are riding skateboards and the total market is valued somewhere around 3 billion dollars.

It’s unclear why that hasn’t borne out into financial success for more companies. Some have cited retail's inability to compete with online shopping and skateboarding brands' slow uptake of e-commerce as a major blow, as well as fast fashion pulling customers away from legacy skate brands’ apparel arms. Others, including Don Brown, a former professional skateboarder and Senior Vice President of Marketing at Sole Technology, who has stayed on through the Nidecker Group acquisition, think an oversaturation of the market has played a factor. From the “athletic brands coming in and creating a complacent shoe wall that has the same look as the local Footlocker,” to the influx of upstart companies diluting one another’s bottom line due to an excess of choice, to “influencers building up huge audiences and then selling directly to [them] with their own brands, which are taking away from a lot of the [traditional] brands out there.”

The latter can be hard to take stock of for the core community, which doesn’t often stray from the insular inner circle of skateboarding media, brands, and culture, which could be accurately called the mainstream. Brown recalls going to a trade show in 2016 and being among “top retailers from around the country” who were, even then, commiserating about the state of the industry and asking them if they had heard of Andy Schrock. 

Schrock, a YouTuber with over six million subscribers, whose oeuvre includes incredibly popular instructional skateboarding videos as well as bog standard algorithmic pablum like “FATHER SON HOUSE BASEBALL” — which has 158 million views — is also the co-owner of ReVive Skateboards. According to Brown, none of the retailers were familiar with Schrock and ReVive, or that ReVive was rumoured to have outsold every other skateboard brand that year thanks to its direct-to-consumer model supercharged by Schrock's massive and loyal YouTube audience.

Brown doesn’t have an issue with figures or entities like Schrock and ReVive, saying, “Skateboarding will always evolve and it’s important that it challenges the status quo.” But, in his view, “everyone has to look at it as, how do I do a better job to keep my customers or keep my business intact in the most ethical way possible to where I'm not fucking up the ecosystem too much? How do we keep skate shops around the world in business since they represent the voice of the community? How do we make sure that we’re always giving back to the culture and keeping the true spirit of skateboarding alive?" 

That’s a big ask for people just trying to keep their businesses and livelihoods intact, which Brown is aware of. He is also aware that the landscape has transformed in our hyper-connected digital age, where skateboarding has broken containment from its blinkered beginnings and is more and more defined by the individual consumer and not whoever is at the helm of the industry. “What is the true spirit of skateboarding? What I know it as is different from what that 15-year-old kid buying a skateboard for the first time thinks it is today,” Brown says.

However, even ReVive is struggling. In a YouTube upload from November 2024 titled “The Beginning Of the End,” Schrock claims that due to slumping sales, his business had to consolidate warehouses, nearly closed the indoor skatepark where they produce most of their online content, and had even planned on winding ReVive down entirely before a sudden uptick in sales gave them a “beacon of hope.” It’s hard to know how much of this is true given that YouTube personalities regularly manufacture stakes to keep audiences tuned in (Schrock repeatedly tells his viewers in his November update that each purchase from the ReVive webstore “literally keeps the lights on”), but however dire, it shows that not even the purported disruptors are safe.

The whiplash that was the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic also can’t be ignored. When isolating and “pods” of close relations were still encouraged, skateboarding, a physical activity that can be done outdoors and at a distance, exploded in popularity, and skateboarding companies responded.

“I give the industry a lot of credit, frankly.” Thomas Kemp told me from his office in Wisconsin. “I think we're all aware of the problems of 2020, right? So everything was sold out for a period of time and nobody could get anything. But the industry was pretty quick, and probably quicker than many other industries, at realizing that there was all this demand out there and responded with a lot of product. So they met that demand, pretty well.” What the industry didn’t anticipate was the drop-off in that demand. 

As R.P. Bess told Boardsport Source of Dwindle's woes, “We expanded rapidly in the Covid years; and yet, like most, if not all, in our industry and the general consumer products industries, we had supply chain bottlenecks due to port and factory closures and shipping containers being scarce.” 

When their orders finally did arrive, “multiple seasons of goods showed up within months of each other, with some being very late.” That left retailers in a position where they could no longer accept or afford all of their previous product bookings. “You can imagine with the size of the three companies [Bravo, Highline, Dwindle] and the demand at the height of Covid and then the slowdown at retail, we were, and are, left with a lot of inventory. I don’t think anyone expected it to slow down as much as it has.”

Don Brown remembers talking to one international distributor who told him they had “enough inventory to last seven to ten years.” This was a common theme from companies with “advantageous” positions in the face of pandemic-related lockdowns. Tech, direct-to-consumer businesses, sporting goods outfits, and the like acted quickly to capitalize on people’s need to stay indoors and apart while out, spending and expanding, as though that interest and circumstance would remain as they were.

It was an immensely challenging time. Nothing was certain, not even the uncertainty, so why not strike while the opportunity seemed hot? Most businesses were lucky if they qualified for loans or grants to pay staff while their offices and storefronts were forced to close down. 

In the United States, over 11 million businesses received Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans. The PPP program was created by the federal government to support small businesses with 500 employees or fewer to keep those employees on payroll. It’s likely that this program, and the fact that the loans were eligible to be forgiven, saved a good many of them. A number of notable skateboarding companies also received PPP loans. 

An anonymous source who works in the skateboarding industry and is concerned about the public’s lack of understanding of its inner workings sent me a spreadsheet they compiled that tracks skateboarding-related brands and their PPP loans. They believe that the loans may have acted as a catalyst for some companies, allowing them to over-order and, as the source says is rumoured, purchase production time from multiple board manufacturers at once, contributing both to the production backlog and wait times that put other brands and vendors in a crunch.

As it stands, and without access to the relevant financial information, there’s no proof that any company spent their PPP loans on anything besides the allowable payroll and operational costs. Even if they had, there are no signs that they were of any help beyond keeping the lights on.

Bravo Sports, for instance, was approved for a $1,517,993 USD loan in April 2020. It’s unclear if any of that made its way to subsidiaries like Dwindle. One assumes not, given Bill Weiss told Jenkem that his final months at the company were spent “chasing the money that was owed to [my team riders].” Sole Technology took in two separate loans, one in April 2020 and another in February 2021, for a total of $2,071,208 USD. They would sell to the Nidecker Group in May of 2024. NHS, Inc. took in a substantial $2,156,726 in 2020. A few years later, they would cut most of the Krux Trucks team and lay off brand manager Alex White.

Primitive Skateboards received $726,200 USD, which is more than the loans of Crailtap, Baker Boys Distribution, Tum Yeto, Welcome Skateboards, Habitat Skateboards, Zero Skateboards, Quasi Skateboards, and Frog Skateboards combined. Despite that disparity, which would suggest the size and success of the brand, Primitive figurehead Paul Rodriguez shared on a podcast with Mikey Taylor in March of 2024 that his company is merely keeping its head above water, saying, “We’re still grinding [every day], just trying to keep everything operating smoothly.”

That “grinding” has taken on a particular form for Primitive and other companies like Santa Cruz Skateboards and Welcome, whose catalogues are increasingly buttressed by collaborations with other brands or licensed intellectual properties. While there isn’t available sales data on the results of say, Santa Cruz’s collaborations with Star Wars or Godzilla, or Welcome’s with Batman or Britney Spears, Glynn Hyland, Primitive’s Marketing Operations Manager, states on his LinkedIn page that the brand’s collaboration with the classic anime series Dragon Ball Z “delivered millions in sales and led to larger partnerships including Disney, The Cartoon Network, and Funimation.”

As a marketing strategy, these are products meant to appeal beyond the regular consumer base and, specifically, to collectors who rush to buy and hoard or buy and resell for incredible amounts.

While the core skateboarding community may find these collaborations increasingly off-putting, inching Primitive ever closer to the end of Kemp’s brand lifecycle diagram, who can blame either party? Again, these are companies simply trying to make it work in an increasingly hostile market, and core consumers are rightfully tired of the inauthentic ends that brands have turned toward.

Skate shops have also been forced to adapt. In a roundtable discussion between shop owners from across Europe published by Bubble Magazine, Martin Schreiber, Michael Paul, and Dave Mackey of Bonkers (Frankfurt), Stil Laden (Vienna), and Lost Art (Liverpool), respectively, detail the lengths they’ve had to go to to survive.

We’ve been a tiny store in a large independent mall. We’ve been a standalone store with three huge windows, a big white box filled with lots of product. And we’ve been a small, hidden away, speakeasy style buzzer above a pub store. And we’ve also been, now in its current interpretation, an event space coffee shop, skate shop. So we’ve definitely adapted and changed our business model slightly, but always with the same central thought and feeling that we are here for our community.

A skate shop having to become more than a skate shop is not a new development, as Mackey details above, but it has become something of a requirement in recent years. That is in part due to the growing disconnect between the skate industry, retailers, and consumers, the rise of e-commerce, and the crushing combination of increasing manufacturing and shipping costs. Most recently, the threat of tariffs from an increasingly erratic and isolationist Trump administration hangs over the necks of those in the industry, where materials and production are primarily sourced outside of the United States, like a sword. 

Who knows how many businesses blanket tariffs could leave vulnerable to the vultures that were already circling?

Those vultures take the shape of, as they most often do in our contemporary capitalist society, private equity firms and similar corporate interests whose entire purpose is to wring as much money as possible from a struggling asset before selling off its bones. Private equity has destroyed or maimed everything from Dwindle to Toys ‘R’ Us, Party City, Hooters, the journalism and publishing industry, and local fire departments. 

Those byzantine brand licensing and licensee operations with villainously ironic names like Authentic Brands Group and the now-defunct Liberated Brands pick up struggling companies on the cheap and try to maximize profits through various cost-cutting schemes and exploitative business models that dilute and ruin what it was that made a brand “authentic” and attractive to consumers in the first place.

These companies hold onto what’s left of some of skateboarding’s oldest and most beloved brands. To them, those businesses, their employees, history, and place in the culture are nothing more than a cell in a spreadsheet — a keystroke away from deletion.

“It’s not the same industry that it was in the ‘90s and 2000s,” Sole Technology CEO Pierre André Senizergues told Shop Eat Surf following the sale of the brands he helped create. “I think with all the acquisitions and licensing going on, it’s losing its soul in a sense.”

DEEP IN THE VALLEY

Is the skateboarding industry finally hitting a long-delayed depression? Once cyclical, these slumps defined it from the ‘70s until the late ‘90s. What finally lifted and stabilized the industry as Y2K reared was a confluence of the X Games, the success of the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater videogame franchise, and popular culture’s recognition of the market opportunity skateboarding presented. These were revolutionary moments that elevated skateboarding itself and inspired millions of people to give it a try. 

What could we consider moments of revolution since? Skateboarding’s inclusion in the Olympics, starting with the Tokyo 2020 games, fits the bill. Being on the world stage has certainly solidified skateboarding as a “sport” in the minds of mainstream media and local municipalities, who are increasingly allocating money toward the construction of skateparks in communities around the world.

The pandemic-related boom could also be seen as a revolutionary event, but the steep decline in demand that followed would seem to negate the argument. Don Brown believes the issue is partly a problem with skateboarding’s “evolution” as a product, saying the skateboard’s surge and fall in 2020 and 2021 likely contributed to it becoming akin to a “tennis racket” in many consumers’ eyes — something to pick up on a whim, swing around a few times, and then forget about in the garage. These are consumers who "like skateboarding, but don’t define themselves as skateboarders."

“There hasn't been a lot of evolution in the actual products or marketing hype of the skateboard to excite people [in recent years],” Brown says. Previous generations experienced “elevational evolution," like how "[the] ‘60s went from DIY boards to manufactured skateboards, the ‘70s transitioned from clay wheels to urethane and loose ball bearings to sealed, the ’80s went from 7-inch decks to 10-inch decks and skate apparel created ‘lifestyle’ appeal for non-skaters to buy into. The ‘90s [skate industry] imploded and [led to] the biggest growth, specifically, in skater-owned footwear companies like etnies, éS, and Emerica. The 2000s had the X Games and THPS to take skateboarding to new heights of mainstream acceptance. From 2010 onwards, there hasn’t been any remarkable innovation to bring in a new generation.”

Brown also thinks that the current level of skateboarding on display is so high and that there are so many talented skateboarders that it’s become difficult for people to develop attachments to individual skaters and personalities. “Now, when you watch Street League or the Olympics or whatever, you may see some eight-year-old kid spinning a 1080, and 99% of the people that see it won’t remember the kid's name.” 

With the decline of traditional print media and the media ecosystem’s fracture and dispersion toward social apps, there’s no longer a monolithic skate culture defined by a few magazines and heads of industry. That’s in line with the demise of the monoculture in general, which means it’s increasingly difficult for era-defining stars like a Chad Muska, who was a sales and marketing juggernaut, to emerge. Those transcendent characters built by the industry and its once-thriving media arm helped keep new skateboarders interested and invested in the culture after their initial introduction via Pro Skater, X Games, and the like.

The internet and social media’s cleaving of the monoculture has had obvious positive effects. It’s given space for women and gender-expansive skateboarders to connect, build followings online, and find a foothold in an industry that had historically ignored them, leaving untold amounts of money on the table in the process. It wasn’t until 2016 that major brands, mainly in the footwear realm, started adding women and gender-expansive people to their rosters with both regularity and a significant marketing push. That inclusion and exposure have had tangible, real-world effects. 

While it remains difficult to find consistent and accurate data on skateboarding participation rates or the division of market shares, a 2023 report by GOSKATE, a skateboarding lesson provider, claimed that 40% of their new students in 2021 were women. It should be noted that the company released that data in a press release with the misleading title, “New Study Finds 40% of New Skateboarders are Women.” That was regurgitated as fact by everyone from NPR to market research firms, who didn’t differentiate between “number of new GOSKATE students” and “number of new skateboarders.”

However, that doesn’t mean the reality of their results is off-base. In 2022, The Duke of Edinburgh Award (DofE), a globe-spanning self-guided youth award program, announced that “The number of young women taking up skateboarding for their [DofE] has leapt by 800% over the last five years.” Additionally, a “2021 Skater Representation Survey” conducted by Mariah Davenport, whose purpose was to “[Centre] the perspective and experience of women & gender non-conforming skaters,” found that the demographic breakdown of a sample size of 2,284 skateboarders from across the United States was 43% men, 32% women, and 25% gender non-conforming. And, overall, in 2023, the Sports & Fitness Industry Association ranked skateboarding the 6th fastest growing sport in America.

Together, that tells us that there is, or at least was, an incredible swell of new potential consumers during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The industry certainly over-indexed itself on product in response to the general interest spike, but perhaps it should be asked who they were producing and marketing those products to.

Ashley Rehfeld, who served on the global brand team at Nike SB and later as the Marketing Director at Deluxe Distribution, believes the dip in demand was partly due to a missed opportunity. 

“There was a massive wave of new users entering skateboarding and we let them slip away. A lot of them were young kids, women, and older parents. We kind of just took their money and ignored them.”

Rehfeld says fixing such an oversight is not as simple as “[making] big ads for moms and all of that stuff.” It’s a structural concern. Addressing that has been a focal point of her career, as she’s helped usher Unity and THERE Skateboards — brands built by and around women and LGBTQ+ people — into the fold at Deluxe and was instrumental in REAL and Krooked Skateboards elevating their first-ever female PROs. She makes clear that the goal “wasn’t just about adding names to a roster — it was about backing an underserved group with signature products, meaningful ads, and video parts.” Incremental steps toward shifting the popular understanding of who skateboarding is for.

“We’ve built this castle with a moat around it to protect skateboarding culture, and in many ways, that’s been important. But on the business side, that moat has also kept new people out,” Rehfeld says, and as she breaks it down, it reads as painfully obvious: for a healthier industry that can not only survive but maintain and grow, efforts need to be made to expand the overall user base “so more people [become] skateboarders” who then purchase product, and that financial success will then allow for more skateboarders to “have jobs in skateboarding” and responsibly steward the culture.

Rehfeld argues that skateboarding is experiencing a mid-life crisis, which is at the root of much of the current tumult, especially on the hard goods side, where the companies that make up the core of the industry and maintain a grip on the majority of the market, were founded in the ‘90s and early aughts "by 20-somethings who saw a better way to do it.”

At the time, what we now consider legacy brands, were at the beginning of Kemp’s lifecycle, untested and their future unclear. Rehfeld says an element of “right place, right time” was central to those brands’ eventual success, but they also “took risks, made mistakes, and [ultimately] built something lasting because they were young, stubborn, and close to the culture.”

That loose configuration of teenagers and young adults would help construct the infrastructure, including everything from research and development to the production and distribution pipelines, for a multi-billion-dollar industry. “I always say, ‘You guys did the labour. You put in decades into this place.’ However, renewal and creating access to [that infrastructure] for new brands is really hard,” Rehfeld says. 

Perhaps most importantly, “Creative stagnation sets in when the people making decisions are no longer close to the culture they came up in." Rehfeld believes that contributes to a “total disconnect because [the industry leaders] have the experience and they have perspective, but that perspective is not as in line with the youthful perspective. Skateboarding relies on youth. Bottom line. So I think we're at a moment of [figuring out] how we are going to hand this off to younger people to keep this thing going.”

MAKE WAY FOR THE FUTURE

Falling isn’t a pleasant experience. There’s the realization that you’re going down, the anticipation of impact, and then, however far below it might be, the bottom. Once there, you take stock of the situation. Are you hurt? If so, how bad? Can you get up and shake it off? In the motivational poster tripe that the experience of the skateboarder is often framed: falling is integral. It makes you resilient. It’s what you do before getting up, trying again, and riding away.

However, if you don’t change what isn’t working, you will just keep falling. There’s only so much the body can take.

Much of what these conversations amount to is speculation — a communal feeling around in the dark and a struggle to stay afloat. Kemp sees this moment of uncertainty as a horizon of possibility. That skateboarding is poised for a refresh, much in the way that each depression in skateboarding’s previous lifecycles has led to a new interpretation and evolution of its practice and, in turn, its business. 

“What we call ‘skateboarding’ has been in [its current] mode since about '97, which is way longer than [any] of those previous stretches. So this is what I'm talking about when I'm talking about a refresh — a refresh of what skateboarding is itself. And to me, it looks like we're entering a sort of post-modern phase.”

Kemp believes this offers hope for the industry because “skateboarding as an activity isn't captured by disinterested parties.” It’s those skateboarders on the ground, pushing and redefining its limits, that speak to the core base of consumers. As long as “skateboarding or whatever constitutes the cutting edge of skateboarding is controlled by people who are passionate about the activity,” there’s room for optimism. 

That may be true, but as Rehfeld points out, for those on the cutting edge to truly break through, a succession plan is needed. That looks like legacy distributors bringing in new brands and creative voices that can both connect with the modern consumer base and expand it. That doesn’t mean removing and replacing the minds who helped build the modern skateboarding industry as we know it, but utilizing their experience more effectively in “advisory” roles. Rehfeld underscores that we’ve seen what happens when the reins aren’t passed on to younger generations who are truly invested in the future.

“[With] big corporate legacy surf brands, when the founders started retiring, they would sell their companies to a venture holding group. Historically, that venture holding group would then over-license those brands to complete dilution [and] almost non-existence… putting them in all of the wrong shops, [forgetting] how to stay in tune with the culture and marketplace.

“Now they don't exist — RVCA, Billabong, Volcom — like overnight. So you see these huge gaps in the industry. People can say, ‘Great, time for new [companies],’ but you have to understand those [legacy] brands own so much of these expensive [production and distribution] pipeline systems that it would just be better to keep those open and bring in new brands instead of [letting] them collapse completely and having to rebuild. My concern is that we're treading into that space right now within skateboarding.”

Brown agrees. “As long as the skate industry understands each generation of skateboarders has different wants and needs the future will be looking good. But, I’m not sure if the majority of the aging skateboard industry understands what the new generation wants and how to connect with them. With over 50% of the market being 6-24 years old, this could be a major issue for the long-term future. It’s time for the industry to allow the kids to drop in, create a fresh new future, and roll forward in the right direction.”

Succession won’t fix the immediate, compounding issues of inflation, looming tariffs, a fractured media ecosystem, and everything else, but it could help mitigate the effects. The industry has always had its struggles, but by all accounts, it’s reaching an inflection point. Companies are struggling, professional skateboarders aren’t getting paid, and “finance chodes” aren’t just at the door, they’re inside rooting through the silverware. In a post on Instagram, longtime industry figure Mike Sinclair captioned a video of a vast pile of firecrackers exploding in a violent plume, “The Skate Industry 2025.” 

If there is room for optimism, it can only be fulfilled by opportunity. A revolution, evolution — whatever you want to call it — is needed. Falling is different from failing; what separates them is the willingness to get up and try something new.