HOW CORPORATIONS ARE CHANGING SKATEBOARDING AND WHY IT MATTERS

November 26, 2012/ / ARTICLES/ Comments: 292

In the past decade there has been a huge increase in the level of corporate involvement in skateboarding, and we may be returning to a form of skateboarding that Steve Rocco, Mike Vallely, Mark Gonzales, and others desperately tried to escape in the early 1990’s.

New members within the skate community, like Eric Wiseman, Phil Knight, Herbert Hainer, the Maloofs, Gary Ream, William Sweedler, Neil Cole, and Andrew Kline, are all challenging what it means to be a skateboarder and how we skateboard. These men (that have probably never stepped foot on a skateboard) run or are the money behind VF Corp [Vans], Nike, Adidas, Maloof Money Cup, Woodward, Sequential Brands [DVS], Iconix [Zoo York], and Park Lane Sports Investment Banking [Street League]. Through their economic capital, and power outside of skateboarding they have been able to force their way into powerful positions within skateboarding and are able to directly profit off of our activity. Should we care if non-skaters are allowed to hold powerful positions in our culture? Should we care if skaters associate with these people and buy their products? Will it change how we skateboard, how we view ourselves, and how we view the world?

iconix brand - owns zoo york, rocawear, ed hardy and many more / photo: rob tannenbaum

Of course! As skateboarders we all share social space and none of us exist in a vacuum (in some way all of our actions affect the skate culture as a whole and every skater within it). Within this social space our collective actions have produced and emphasized how important creativity, autonomy, cooperation, and fun are within skateboarding. These values make up the dominant ideology within skateboarding, which shapes our identities, how we view the world and how we act within it. But as more and more corporations enter the activity, they are challenging and attempting to shift the dominant ideology and performance of skateboarding into something that allows them to rationally fulfill their sole purpose: the pursuit of profit. If they are successful it may not change the ideology or performance of skaters like myself that have been involved in the activity for many years, but it will change the ideology, the space, and economics of skateboarding for younger skaters, and alienate older skaters from a social world they helped create and maintain until it was invaded by and sold to outsiders.

Many of these outsiders are attempting to run skateboarding with the same principles that drive many modern corporations, which are completely incompatible with street-skating as we know it. As George Ritzer points out in The McDonaldization of Society, businesses attempt to operate in an extremely efficient fashion. They focus on making everything quantifiable (skatemetrics) rather than focusing on creating subjective quality (“best” video part), they want everything to be predictable (i.e. standardized, the same experience every time), and they want all aspects of a business or activity to be easily controlled, basically the antithesis of what skateboarding is today. As the corporation’s values become more and more apart of skateboarding and influence the ideologies of individual skaters, the greater the potential that our activity will fundamentally change. Skateboarding won’t be like the activity we all know today, instead it will have an ideology and a performance similar to that of football, or, as Rob Dyrdek is praying for, the UFC.

If corporations continue to gain influence within our culture the dominant form of skateboarding may move from the streets, where it is difficult to control or directly profit off of, into the contained space of the park. Additionally the skate video may also fall to the wayside. Why spend the money to send a skate team to Barcelona for three weeks to film ten tricks, when you can fly one skater to Gilbert, AZ for a couple of days and have your logo seen throughout the world on ESPN?

Instead of inefficiently, creatively, and collaboratively creating skate videos, skaters will efficiently and competitively enter into the highly predictable, standardized, quantifiable, and controllable world of mega-contests. In this social-world, there is no time for a skater to push himself spending hours trying to land a trick, because it is inefficient. There is little room for creativity (i.e. no backside 50-50 finger-flip) because, “it isn’t good strategy.” And there is no reason to seek out new skate spots as it more efficient for all skate contests to take place in the same stylized spaces. Whether you are in Gilbert or Toronto you can watch Chaz Ortiz jump down the exact same 10 stair. If corporate skating begins to dominate there will be little room left for the skating that Louie Barletta, Chris “Mango” Milic, or Jeff Stevens do, there will only be room for the (amazing, but) standardized and predictable skating of Greg Lutzka, Ryan Sheckler, and Nyjah Houston.

”Skateboarding is separating into two poles: one where a few businesses and a very small group of skaters are making lots of money, while everyone else is fucked.”

A strong corporate presence within our culture will change the economics of skateboarding. As we have seen in the past seven years, Nike and Adidas’s presence has escalated the number of skater owned skate shoe companies that have gone out of business, which limits the ability of skaters to influence skateboarding. Skater owned companies are in dire economic situations, not because of natural fluctuations within the skateboard market, but because of the imbalance of economic power within skateboarding that is evident in a post-Consolidunk era.

The entrance of Nike, Adidas, and other mega-corporations, has created a situation similar to what many popular but small coffee shops faced when dealing with Starbucks. Starbucks would open across the street from a local coffee shop, and even if the local coffee shop was doing well prior to Starbucks entrance, the small shops couldn’t afford to operate in such close proximity to a Starbucks “Café,” which could afford to run at a loss, dump huge amounts of money into advertisements and promotions, and do huge amounts of market research on potential customers because of its deep pockets. Eventually the small café would go under, which allowed Starbucks to dominate the local market, not because their product was superior, but because of their economic might (see Naomi Klien’s book No Logo and Ocean Howell’s “Extreme Market Research”).

photo: jared wickerham

Corporations are also changing the idea of what skaters think they deserve to be paid, how much profit companies… err shareholders should expect to profit off them, and how little corporations need to invest into the culture as a whole. It has become “common sense” that Chris Cole and other mega-stars deserve to make an average of $40,000 per month, while many pros pull a salary much closer to $2000 a month, or are being dropped in order to pay for the mega-stars contracts. It has become reasonable that the publicly traded corporation Zumiez does hundreds of millions in sales in each year, but doesn’t sponsor one skater.

And we are all amazed that the Maloofs are willing to put up a $500,000 cash prize, when in reality $500,000 is nothing when we consider the fact that the Maloof family is worth approximately 1 billion! 500k is 1/2000 of their net worth. This is the same as if the average American family (net worth 77K) was to “give away” $15 (I put give away in quotes since the Maloofs profit off the Money Cup and do not lose money). It seems that skateboarding is separating into two poles: one where a few businesses and a very small group of skaters are making lots of money, while everyone else is fucked. Sadly, our new ideology allows us to see this as normal, when in reality this is a very unusual state of affairs for skateboarding.

all these brands are owned by VF corp

Finally, the large corporations buying, selling, and trading skate companies drastically affects the structure of the skateboard world. We recently saw this when Mark Ecko sold Zoo York to Iconix, who then decided it would improve their bottom line if they abandoned Zoo York’s “skate program” and dumped some of their riders.

Another example of the consequences of skateboard companies being bought and sold as commodities instead of being treated as pillars within the skateboard community is VF Corp’s acquisition of Timberland. VF Corp recently purchased Timberland, which had owned Ipath. A few months before VF Corp acquired Timberland Ipath was sold to Klone Lab, which lead to the restructuring of Ipath and the loss of a good portion of the team (as we see with Birdhouse’s new pro Ben Raybourn, the up-coming ams Ryan Reyes, Ryan Lay, and many others all leaving the company).

Corporations only value skate-companies and skateboarders in relation to how much capital they can generate for a group of shareholders, instead of valuing them as important parts of our culture. In the world of corporate skateboarding, skate-companies and skaters are simply commodities that are meant to be bought, profited from, and then thrown away.

If the corporations continue to increase their hold of skateboarding the ramifications for skateboarding in terms of culture, space, and economics will be huge. Instead of waiting to see Mango’s next creative part, the hijinks of the Baker Boys or the adventure of Wallner’s next skate-documentary we will be stuck watching Alex Klein attempt to sell competitive skateboarding to outsiders and Sheckler win at skateboarding by being the “best”. Rather than being anomalies these skaters will become the norm if we return to the world of corporate skateboarding, and we will end up in a worse spot than we were in the 1980s when Vallely, Rocco, Gonzales, and others all first rebelled against corporate control.

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Comments

  1. theodore

    November 28, 2012 12:32 am

    i juzz wunt 2 say that sk8boarding is awsume n i am going to one day be the best sk8r n im going to make millions. i wunt 2 b the first sk8r sponcered by both monster and redbull ( at the same time ) be groundbreaking stuff , 4 real y can’t you have more than 1 sponsor for the same stuff? grow up yall n understand money = life, and sk8n is a sport, we r athletic .n why shouldnt crizz cole make 40k a month when he is risking his life on handrailz and a lawyer is making even more money sitting safely in a desk LOL. sk8n is cool n hardcore risk taking hard work, its an extreme job dat deserves extreme cash. plus, the monster logo looks friggin sweet, who wouldnt want to rep that on their shirts n make money doing so? big companies pay good n sk8r owned stuff iz alrite if u wunt 2 be a pro sk8r and have a 10″ tv and a 1 room apartment. but hardcore sk8n isnt easy n it shuld reward u wit 3 70″ tvs in 3d and a 3 story mansion and a ashton martin brand new off da lot

  2. LurkerLarry

    November 28, 2012 1:15 am

    Rocco wasn’t fighting the corporatization of skateboarding…he was just trying to topple the old school guard of Powell Peralta and similar companies more than anything else. As far as I know, Powell has always been and remains an independent entity, same with Santa Cruz and other brands that had a stronghold on sales in the late 80s when Rocco started his division of SMA (that later turned into World and the empire associated with it). It’s true that George Powell was part owner but when Rocco went on the attack, Stacy Peralta was still on board, which made it very much a ‘skater owned company.’ It wasn’t like Rocco was battling Nike or AT&T so that analogy is out of context with the rest of the article.

    Skateboarding is always going to be what the kids decide it will be…the skaters in the street don’t care that Monster or Red Bull are pouring buckets of money into it. They’re removed from the business and politics of the industry. Their parents don’t care whether the boards they’re buying are from China or Santa Barbara, Mexico or Bangladesh. And that’s probably the real reason things are so convoluted: American consumers don’t give a shit and that affects everything from the top to the bottom as far as American industry and business are concerned.

    Don’t try to tell me you’re a ‘core’ company if you offer up a line of products made in China by people who don’t even know what a skateboard is. I don’t care if you’re an owner who skates if you’re making shitty products overseas. If you expect people to respect your station as a business, then respect the fact that sending production offshore damages the American economy overall. If your argument is that you can’t make money by paying people to make a skateboard deck in America, then just realize that the same money you’re trying to get is the same money that Monster or VF Corp. is trying to get. Everyone on the chain is trying to increase the bottom line, they justify it all by suggesting that they have to make money and that’s where skateboarding gets lost.

    You can’t just isolate corporate companies and say, ‘These are bad’ because it’s a very long chain that goes from the consumer (the average kid skater and his parents who are supporting him) all the way up to the corporate boardrooms. Some would argue that the corporate money makes for more opportunity in skateboarding (not just for pros, but as the market grows, there is more room for competition and more companies) but who are we fooling? Skateboarding is a microcosm of the real world and American consumers care about one thing: low prices and money. Just ask Walmart. And who can give people low prices and pay out large sums of money? Huge corporations. They run everything and skateboarding isn’t this little tea party that many people want to make it out to be anymore. If it has dollar potential, it will get siphoned up like every other market by one of the larger corporations and they will essentially own it.

    In a perfect world, you get to own what you create…the innovators and veterans would have the market cornered and the respect they deserve. Skateboarding could be this happy collective of friendly competitors, free of market trends and cut-throat business. That’s not the way things are, unfortunately and very, very few in the skateboard industry are innocent from what I can tell. Sending production to China was the first sign that the ‘core’ industry was slitting its own throat and they have nobody but themselves to blame for that. When an industry decides collectively that what it’s producing is so unimportant that it can be made alongside toys and produced by people who have never ridden a skateboard, then what you’re doing is devaluing the actual worth of what you’re selling. You’re basically saying, ‘Oh, these things? Anyone can make these. Mine are made in China by someone who has no idea who Eric Koston is and has never stood on a skateboard.’ And all the companies thought that was a wise move? But in the ‘core’ industry, it’s not greed to want to make $8 more per deck and keep that margin while producing a sub-standard quality product.
    It’s only greed if it’s done by someone who hasn’t ridden a skateboard, right?

    Everything that becomes popular is eventually bought by the highest bidder. Welcome to capitalism and the free market. And people have a right to despise it all. I do. Skateboarding isn’t NFL or NBL or UFC. Give it another ten years. It most certainly will be and everyone from the kid skater on the street to the company owner who has been skating for 20 years will play a role in it becoming just that because when it comes to money in America, nobody wants to get left behind and most will sell their very souls if given the opportunity. Skateboarding companies aren’t immune to greed. That’s for sure. As far as Rob Dyrdek and the Street League, he likely realizes this and I’d rather see him make money off of it than a non-skaters so good for him. He put in his time and dedication…let him have a seat at the table and make some of the dough.

    Skateboarding as you grew up with it has changed dramatically because the America you grew up in has changed dramatically. And until the people are smart enough to reclaim that aspect of the country and decide that maybe corporations don’t have America’s best interests in mind, it will remain that way, sadly.

  3. Shen

    November 28, 2012 4:08 am

    I think capitalism is slowly ruining every aspect of human culture- and that worries me. What will be left if everything becomes corporate? The music industry is well down the shitter, and just about anything you can think of that isn’t an extremely fringe activity is headed that same way. We need some fucking Moderation, and to stop creating these mega celebrities, as they soak up a ridiculous amount of money that could be used to support actual talent. Just look at the enormous divide between mainstream and independent, that is surely a warning sign.

    Capitalism is getting too powerful. This is playing with fire.

  4. BOBBY

    November 28, 2012 9:49 am

    VANs is and has been the most core com-any as can be for their size. They were there in the beginning, and they are in the mix, hands on every single day. Steve VanDoren and his daughter Kristy can always be seen with the skaters, listening to them, and giving back to the culture in a way that no other corporate skate company does. If you don’t know or realize this, then you either are supider than shit, or aren’t a skater

    Well Said

    Also, not reading through every comment, but Andrew Klein is in Strife.

    And big deal if big corps are putting money into skating. Look at all the exposure it gets now.

    I know some of you kids are not a day older than 14 & I get the f**k these companies. I was once your age as well.

    And what is wrong making bank while doing what you love?

    You think it is easy living on no money? Wait until you see.

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