More interested question is will there be professional skateboarding like today in 5 years?
Today we have way too many companies and pros to give fuck about.. We have this divide between pro athletes who compete in street league, park series etc. and then we have the local smaller scenes around the world..
There will always be money in the upper ranks of endorsement deals but do we really need this many pros? I can easily see the big brands drop their most of their teams and only focusing on Nyjahs and Currens of the skate world.. But does Nike or Adidas really need to sponsor every shop sponsored local ripper? Yeah they are important part to the local scene but would it have any less impact on big companies profits if they didn't flow them some shoes? I feel like everybody already skates the same shit so I don't know how sponsoring some smaller brand skaters would have any affect on the sales of a big corpo which basically what they are in for, not for the culture but for the money.. I know if Nike pulled the plug on their flowpro/b-team lots of little cool companies would die too and skateboarding could slump pretty heavily..
In the same vein I'd say middle level hardgood companies are on the chipping block too.. We will have NHS, DLX and maybe Dwindle as the big distributors but the smaller ones like Theories, Habitat/Alien or Crailtap and such might not be big enough and at the same time too small to survive if the money dries for they shoe sponsors.. That's why atleast where I live small local brands thrive and succeed as they don't necessary need the money from big corpo to stay in business like some others too.. ..And if some big sporting goods company decided to make boards it would change this completely..
I don't know if I make any sense and I might have to open things up a little more but but, but I feel like there is some turmoil coming in the near future.. Sell out, cash in, get that budweiser check now this is the time tomorrow might be too late..
You bring up a lot of interesting points about the ecosystem of skateboarding. Especially how you see smaller companies dependent on large (shoe) corporations to basically subsidize their riders’ salaries.
I see this as both unnecessary and a basically negative thing.
Unnecessary reasoning first.
The majority of skateboardings brief existence it has not been directly dependent on outside funding, at least to the extremes you see it as. It has survived before Nike money, and will do so afterwards as well. We will just have to deal with the fallout that no, skaters are not basketball stars, and if we want skateboarding to continue to be skateboarding and not ice skating, we will have to live up to that fact.
The lifestyles of the richest skaters will drop, but it won’t mean much for the rest of us, other than there will be less scectacle contests/contest spectacles.
Because believe it or not, this corner of ultra-sponsorship breastfed skating is not the only model.
For example, there are kids around the world busting their asses off to buy plane tickets to race in events on most continents, without shoe sponsors. And the scene is thriving regardless. Downhill is growing DESPITE not having any of the funding we have. And it used to be that way in ‘regular’ skating, not that long ago.
(Edit- actually, it still is the lifeblood of the majority of skating, even competitively. Most contests, and the vast majority of radness and creativity happens locally, at the shop and independent skater level).
One more point is this, the negative effects.
Shoe/sports drink money depends overwhelmingly on non-skaters buying the product. And THOSE are the people the companies aim to please, not us. So when something as random as skating has been shoe-horned into a format from other lifeless sports with points and ‘crowd-pleasing tricks’, you have stripped away something very essential to skateboarding, in an effort to appeal to non-skaters.
Neil Blenders’ famous graffiti run said just as much about skating as him doing actual tricks.
But I’m sad that that spontaneity has no place on Dydrek-world. And it will be further marginalized the more non-skater dependent money is allowed to influence the ‘sport’.
But, a lot of regular skaters exist outside of that bubble. Probably most people on here. We will continue skating thru boom and bust.
Topic: Companies that won’t exist in 5 years? (Read 17004 times)