Crailtap is low hanging fruit at this point.
My head spins when I think about the current state of eS. They were monumentally influential in their heyday and consistently had a good team before their "hiatus". They let people like Rick McCrank, Mike Anderson, and Bobby Worrest (who made Venture trucks cool again) slip away from their fingers, and in turn their posterboy now is fucking Kelly Hart. They sorta try to market as a "nostalgia brand", but they fuck up their reissues and alienate the few people who would actually be interested in them in the first place. Lately it seems like they care more to market their team of like 20 years ago than they do their team now. How are they not marketing the fuck out of Wade Desarmo or Tom Asta? Give them shoes. Film a promo. Do fucking ANYTHING to make people give a shit. Don't just bank on Menikmati nostalgia if nobody from that video is even around. I'm browsing the team page now and the riders' video highlights are mostly just Nine Club tidbits. And you can't really argue that the Nine Club association is good branding because nobody on the show but Kelly seems to give a shit about the company at all. Roger outright rolls his eyes half the time Kelly tries to bring up eS. I often see people complain about companies like Emerica lacking diversity or not having interesting product, but at least with Emerica they have a team and an image that they market the fuck out of. They have SOME media presence in skateboarding. Even if it's not your thing, it's at least appealing to somebody. I don't know who eS is trying to appeal to other than people browsing the sale section on CCS.
yeah to all of this.
The e's name and logo still has brand value too that's the sad thing. But they just can't get it right between marketing and the shit they're actually putting out. It's a shame too. You would think with the nostalgia for the early 2000's shit jumping off right now e's would be killing it and they could be. I think they've been close to getting it right with certain things like their apparel line has actually been good, and a couple of shoes like the silo and swift 1.5 (horrible name aside) but then you look at shit like the sparta and symbol and it makes you hate their entire direction. The fact that they're putting out a million colorways for every shoe is a bad look too.
Make the stuff feel more limited, modernize and stylize the designs in a more minimal fashion, and market the team around a couple of OG riders and maybe just make the rest of the team up of european guys. I think that whole market would be their best bet to focus on right now.
It's unfortunate they can't afford to pry scott johnston from adidas because what he's doing there would be a great direction for e's. I think they can learn a lot from nb# too.