The anti-blank campaign reeks of a corporate move to shit on blanks. They complain that without skateboard companies, skateboarding will die. THEIR board sales are down, but skateboarding as a whole is not dying as evidenced by the growth in blank sales.
It’s obvious the companies in the article are going the way of record labels. Skaters who have a lot of good content on social media gain followers because of the skating, not the skateboard. The companies are hanging onto pros to have some kind of foothold in the industry that no longer needs them.
Go to ImportYeti.com and you can see that DLX, Dwindle, NHS, Supra, etc all get their shipments from the same groups of Chinese woodshops.
Go look on Alibaba and you will see Chinese companies selling skateboards direct to small companies around the world. You don’t need to go through a distribution company to get the boards you can get blank from the same kind of companies the big boys get their boards from. In fact, many of the companies show purchases of heat press machines. Which makes me believe that they too are buying blanks and just printing them when they get to the US.
Not disagreeing with you, but you might want to check out the Woodshop thread, just as a reference to where boards come from for various companies, because it is definitely not as simple as you might think, or how it comes across from your post.
https://www.slapmagazine.com/index.php?topic=120409.0Also the shipments you might be referring to are most likely for the budget completes, which in itself is nothing new, but yes there is an increased trend to get cheaper budget / beginner boards produced in some woodshops in China for the lesser quality type setups and the pro boards from other woodshops, as per the list.
Also there are a significant number of smaller to mid range brands or distributors (who do a number of brands) that do have heat transfer machines which do put whatever graphics on "in house" according to what is needed, which means they are somewhat more versatile than everything being done at the original woodshop (be it Mexico, China or elsewhere), from deck production, graphics, shrink wrapping with sticker, etc and then shipped to the brand distribution warehouse as per pretty much all the major top brands in the industry. Again their wood can come from any number, usually the larger woodshops, be it BBS, PS Stix, Clutch, or others in China.
The woodshops in Mexico and China are the most common suppliers of boards, but there are still woodshops in USA and other places too, including HLC in Spain that does a number of brands with global distribution. Most of these woodshops are also now doing blanks in a "straight to consumer" method or through a representative company / website, as per the boards from
https://skatesamples.com/As to Alibaba and similar sources, there are a significant number of counterfeit products on the market of which people do dabble from time to time, including some shops, but they are different boards, different concave and easy to spot if you know what you are looking for. There was a separate thread on counterfeit product too.
Personal opinion aside, I have tried to collect as much information with regard to woodshops and associated things, to help with general knowledge and information on here, so although I have no direct affiliation with any skateboard company, brand or distributor, I have worked in and around skate shops for twenty plus years and I can definitely understand the frustration with the big brands / distributors and see your view on things like that as well, whatever that may be.
Topic: Anti-Blank Campaign (Read 3948 times)