Skateboarding
Skateboarding
How do skateboarders go professional?
Ever wondered what it takes to reach the pro ranks as a skateboarder? Here are some steps you can follow to help you reach professional stardom!
The role of- and paths to- being a professional skateboarder has evolved over time as the culture, media and financial landscape of the wider youth culture industry itself has. Let’s take a look at what constitutes professional skateboarding today, and explore some of the routes to earning a living from the greatest pastime in the world!
Find Yourself A Board Sponsor
5 min
Sweet Skateboards experience Bulgaria
Scandinavian tech sensations rock Europe’s secret skate paradise.
Historically, being pro for one of the big skateboard companies of the early skateboarding era (Dogtown and Sims in the 70’s, Powell Peralta, Vision or Santa Cruz in the 80’s, New Deal or Blind in the 90’s and so on) had a two-fold effect. In the first instance, it was these brands (and more importantly, the scale of the distributorships to which they were attached) that could place a large enough volume of signature models of the walls of skate shops around the world for the professional involved to make a livelihood solely from royalties on the subsequent sales. Boards, alongside trucks and wheels, are collectively known as the hardgoods industry. Royalties historically were paid at the rate of $1 per board although that has been negotiated up by individual skaters over time since then, particularly when TV exposure is likely to blow them up in the consciousness of consumer culture for a short period of time (Tony Hawk, Bam Margera, Ryan Sheckler). The secondary benefit of riding for an internationally- established hardwoods brand is that the lure of the tribe in youth culture means that other sponsors are likely to want to orientate their status around teams with a strong cultural gravity of cool (such as Palace Skateboards today). This law of secondary consideration would prove pivotal in the genesis of the second great marketing phenomenon of pro skateboarding, and one which would dwarf the money earned from board sales: the pro shoe.
01
Shoe Sponsorship
1 h 5 min
Etnies: Album
A passionate tribe of skateboarders search cities on five continents in a quest to find new skate spots.
The release of the Natas Kaupus pro shoe by the then-relatively obscure French-born Etnies brand proved such an instant success that the big players in the market of that time (Vans and Airwalk) quickly followed suit. Observing the oft-quoted truism that only skateboarders buy skateboards but everybody likes a nice pair of trainers, the pro model skate shoe not only generated more revenue for pro skaters from their skateboarding fanbase but drew more consumer spend into the space as a whole. However, with their instinct to cover as many aesthetic bases as possible (and oftentimes these days to copy Vans), footwear brands while lucrative to ride for, still lack the cultural clout-by association of the board companies and their tribal pull. For that reason although landing a pro shoe deal is the holy grail of professional skateboarding today, it is rare indeed to find a professional skater with a shoe deal who is not sponsored by a hallmark board brand- or, if they do, it is seldom for long. With that said, the evolution of the contest circuit into a kind of standalone sub-culture within skateboarding has meant that sponsorship itself has changed, and a secondary avenue of professional skateboarding has evolved which owes precious little to the tribal jockeying of youth-culture marketing within skateboarding.
The Contest Circuit
3 min
CPHBER 2018 skate contest highlights
Watch Zion Wright barge the hectic CPHBER contest right across Berlin.
The one great disconnect of understanding the nature of professional skateboarding by outside observers is that winning contests is equivalent to popularity which translates into sales. As any skateboarder will tell you, that isn’t the case. Skateboarding is a culture predicated round coolness, and part of coolness is about appearing effortless. Skateboarding contests were all well and good as a means to promote the status of individual skateboarders while the activity was still strongest in its American homeland until around 25 years ago, when the Brazilians ambushed the contest circuit from Rodil Jr and his almost robotic consistency meant that established US professionals were suddenly placing 12th with a whole lot of explaining to do. In that moment contest skateboarding drew wrinkled noses from the (then) taste-making spheres of skating and has progressed on a parallel track ever since.
Felipe Gustavo
© Red Bull Content Pool
Tampa Am (is) one of the most famous contests ever. Basically, if you win that thing, you have a shot, people know who you are.
Possibly the best illustration of this disconnect in the life of a pro skater is the fact that while both brands were under the umbrella of Blitz Distribution in the 1990’s, Baker’s Jim Greco (who never competed meaningfully as a pro) outsold Birdhouse legend Tony Hawk (who had won everything he had entered up to that point more or less) in terms of board sales. So the lesson which we can draw from this is that mystique and status can play into the longevity of a professional skateboarding life in a way that just winning contests cannot. Just ask Gino Ianucci. However, this is not to say that you shouldn’t grasp the fact that-
Contests Serve A Function With Secondary Sponsors
2 min
Simple Session 19 skate highlights
From the depths of Estonian winter we bring you the skate clash which brought Tony Hawk, Bam Margera and Greyson Fletcher into the fray.
Some brands market to skateboarding, and some market through skateboarding. The fact that everybody knows what Vans are is testament to that. Left to its own devices the skateboarding economy will naturally shrink as skaters get hurt, quit, start families or otherwise have their attention and disposable income absorbed faster than new skaters can take their place (the attrition rate for people quitting skateboarding within a month of starting is staggeringly high). For that reason, skateboarding whether it likes to admit it or not needs a continual dalliance with mainstream consumer culture to generate new cash flows, sponsorship opportunities and routes to market for brands to promote themselves through. Indeed, the venerable British magazine Read And Destroy once ran a tongue-in-cheek article detailing just how to kickstart your career by winning a contest. For a period the demo tour was that vehicle, and then it was video games (about which more later), but in recent years it has been the humble contest re-imagined as Street League, the X-Games, the World Skateboarding Tour and similar which have become the primary nexus via which new revenue streams have entered the closed economic loop of skateboarding. However, be warned: competitive skateboarding has taken a quantum leap with the arrival on the international stage of the Japanese who have now put the Brazilians on notice of a new era in consistency and technical ability arriving- so if this is the path of professional skateboarding you intend to go down, understand that just being a local hero won’t be enough!
02
Star In A Video Game
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3
© Activision
If it is your intention (and well it should) to make enough money from skateboarding in order to retire once you are done- and statistically, these days you will do well to last a decade in the meat grinder of the pro ranks- then you may well need to consider how you can leapfrog your cultural status as a professional skateboarder and parlay it into becoming a cultural icon. There was a period at the turn of the millennium when home entertainment provided that platform. Starring as a character in one of the iterations of a skateboarding video game was the definitive rock-star moment for pro skaters in the early 2000’s.
03
Develop Your Own Constituency
10 min
Pushing Forward Chapter Two
Chapter Two of the original skate documentary examines how social media has impacted skateboarding.
It is hard to quantify just how much Instagram’s introduction of video to its former photos-of-lunch app back in 2013 has impacted the skateboarding industry and its sponsorship landscape as a result. Alongside Youtube, this ability to leapfrog the gatekeeping aspects of established media on a platform where video content alone is king has created a kind of shadow hierarchy of sponsorship opportunities which the established orthodoxies of progression outlined above would like to hold at arm’s length- but cannot afford to ignore. Almost every professional skateboarder uses social media for direct audience engagement. You are, after all, a personal- sub-brand of your sponsor’s collective marketing thrust in whom they have invested personally. Famously, Wes Kremer doesn’t use it and is an outlier in that respect. However, the democratic nature of these platforms as mentioned elsewhere mean that they are drowning in contender content so if you intend to try and make money through new media you really have to hone in on what particularly makes you different as a skateboarder. Which of these two avenues of professional skateboarding is currently more financially viable is a story which is changing by the day.
Irrespective of the path you take to becoming a professional skateboarder, it is worth bearing the following things in mind: Sponsorship is more about status than reward these days. If you want to get free product you can open a skateshop. If you want to travel you can save money faster with a part-time job. A large part of skateboarding life is a bit like being a rodeo rider- the risks are high, the rewards usually limited and the lifestyle itself is the real reward. If you don’t absolutely love skateboarding, if it is just something you happen to be very good at, then there are other ways to stay involved in the culture without being a professional skateboarder. It is a hard, hard way to make a living and comes with no guarantees. If you are hungry enough, good enough and play your cards well enough, the life of a professional skateboarder can still be yours, regardless of whether you follow any of the paths outlined above- or create your own!
