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Skate Industry Legend Steve Douglas Discusses Skateboarding Boom & Biz Impact Of COVID-19

Skateboarding has experienced several peaks and valleys over the past decades. Only a select few people in our industry have witnessed these changes first-hand. Even fewer have played a direct role in charting a course forward during restructuring periods following major waves of popularity. So, to make sense of the current skateboarding boom amid the effects of the global COVID-19 pandemic, SOURCE Skateboarding Editor Dirk Vogel used the opportunity to speak to industry veteran, insider and former pro skateboarder Steve Douglas.

Steve Douglas started his skateboarding journey in the UK in 1976, right at the start of the big 1970s skateboarding boom. After cutting his teeth at legendary concrete parks such as Rolling Thunder and Harrow, he emerged on the scene in the early 1980s with a penchant for technical vertical moves and innovative lip tricks. After Douglas moved to California in 1984, his skateboard deck sponsor, California-based company Schmitt Stix, elevated him to the pro ranks in 1987. At the time, skateboarding was experiencing yet another peak period, and the London native exhibited a keen interest in the business side of the skateboard brand landscape.

This interest led Douglas to co-found a rider-owned and operated board brand, New Deal Skateboards, in 1990 together with Paul Schmitt and Andy Howell. The company started after the late 1980s skateboarding boom had whiplashed into collapsing the entire skateboard industry. Coinciding with the rise of street skating, New Deal charted a fresh course for authentic skater owned brands alongside companies such as World Industries and H-Street.

CHARTING A NEW COURSE
In the mid 1990s, Steve Douglas took the next step by co-founding Giant Skateboard Distribution, a multi-brand conglomerate including labels such as Element, New Deal, Mad Circle, Black Label Skateboards, Golden State Wheel Co, Destructo Trucks, next to media outfits such as 411 Video Magazine and On Video. As fate would have it, Giant was perfectly positioned to catch skateboarding’s mid-1990s resurgence as a culture-defining force. At the end of the decade, fellow UK pro vert skater and close friend Hugh “Bod” Boyle joined the Giant team. In his role as president, Douglas grew Giant into an industry powerhouse while always keeping a finger on the pulse of skateboarding’s evolution.

Douglas left Giant in 2002 to take some time off with his young family after the sale of Element Skateboards. In 2005, when the early 2000s skate boom triggered by the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater video game still reverberated, Douglas and Boyle reconnected and took an opportunity to join powerful brand conglomerate Dwindle Distribution. In that period, the company played a major role in the advancement of globalized supply chains in the industry.

Most notably, Dwindle pioneered overseas manufacturing of skateboard hardgoods by establishing DSM, the Douglas Street Manufacturing woodshop in Shenzhen, China. After starting as a consultant, Steve moved to Vice President (VP) of Dwindle Distribution and its multiple hardgoods brands.

WRITING THE NEXT CHAPTER
Douglas left Dwindle at the end of 2016 to help his son’s football career and moved to Denmark on and off for 18 months. In Denmark he had a lot of time on his hands and began thinking – Douglas looked out into the Europe market and noticed differences to the US market. In the big sports stores he saw the complete skateboards as very poor with no good options and also he saw a big difference in specialty stores seeing multiple non-named brands at cheaper price points than what were available in the US. He thought it was an idea to compete with these brands with known name brands past or present.

More so, the industry veteran knew that complete skateboards, long shunned by ‘core’ brands were the perfect vehicle to grow skateboarding as they provide the very first experience of our lifestyle, culture, and sport to many riders.

To pave the way, Douglas and longtime friend Matt Anderson built a stacked portfolio of brands at Rolling Thunder Supply co, global and regional licensees and distributors of Zoo York, Alien, Habitat, Ocean Pacific, Speed Demons, Vol 1, Blueprint, Verb, KFD, RAD, Pivot Trucks, Killer Speed Co, The Heart Supply and just recently Meow Skateboards.

UK-based company Nineteen76 distribution came a few months later when Primitive approached Steve. At that time, industry veteran and longtime friend Alex Cock joined both companies as their first employee. Another full-circle moment, since Alex had just recently moved back to the UK from LA after running Dwindle global sales for six years.

Now that skateboarding is catching a massive wave of popularity in what has been a strange year, Douglas is excited about the future. “Every planet is aligned for skateboarding right now. Skateboarding is being taken seriously and towns across the world are building amazing skateparks. It’s really the perfect storm,” said Steve Douglas, Director at Rolling Thunder Supply co. In this Boardsport SOURCE interview, the industry vet provides valuable perspective on the state of skate and what’s next. Sit back and take notes.

Hello Steve! The last time we spoke, you were still at Dwindle, now you’re in charge of your own enterprises again and it looks like you’re busy, right?
Its crazy, it just happened, everything seemed to come together at the perfect time, I could not be happier to work again with lifelong friends in the UK and now all over the World. Business is simply INSANE; I have never seen anything like this, and it seems to change daily.

Please give us a quick breakdown of where you live and your activities since you left Dwindle
I live with my wife in Nor Cal, right outside San Jose and was spending a lot of time in London. Around 2018 I was thinking about moving back to the UK as our son was – and still is – playing football in Denmark so this got me thinking of what was next. At Dwindle my role was business development, identifying growth areas, I focused heavily on the complete category and price point products in general global retail prices.

When I was in Denmark and in Europe in general, I spent time looking at prices and brands. So, a Europe-based global distribution company focusing on quality hardgoods at affordable prices made sense.

So, you now run two companies, correct?
Yes. Rolling Thunder Supply with its own portfolio of licensed and distributed brands for which we manufacture and distribute skate hardgoods globally.

As we were setting up Rolling Thunder we got an opportunity that I could not turn down, so we set up Nineteen76 as a core skateboard distribution business based in the UK proudly distributing Primitive, Alien Workshop (starting Holiday 20), New Deal, The Heart Supply the new giving-oriented skate brand established by my old Giant partner and former Element CEO Johnny and his wife Kori Schillereff which I am really excited about. Also, we just picked up Meow skateboards, distribution of that will start in 2021 and lastly, we will be distributing Killer Speed Co.

It sounds like completes are a big foundation of your business.
For Rolling Thunder Supply that’s 100% true. My son started skating when I took over the complete category at Dwindle (his silhouette is still used for the micro size in the size guide) that’s when I realized how horrible complete skateboards were at even the core industry. Simple things like bushings were way too hard, I am 220 lbs and I could not make the boards turn. Think about that!

There’s a weird disconnect around complete boards and ‘core’ skate companies, how come?
The US core skate industry has always looked down on what goes on in mid-sized and mass retailers. Yet, they are not going away. The reality is they do feed the industry despite what anyone says. My goal was to find out how we could capture more of those skaters and of course, it comes down to the quality of those completes. If we make them better globally, we will feed the whole industry with new skaters.

When people think completes, they mostly think of a crappy board from Walmart.
Yes, there are some bad completes in the US and some absolutely horrendous ones in the UK and Europe which breaks my heart. Now in the US there are some pretty decent ones in the mid and mass retailers thanks to what we did with Walmart with Darkstar. Chet Thomas personally oversaw, tested and approved a complete for a $40 retail price. Please take the time to watch this YouTube video and read the comments.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlNUD33eN80[/embed]

Something like ninety percent of the core skate brands don’t even make complete skateboards but completes are what most people start with. But for some reason it is not considered ‘core’ to make completes, which is just hysterical if you think about it! For many key years the industry – myself included although we did try at Giant – left completes almost exclusively to sporting goods stores and the quality at that time was really bad. How many potential lifers and amazing skateboarders did we lose because of a poor first experience, how many people could have changed their lives because of our beloved useless wooden toy? Sadly, we will never know.

So you saw a niche in the industry for quality completes?
Initially the plan was to work with the core industry with brand names and go after the lower price points and also the big euro sports store chains. The idea was simply to improve the quality for the first-time buyer for the large European retailers like we had done in the States with Darkstar. But most of these retailers proved really hard to work with. So, the idea was quickly adapted to multiple brand names to hit a range of price points primarily for the core industry with major focus on completes.

I personally started on a complete board and it was horrible.
Me too! That’s why quality completes are so key. Someone could be the next Tom Penny or Grant Taylor but might just quit because the wheels don’t roll, and trucks don’t turn. At Giant, the aim was to offer a skateboard brand for every type of skateboarder. At Rolling Thunder it’s to offer quality completes for every budget to help grow skateboarding globally.

All the way to ‘cool’ skate shops ordering complete boards?
Yes, much has changed. UK core stores like Slam City Skates and Note in Manchester now carry completes year-round, and people new to skateboarding now start on good boards at affordable prices. It also makes walking into a core shop far less overwhelming.

How so?
Just looking at all those boards on the wall is often too much for a new buyer and then not understanding all the parts needed can be overwhelming and sometimes embarrassing. It can also be embarrassing not knowing what all the parts are and not understanding how it all goes together. You get the right guy behind the counter, great. If not, it could be a bad first experience. Some new people off the street with no experience may just want to take an easier route and buy a complete and go home and play around with it and learn by themselves.

In my experience over the last 20 years, when I’m in a room of skateboarders and I have asked the question, “Who bought their first board in a non-skate shop?”, the response is 80% to 100% have bought from non-skate shops. And what were the boards? Yes, all completes!

So having quality completes at a various price points is important for skate shops and skateboarding. £60-£80 for a good complete is pretty cheap, we also have many cheaper options, RAD at £54, Speed Demons start at £40 and our new ultra-price point brand Vol 1 starts at £35. It’s incredible that we can do this, and these brands are only sold in skate shops.

Some new skaters may never transition to buying a ‘real’ deck, they’ll just replace it with another complete. But it helps get more people into skateboarding. Skateboarding changed my life! And it changed your life and the lives of many that will be reading this! So we want to get affordable, quality, good-looking completes into the hands of as many skateboarders as we can.

Well, looks like your prayers have been answered and more and more people are finding their way into skateboarding in this crazy pandemic situation. Did you see any of this coming?
Skateboarding has been in these cycles, with a big cycle every ten years or so. We felt like we were due for a new cycle. Skateboarding has never been in the Olympics, so it seemed that there was going to be a ripple effect this year. We said “We don’t know if it’s going to be a one-foot wave or a 60-foot wave, but let’s be on that wave”

Then on top you have Covid-19 which no one saw, so parents and kids are stuck at home and the kids can’t do their team sports. Perhaps their Dads or Mums used to skate, so that’s something they can enjoy together – and that’s not going to change any time soon. This really is the perfect storm. Through dealing with some of the key global mail-order companies, they’ve been telling me that 70-90% of their customers are new and are buying multiple completes – not just one!

So as much as we hoped for a big wave, we did not expect a tidal wave!

The overall acceptance of skateboarding also seems higher than ever, right?
Over the last 25 years or so, so many great skateparks have been built everywhere and skating has become so much more diverse because of that. In the mid-1990s, it was all street skating, very inconsistent and let’s not forget pretty damn negative. Today it’s all going on and very positive, every genre of skateboarding going on at the same time! Freestyle, downhill, slalom, mini ramp, mega ramp, regular vert, skate parks and street skating are now so consistent and just mind blowing. On top, girls are the fastest growing group in skateboarding, how great is that? Forty Two shop in Nottingham in England recently told us that 65% of their customers are female!

This storm has also overwhelmed the supply side of the industry.
I have never been in a situation where there was no stock before. The supply chain is overwhelmed. All the factories are scrambling, and are at maximum capacity, most are already full for 2021. Many distributors and brands are turning off their B2B’s as they can’t accept the orders, much stock goes before it even uploaded on the sites, skate shops are being rationed!

Will shops and distributors have to change their ordering process to secure supply?
Yes, prebooking is key for the whole supply chain and variety – what you want may change to simply what you can get, it’s happening now.

But isn’t that tough amid economic uncertainty for some stores, especially writing pre-orders?
Yes, its always tough for everyone to look into the future. Shops that don’t normally pre-book, can ask if their suppliers will take the risk and put in a “phantom or at risk” pre-book order. We do this at 76 and RT. It helps shops secure product that they really want with no risk and the distributors also benefit, because they receive better information about the kind of products that are wanted and product amounts for their buys, which helps decision-making all the way into manufacturing. The manufacturers are key and with numbers they can plan new staff, extra equipment and new buildings, which is easier if they have projections.

Speaking of manufacturing, what is the supply situation in skate like at the moment and what’s your advice to folks in Europe?
Expect shortages, late shipments and cancellations for the holiday, expect price increases in 2021. Pre-book, pre-book, pre-book is the best way to get what you need and to help everyone in the supply chain.

From what we hear, it’s pretty nuts and nothing is certain. What can shops do in order to stay in the loop?
Communicating with your suppliers is key. What you think you are getting delivered may be different from what’s actually coming in. Be flexible, check emails of what is coming in, deliveries are selling out in hours. Be in contact with your reps – let them know what you need when that product comes in but be patient and understand everyone is overwhelmed.

You need to constantly check in with your distributor or supplier to make sure you are getting what you ordered. I have heard many stories of suppliers quoting product to arrive in October 2020 only to be told later it would be coming in March 2021. Things are changing daily, keep updated. I also think that shops will be accepting deliveries right up until Xmas, so again please be flexible.

Is that just true for decks and wheels and trucks, or accessories as well?
It’s everything! Expect shortages of things that aren’t even on your radar, hardware, bushings, bearings, grip tape and so on. All brands and distributors are scrambling because of the demand.

How long will this drought continue?
I don’t see the situation changing until summer ‘21 at the earliest but that is when the Olympics will be hosted in Japan, so it’s very possible we will see another spike then and another spike for the ’21 holiday. I feel skateboarding will be the hit of the Olympics, just like snowboarding was and it rightfully deserves to be. Many factories now have up to six months lead time to make completes. As I said most factories are full all next year, supply cannot catch up with demand. This could take years if you remember the mid-1980’s boom. I think this could be the biggest expansion in skateboarding of all time.

That’s a positive outlook in these crazy times, we sure need it.
Skateboarding changed my life in ’76! Until I got hold of a skateboard, I didn’t know what to do with myself, I was told to like team sports, but I hated them. When I got hold of a skateboard, I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I now live in California and I am lucky enough to travel the world and have done since I was 15. All because of finding skateboarding. I want to help people get the same opportunities I have had and quality skateboards at affordable prices around the world help that.

The people I learnt to skateboarded with changed my life. In a world full of inequality, skateboarding is really the most integrated sports activity for people from all backgrounds and ethnicities. Scientific research from my good friend Neftalie Williams at CSEF has proven the integrative and positive effects of skateboarding. So if people who would have otherwise started on a junk board can get their hands on a quality skateboard at a decent price all around the world, I hope that’s my most important contribution to skateboarding.

Thanks for the interview, Steve.