The business of skateboarding, transhumanism via Skims, unexpected subcultural ties, n more

Hey yall,

A lil mid-summer send from NYC. Tap in if we haven’t seen each other yet please! My memory is so bad.

(HEAVY DISCLAIMER before yall come for me - I AM NOT A SKATE EXPERT)

I’m loathe to admit that in the sea of AI-generated garbage that is LinkedIn 2025 this gem was surfaced (thank u to the homie Alex Vitlin who shared it on) - "More Skaters Than Ever, Less Business Than Ever: The Skateboarding Paradox in 2025”. Really digestible breakdown on the ebb and flow of the skate business over the past few years and the elements that have spurred or hindered growth. Basically, the sport is growing, but in a paradoxical way;

Key takeaway: growth is happening at the edges (women, 30+) while core teen engagement is slipping. Time to adjust product lines, storytelling and talent pipelines accordingly.

There’s some insight in the comments (ALWAYS read the comments yall) that to me goes some of the way to explaining the fall-off amongst the youth;

• “As a Skateboarder and brand owner, the [decline] on sales has began like 2 or 3 years ago. I think that new generations dont have the patience that required to accomplish things. So maybe for them skateboarding might result very frustrating at the first time.”

• “skateboarding is really difficult and hard to master. It takes lots of perseverance and commitment (and dealing with pain and setbacks). So after each trend period there’s been a drop in participation and only ‘die-hard’ skaters remain.”

• “Skating needs to be attractive again. As a way of life with enmeshed sub-cultures whether music, fashion and so on. We need to tell better stories, we need original skaters - weirdos that inspire.”

I’ve notice meta eyewear going at skating very directly since late last year, which is interesting given the gen z drop-off in the culture. Maybe they are chasing millennials (we do have the $$!)

Beyond the ‘skating is hard and gen z don’t like failing’ theory, the one about (sub)cultural impact and connection definitely feels sticky. The business breakdown is a super interesting read against the backdrop of this weeks Nike SB release, a 95 redesigned and rewired for skate:

Disregard the ‘graphic design is my passion’ level aesthetic here, the copy line is a slogan famously coined by Stevie Williams, an OG of skate (one of Thrashers most influential skateboarders of all time) - pictured below wearing the original 95’s-

I’m not clear on the logic in making this choice as a brand - to ignore the real roots/story - when you have the source and the recipe for a deep, credible cultural link right here. I’m sure Nike knew what they were doing but just opted to do something ‘new’, or maybe this was some sort of [corporate] politically-motivated thing as has been rumored (see above). Anyway- my takeaway from not just this, but the news in marketing this week in general (ahem), is that brands should consider hiring historians, or building out a functional discipline that acts as archivists/librarians/cultural researchers that can be tapped for this sort of gut-check and storytelling. (The below tweet is something that could’ve been kept private for the brand when they first had the product idea, and built it into the campaign if they had this sort of talent in-house). To me this is a true edge in a landscape filled with the same LLM-scraped ‘research’.

Edit: Adding in this comprehensive Q&A piece from Welty + Stevie Williams:

“I'm not mad. I didn't do it for me, to be honest with you. I didn't do it for any money. I'm not doing it for any club. I really just did it for all of the people that know what's right. For the next generation of kids that may not understand how to protect your legacy. I felt as though that was just an opportunity for me to just show everybody how well and how far I'm willing to go to protect my legacy, because no one else will. And I don't want to be erased from history, because you can easily be forgotten about if you don't have anything and if you don't stand for anything.

So I just was making a point, and that's it. I'm not mad. I don't even own or trademark the name Run, Skate, Chill. The culture owns that shit. So I'm just kind of the protector of the culture that gets overlooked all the time, and I'm fine with that.”

Somewhat related….

I absolutely LOVED the Jesse Beard highlight of the Melbourne Shuffle here and especially surfacing the deep relationship the scene has with Puma.

This is the type of subcultural story you can’t ‘seed’ or manufacture. It’s extremely cool (because its true - not because the shuffle itself is ‘cool’) and would be such a sick way to reframe Puma’s low profile offerings, which are not exactly doing well off the strength of their instagram influencer-first seeding strategy. The brand is almost 10% down in north america and in particular the Speedcat has underperformed. Building up an iconic franchise like this is definitely a lot more complex than just a cool story, but if you have distribution and media dollars, this type of nugget to me helps things go a lot further imo, and acts as a very useful creative catalyst and filter.

I’m sure we’ve all seen the latest skims viral-bait - a face-snatching sleep mask for your chin/jaw line-

For me, this was a weird one. Undoubtedly attention-grabbing and definitely an innovation in ‘shapewear’. It has all the Kim brand dna - an embrace of surgical enhancement, a penchant for flesh-tones, social rage-bait fodder. But the thing-behind-the-thing was, imo, this shoot (lest we forget):

with kim’s cozy relationship with the tech elite, her new innovation immediately made me think about ‘transhumanism’- a reality our tech oligarchy are hurtling us toward at an alarming clip. Recently, Peter Thiel sat down with New York Times’ Ross Douthat and offered an opinion on whether the human race should continue. Which, if you haven’t seen, took him a minute to respond to.

“Yes [I would like us to endure] but I also would like us to radically solve these problems. It is always, you know... trans-humanism, this radical transformation where your human natural body gets transformed into an immortal body.”

It’s hard not to feel like we’re looking at something else entirely when the Skims facemask benignly shows up on our feeds via Kim as if its just the next logical step from a bra. In a recent piece in NYT australia’s Style section titled “An Imperfect Ideal”, Divya Venkatamaran highlighted how we are already evolving to a tech-first or tech-borne image;

In the four years leading up to a 2022 survey by the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ISAPS), aesthetic procedures increased by 41.3 percent, with facelifts and blepharoplasties (eyelid lifts)dramatically on the rise. Non-surgical procedures— Botox, filler — grew by nearly 58 per cent between 2019 and 2023 (also per the ISAPS), and that figure continues to climb. In some cases, this transformation becomes transmogrification — a move from just wanting to be prettier, leaner and tighter, to the point of looking uncannily inhuman, becoming a beyond-human version of beauty. A monstrous beauty.

Anyway… cyborg beauty standards soon-come.

• (not entirely unrelated to Kim K)- How did Beige lose it’s cool factor? LOVE this analysis from Sydney Gore.

• “More and more, faced with the production of limitless ideas and the absolute proliferation of stuff, we’re seeking out objects and experiences, faces and fabrics that are time-stamped, geographically specific, and magnificently imperfect.” - great read from 1 Granary “An Argument against AI Panic for Creatives”

• A fresh take on the (boring) topic that is our cultural nostalgia loop

• Interesting (but also obvious?) - jewellery is on the up amidst a luxury slowdown. Guilty as charged, i’ve definitely invested a bunch in jewellery recently but haven’t really copped a nice bag this year.

• Great write-up on how Phoebe Philo is winning over the cool 40/50 somethings.

• I know we’re all tired of talking about the creator economy but this is a good and simple 101 (via Rolodex Media) that reframes the value of creators: “Creators are no longer just paid promoters - they’re brand builders, demand drivers, and cultural engines. They move faster than agencies, go deeper than PR firms, and bring conversion-ready communities that outperform paid ads. They don’t just generate buzz, they generate revenue.
  A loyal audience + aesthetic fluency + cultural timing = more leverage than any CPM metric. CPM stands for Cost Per Mille, with mille meaning thousand in Latin. It’s a standard advertising metric that measures the cost an advertiser pays for 1,000 impressions (i.e. views) of their ad.”

• Beautiful exploration of the Bob phenomenon.

• Has anyone else noticed a hard anti-spotify vibe-shift? A bunch of acts are removing their music from the platform (sadly, including Blood orange. Noooo….), presumably in light of the announcement that Daniel Ek is …. investing in and operating an AI-weapons start-up.

• Wild look at Click Farms:

• I’ve been thinking a lot about different operating models recently and was intrigued to come across this shout-out from one of my fav type studios to some consultants they worked with — who helped re-imagine how they price their fonts based on client/company size:

• cute ecomm creative idea from Oh Polly

• Diptyque made a beautiful short, animated film tracing the origins behind one of their fragrances. Soundtracked by James Blake!

I’ve been hyperfixating on fragrance marketing recently, so if you have seen anything cool please send it to me so we can nerd out together. shout out to Elsa Schiaparelli and her incredible marketing mind in particular. (this is why product and marketing should always be in the room together from the start!)

• pretty, pretty, prettyyyyy good branded content /placement from On

• Not just feets but ASIC’s apparel is looking very good:

• Seeing as this is a ‘skate-themed’ installment, i also enjoyed this insider-y look at how ASICS are approaching skate.

• love these Birks from Thibo

• sick Nike Rift concept from 2010.. please make these

Thats all for now :)

GG x

p.s I HATE LinkedIn (actually kind of trying to divest entirely) but just sharing my lil self-aggrandizing shout out here - if you need brand or culture / research / strategy work from September onward, please come find me :) i am not ur average greenscreen thinkboi who is all talk and no real reps…. the results speak for themselves — “Men’s footwear grew at nearly twice the overall brand rate”. 💸💸💸 Can’t wait to show yall what I cooked up with the team for AW26 Collabs product!!!