Brand Narratives: Or How Skateboard Companies Rise & Fall & Rise Again

📝 Words by Mike Munzenrider
🎨 Art by Francesco Pini

Stereo Skateboards emerged in the early 90s as a jazzy, loose-trucked alternative to what had come before. Its first video, A Visual Sound, is a classic, but by the end of the decade the brand was showing its age. “All anybody wanted was stairs and cartoons,” says Stereo co-founder Chris “Dune” Pastras, speaking on the phone. His partner at Stereo, Jason Lee, had already departed to pursue an acting career, and the brand’s distributor, Deluxe Distribution, Pastras says, had other companies that were blowing up. “Maybe it was a sign of the times.”

Stereo went away. But then, in 2003, it came back. Pastras says he’d been doing odd jobs post-Stereo – catering and some modeling with some skating on the side – until he chatted up a guy in a bar who told him Osiris was looking for a team manager. He landed that job and was squarely back in skating. Then, as he tells it, Lee, at a party, ran into fellow skater/actor Steve Berra, who gave him a setup. Lee phoned Pastras to let him know he too was back on a board; the two skated nights at the warehouse that would become The Berrics, and in a couple weeks time they were pitching Giant Distribution about picking up where they’d left off with Stereo.

Brand comebacks are in the air once again. On Valentine’s Day, three years after announcing his departure from the company, Louie Barletta announced on Instagram that he’d gotten control of enjoi Skateboards back from private equity ownership. It is now part of Sidewalk Skateboard Distribution. Instagram celebrated the news, but it is not immediately clear what it means. Asked about the brand’s future, Barletta says, “The beauty of enjoi is we can lean both on the legacy of the brand, while still using it as a platform for kids to have an opportunity to live out their dreams of becoming professional skateboarders.”

Whatever’s to happen with enjoi, Stereo and other brands have made successful comebacks, continuing to be seen as legitimate operations in the eyes of skaters and shops. Others have come back to scrutiny over who owns them, who’s on the team or whether they should continue to exist at all. “A brand ends when the people who are running it lose their passion,” Barletta says. “There are brands that should have never died, and on the flip side, brands that are around now that should just die.”

The Creature Skateboards we have now is in its second iteration. Started in 1994 by artist and then-NHS employee Russ Pope, who currently puts out Transportation Unit Skateboards, Creature 1.0 was inspired by classic horror films – Universal Studios’ Dracula, Frankenstein and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. “Creature was a reaction: ‘Alright, enough, not everybody is enjoying riding bearing covers,'” Pope says over the phone. The brand put out “big” hardgoods for the time – 8 and 8.5-inch-boards and 50 mm wheels. “We were on the very front end of the correction.”

“If there aren’t riders involved who back [a brand], then it becomes straight-up SKUs.”

Creature was such a hot commodity, Pope says, that it opened up new distribution opportunities for NHS. Based on that, he says he approached his bosses asking to get more for his efforts with the brand, only to be rebuffed because his role as creative co-lead at Creature was based on a handshake deal, while NHS owned the brand. Unhappy with the situation, Pope says he walked — along with the entire Creature team — borrowed some money, and started Scarecrow Skateboards. He says Creature lasted a couple months without him.

Jump to 2005. Onetime Creature/Scarecrow mainstay Darren Navarette, then on 151 Skateboards, was at the trade shows talking about how NHS needed to resurrect Creature. That’s according to Lee Charron, creative director of hardgoods and marketing at NHS, who did just that. At the time, he says he was working on Santa Cruz, but, “I didn’t get it.” Charron says he saw Creature as an opportunity to push limits. “[We] didn’t have any board brands like that.”

Pope says now-retired NHS honcho Bob Denike called him to let him know that Creature was being resurrected, and that he gave Denike his blessing. “I am friends with all those guys [who would be on the team]. If they’re going to have jobs, I’m all down with that,” he says. Pope would go on to do a guest artist board for the new Creature. Charron says he and Navarette took a more broadly spooky and humorous approach to Creature than Pope, letting the personalities of riders guide the brand. He says demand for Creature remains strong. “If people aren’t asking for it, why bother?”

Other companies have more complicated afterlives. Blueprint Skateboards is now in its third iteration. It is currently sold by Rolling Thunder Supply Co., which also sells Zoo York Skateboards and has ownership ties to Sidewalk. Blueprint currently offers a guest pro model for two-time Olympic bronze medalist Sky Brown. Videographer Dan Magee founded Blueprint in 1996, though he never owned the brand. It was originally out of Faze-7 Distribution, which owned it — at a time when there were few brands based in the United Kingdom. With riders like John Rattray and Paul Shier, Magee says Blueprint took off with little supervision from its distributor. He says he ran the creative side of the brand out of a shared skate house, paying for rent and trips from his own salary, and seeing his bosses once per year. “I was so naive; I just liked making skateboard videos.”

Magee made some well-known videos for Blueprint, including Waiting for the World and Lost and Found, which he calls “a sea-change video for British skateboarding.” Despite its seeming success, Blueprint as a brand was on shakier footing than Magee or any of its riders were aware. Magee says he was in the U.S. filming with Shier for Make Friends With the Colour Blue, when he got word that Blueprint was no more — a victim of the 2008 financial crisis. He says he and Shier tried to find the brand new distribution, contacting Jamie Thomas and Jim Thiebaud, but Faze-7 held onto Blueprint’s intellectual property and eventually sold it to Woodchuck Laminates, which at the time was out of Canada.

“All of a sudden this weirdo rich kid has my logos and my graphics and is trying to push my legacy as his legacy.”

At Woodchuck, there was pressure to add more skaters from the U.S. to the team (Kevin Coakley was put on prior to the move). Magee compares the era’s Make Friends With The Colour Blue to De La Soul’s Buhloone Mindstate – there’s some cynicism involved, but it has its moments. Blueprint boards were selling less and less, and riders were leaving. “It was almost a zombie brand running under Shier and me because my heart wasn’t into it,” Magee says. So he quit – he was picking up film production jobs that paid three times as much. Shier started Isle Skateboards. In 2013, Woodchuck inaugurated what Magee calls “bizarro Blueprint,” featuring a U.S.-heavy skate team that included Mike York.

“If people aren’t asking for it, why bother?”

That version of Blueprint was short-lived, and as Magee puts it, Woodchuck put it to sleep for a while before the brand was put up for sale around 2020. Rolling Thunder bought it and reintroduced it selling price-point completes. “It’s the opposite of what we were trying to do,” Magee says. “The whole thing about Blueprint was you skate in the U.K., you make your career in the U.K. You’ve grown up on street spots and rain and skating multi-story car parks.”

Who owns what matters. “I personally will not bring Lakai in here, that’s one we’ll hard pass on,” says Noah Hulsman, who owns and operates Home Skateshop out of Louisville, KY. That hard pass is because in 2024, Lakai was purchased by Inversal, a company that buys distressed brands, and fired founders Mike Carroll and Rick Howard. “I can’t imagine not even getting to choose to sell my shop, then all of a sudden this weirdo rich kid has my logos and my graphics and is trying to push my legacy as his legacy.”

When it comes to enjoi, Hulsman says he initially balked at bringing the brand back to the shop because China-made decks don’t sell well. Continued demand from customers got him to place an order for seven. He sold two immediately, but still has five on the wall and says he’s unsure if he’ll order more. “Did enough people who are 35 and over buy enjoi boards and have them hanging up in their rooms? The youth seems to just not give a shit about any of this stuff.”

“I do my best to keep it alive for the love of the brand. I think I was able to leave behind a mark that wasn’t based on my ability on a skateboard.”

Reviving a brand in a meaningful way can be just as challenging as doing something new. Jihone Du, head of marketing at Deluxe, says he uses a four-part decision-making tree when it comes to moves for DLX: is this plan good for riders, the brand, customers, like shops, and business overall? He says a brand’s riders are the foundation on which the rest of the operation is built – its story, its marketing, its look. “If there aren’t riders involved who back [a brand], then it becomes straight-up SKUs,” he says over the phone. From a distributor’s point of view, there’s also the question, Du says, of how an addition fits with its other brands – will it cause confusion? Deluxe sells only to shops, which have a finite amount of cash for product. And then there’s the question of sustainability. “Everybody can get through a banging first drop, your heart is in it. But tell me about the fourth drop,” Du says. “New brand or a revival of an old brand, there’s a lot of checkboxes. It’s up to us to prove to the shops that we’re really backing this.”

So why do brands keep coming back?

Barletta says enjoi ended up in the IP wilderness after its former distributor, Dwindle, was purchased by private equity. Dwindle imploded during the pandemic and stopped paying people. He quit, and says he spent the next six months trying to get the rights to enjoi, using owed back pay as leverage, but got out-lawyered. Barletta says he redoubled his efforts to get back the rights under the spectre of enjoi-branded scooters and other wacky products. He declines to say how much it ultimately cost to purchase the rights, but that “someone else, on our behalf, reached out to them and made them a cash offer they couldn’t refuse.” Beyond worries of enjoi becoming a zombie version of itself, Barletta says the way it ended three years ago didn’t sit right. “The thing is, we were doing really well. We didn’t go out of business, we just got hijacked by a corporation that plugged us into their get-rich-quick scheme,” he says. “I felt it was unfair ending it like that. Enjoi had so much more to give back to skateboarding and skateboarders.”

For Pastras, bringing back Stereo has stretched on for nearly a quarter century, way past the initial excitement of getting the brand back together. He says the initial return, with riders like Clint Peterson, Benny Fairfax and Olly Todd, worked in part because industry types had fond memories of it. “I think there was enough people still around from the 90s to remember. We weren’t the hottest thing in the world, but the comeback went well enough that Stereo was stocked in most shops.”

The skateboard industry is now in a different place than it was in the early 2000s, and so is Stereo. Though he says he’s recently added a sales rep to work with shops, Pastras says for a while the company was him alone, shipping direct to consumers out of his basement. “I do my best to keep it alive for the love of the brand. I think I was able to leave behind a mark that wasn’t based on my ability on a skateboard,” he says, joking that he’s no Eric Koston. Skaters define skateboard companies, but it can go the other way, too. “Stereo really allowed me to find my groove and connect with people.”

Previously: The Anonymous Skate Brand Survery, The Anonymous Skateshop Survey,