Francesco Pini Archives - Quartersnacks

The QS Anonymous Brand Survey Asks: What’s the ‘Matter’ With Skateboarding? — Part 2

Features & Interviews August 13th, 2025 · 12:00 am · 19

📝 Intro by Mike Munzenrider
🎨 Art by Francesco Pini

For its first 40 years of existence, skateboarding’s popularity would rise and fall in regular cycles. But then, right around 1999, skating enjoyed two decades of enduring prosperity.

Come 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic, skateboarding went nova – with pockets full of stimulus cash, folks sought activities to do outdoors, and skate sales exploded, albeit unsustainably.

And now, the cycle returned, so much that people point to an alleged crash in popularity. This past spring, we surveyed skateshop owners and managers to ask, “What’s the ‘Matter’ With Skateboarding?” The shops pointed to a number of factors, including higher prices for products, a lack of demos and in-person events, and changes in the way younger people interact with skating.

Some of the shops we spoke to also wondered: “Why are you only asking us? Ask the brands.” So we’re back, this time with the QS Anonymous Brand Survey.

The QS Anonymous Skateshop Survey Asks: What’s the ‘Matter’ With Skateboarding?

Features & Interviews April 17th, 2025 · 12:00 am · 20

📝 Words by Mike Munzenrider
🎨 Art by Francesco Pini

Do you remember that demo?

Ben Jones, co-owner of Kinetic Skateboarding, in Wilmington, Delaware, does. It was the early-90s, Toy Machine. Jahmal Williams and Jerry Fowler were still on the team. It was at a metal skatepark in Fayetteville, North Carolina. “It’s seared into my brain how hard Ed Templeton ripped,” Jones says.

Many readers of this article do remember that demo — a flashbulb moment early on in a love affair with skateboarding that really sealed the deal — but such memories are becoming increasingly harder to make. That’s one of the takeaways from the Quartersnacks Anonymous Skateshop Survey. We reached out to 20 shops all over the United States that we have close ties with. We asked five questions, but ultimately, tried to get to the bottom of one. It began as a joke, but maybe it isn’t one? There’s a widespread refrain right now that skateboarding is “fucked.” So, is skateboarding “fucked?” …again?

The Long, Strange Trip — How Travel Took Over Skateboarding

Features & Interviews August 28th, 2024 · 12:00 am · 4

📝 Words by Mike Munzenrider
🎨 Collage by Francesco Pini

One of the most remote skateboard demos ever happened more than 20 years ago in a village north of Madang in the lowlands of Papua New Guinea. Located off Australia’s Cape York, Papua New Guinea is the eastern half of the island of New Guinea. Some 840 different languages are spoken there — more than anywhere else in the world. Just around an eighth of its population lives in cities, so it is very rural. “It’s not developed at all,” says former pro skater Kenny Reed, who in the early 2000s, read a book about the place and decided to go there by himself following a skate trip to Australia.

Reed says he had hoped to get deep into the country’s highlands, but the travel agency with which he booked his trip said such excursions can take six months of planning. He was coming on short notice and was given a more simple itinerary. “It wasn’t as far out as I wanted to go but it was really far from civilization,” he says. The people he met were subsistence farmers who didn’t wear shoes. He’d brought his board and folks were curious about it, though hard surfaces were tough to come by. “The king of the village had a plywood floor in his hut [so we took it out] and we used that,” Reed says of the resulting one-man demo. “After that, they taught me how to throw spears and shoot bows and arrows.”

Identity Politics — On Skateboarding’s Evolving Attitude Toward Sports

Features & Interviews February 28th, 2024 · 12:00 am · 11

📝 Words by Mike Munzenrider
🎨 Collage by Francesco Pini

Deathwish am Davey Sayles was too ripped to rip. “I couldn’t skate the first month, I was so top heavy, I was swole,” he says. Six years ago, Sayles quit college football. He took a three-day bus ride home from West Florida University to Vista, CA. At 5’10” he had a playing weight for the Division II Argonauts of 220 pounds. Sayles says his skating weight is 50 pounds lighter. “It took me three months to slim down.”

The 28-year-old says he was a skate rat turned running back who was a natural on the football field. Sayles says he played because his family has a history with the sport and that he broke records at every stop in his gridiron career; he walked away from it while having pro prospects in Canada. Still, he says, he wasn’t able to be himself as a football player – for years he watched from afar as friends like Rowan Zorilla succeeded as skaters, stacking clips and turning pro. Having given up on football, Sayles says he wanted to prove himself as a skater. And he has – check him out in Baker Has A Deathwish Part 2 for proof – cutting a fascinating career arc along the way.

Starting a New Skateboard Magazine and Other Radical Acts of Love

Features & Interviews June 28th, 2023 · 12:00 am · 11

📝 Words by Mike Munzenrider
🎨 Collage by Francesco Pini

Skateboarder magazine ended in late 2013, but according to its longtime editor, anxiety about the magazine’s viability was present a decade prior. “Even in the early Skateboarder days — the mid-2000s — there were signs that magazines could be in trouble in the coming years. You had to switch gears and do everything you could to keep it going,” says Jaime Owens, who, following Skateboarder’s demise, became editor of Transworld Skateboarding. Transworld, of course, which published continuously from 1983 through 2019, now lives on as a web-only operation, due to its mix of 1.6 million Instagram followers and 400,000 YouTube subscribers.