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.”

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Devil’s Pie

“Eden told me the benches cost the city about $1,000 apiece. It takes a skateboarder to know that you don’t need a big, expensive park to make skaters happy.” Willy Staley (our friend who wrote Tyshawn’s NYT profile and the incredible post-lockdown deep dive on The Sopranos enduring through the generations) penned a full feature for The New York Times Magazine about how the Love Park granite wound up in Malmo, Sweden. The king is just a dude.

Somehow missed this a lil’ while back, but it seems like others did too: “timeout” is a three-minute New York montage by Jake Durham with appearances from Nelly Morville, Mathias Rostein, Matt Militano + others.

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