A few theories why skateboarding got old and is not cool anymore

First of all: skateboarding is doing fine. Or as Tom Botwid, founder of PoeticCollective, puts it: “I think the skate scene is actually really strong right now. It’s broader and more diverse than it’s ever been. The skate industry, though, is struggling. There’s less money going around in general.” So we need to make a clear distinction right from the start. When people say skateboarding is doing badly right now, they’re usually talking about the industry, not the scene. Shops are closing. Big online retailers are struggling, events are being cancelled, distributors are having a hard time, brands are cutting riders’ salaries. Bad news seems to be everywhere – and yet, people say there are more skateboarders than ever. (Which might be true, although it’s hard to say for sure – how do you even define a skateboarder, let alone count them?) So what’s going on? Is it simply the global economic and political climate? Is skateboarding just facing the same problems as everyone else – inflation, rising energy costs, the death of brick-and-mortar retail, and leftover Covid-era overstock? Yes, all of that affects skateboarding. But there’s more to the story.

“If you take my street, a lot of shops have closed over the last months. Small businesses and even chains are shutting down because retail in general is in trouble. At the same time, costs are rising. My rent has quadrupled since I opened the shop 20 years ago, and insurance went up 40% just last year. Business hasn’t necessarily dropped, but overall profit has. We don’t sell less, but we make less money. For 20 years we never had sales on hardgoods, yet for the past two years, we’ve had to. That makes us part of the problem too,” says Seb Garnaud from Riot Skateshop in Bordeaux, who also ran a distribution business for years before shutting it down. Despite all the obvious issues, Seb is self-critical and sees both shops and brands as part of what’s going wrong. “If you try to sell a relabeled Gildan shirt with a logo for €60, that’s not what a skateboarder wants to pay. Because any shop can as easily print its own logo on the same shirt and sell it for €25. And people want them just as much. At some point we veered away from our real customer base and started chasing trend-driven consumers. Or look at board prices: if a shop buys a deck for €35 and sells it for €70 (I ignore taxes here to make it simpler), that’s the industry standard shop margin, times two. Then wholesale prices rose to €50 – so with the same calculation, retail should be €100. But that’s when people stop buying. But If you’d sell it for €85, you still earn €35 – same amount of money, lower margin, but a price that’s easier for the market to accept. Yet nobody wants to change the ‘double your cost’ rule.  Another exemple of unwritten rule to question is free griptape. Since it comes from the store’s margin, many shops are buying  the cheapest Chinese griptape to give away. But what is the point of giving a griptape that won’t serve it’s purpose instead of offering the customer choices from premium brands to meet their preferences? Especially on a €100 deck!” A lot of industry habits go unquestioned – until they’re forced to change. Maybe we’ve reached that point. “We’re still working in an old-school system based on how things were done 20 years ago – like pre-books for apparel, which used to be necessary to meet production minimums, fill up a container etc. but today you can order some cut and sew pieces with 50 units minimum. The traditional rules of how skate brands operate just aren’t efficient anymore. For 20 years it was always about growth. Everyone was making money. Now nobody is. Shops, retailers, distributors – nobody makes money.” 

The world is changing fast, and everything is more flexible now. Anyone can start a brand – which is why there are too many, and most won’t survive in such a small scene or are more like a hobby on the side than a real company. And customers just want the best price. “Spitfire is the  number one wheel brand, everyone wants them, but probably only 25% of what we sell are Spitfires because they cost 70 bucks. Realistically, they could be €55 – same as in the US. Shipping wheels with UPS isn’t  that expensive. But when they go from SF to a California warehouse, then  to a European distro, then to the shop, all that extra shipping and  handling is adding unecessary costs. It could be 30% cheaper for the customer, and sales would explode – but then you’d have to cut out or change the distributors role, and they’ve done good work for years. So doing so without compensating them wouldn’t be fair either.” Distributors wouldn’t be happy – but change is necessary. Seb says the industry needs to make those changes together. “If shops don’t align, we’re all just undercutting each other. If brands compete with the shops, they kill the culture that supports them. That doesn’t work. Look at Nike – they tried going fully direct-to-consumer when John Donahoe was CEO, focussing primarily on nike.com sales. But it didn’t work. Today they backed out of that strategy and are a good example of how to support shops. I think shops should buy more directly from brands, and brands should work deeper but with fewer shops. Right now, distros sell to everyone, and of course even the smallest shops want all the cool brands – but they only sell a few decks, which makes for each brand a weak presence. Take Hockey, for example – maybe they should just pick five shops in France, give them the entire line to sell and full marketing push. If you're local, you go to that shop. If not, you order online. That’s already how people shop anyways. Sometimes I ship stuff to customers who live 50 meters away from a friend’s shop and same the other way round. You can’t keep telling them ‘support your local’ – nobody cares who the profit goes to.” People don’t care if they’re buying from a skate shop, an online store, or directly from the brand. And in the end, skate shops aren’t big earners for the brands anyway. “Core shops aren’t here for brands necessarily to make money. We’re here to build their image. For the shoes it’s not about how many pairs we sell. We’ll always sell peanuts compared to them. Let’s stop pretending we’re important retailers money wise. Our role is to represent the brand. That’s the way forward. Five years ago, store plus distro were nine people working here, with a 7 digits turnover. That’s not a skateshop. I started because I love skating and wanted to run something by myself. Maybe that’s what a shop should be. Two ore three people, a small space making a few hundred thousand a year. That’s already a lot. That’s sustainable. Can a skate shop be a multi-million euro business? I’m not so sure anymore.” Shopping isn’t what it was in the 90s, and  shops need to adapt. “We’re at a turning point and shops can’t miss it – otherwise they’ll hit a wall. But the problem is, we don’t even see the road yet.” One reason for the slow response could be that the industry itself got old. “In France, skate shops are mostly run by people around 50 – like myself. And when a store who’s main customer are teenagers is run by 50-year-olds, the gap starts getting too big.”

Here we are, getting closer to the core of the problem: it seems like skateboarding has gotten old. Not only are the key positions in the industry often held by older guys running shops or companies – even team rosters are sometimes made up of more seasoned pros than young guns, which is unusual for a youth-driven culture. We talked to a friend of ours who works as a teacher and has a miniramp at his school. He told us he’s the only one using it these days – the kids just don’t think skateboarding is cool anymore. And even if skateboarding did have more hype right now, the competition for attention is tougher than ever. If you grew up in the 90s, there were no smartphones or endless distractions. You couldn’t just scroll away from something when it didn’t click immediately and attention spans were longer. Nowadays if you can’t get instant joy out of something you skip it for the next thing. Max Beckmann from Yamato Skateparks says: “In rural areas, skateboarding doesn’t always play the biggest role. Sometimes it’s BMX, plus there are just a lot of scooters. But that’s also because every child owns a scooter – it’s standard equipment, like a bike.” Scooters are easier to ride than skateboards. Some of those kids might get into skating as they grow older – or maybe they just end up going to the gym instead. Getting your body in shape might be more interesting than wrecking your body for a month to be able to flip a wooden plank with your feet. And there’s also the problem of how welcoming the skate scene is. Max Ritter, owner of Quarter Distribution and chairman of the Berlin Skateboard Club, puts it like this: “Sometimes you go to a skatepark and it feels like a closed event. Beginners are only semi-welcome – and that naturally turns people away. The same goes for skate shops. Some try to dictate to customers what’s cool, based on their own taste, instead of responding to actual demand. But the business works the other way around.” Skateboarding has long portrayed itself as a tight-knit culture of outcasts – and there was pride in that. Not everyone could be part of it. You had to know the rules and follow the code. If everyone wants to join your club, you can afford to be strict at the door. But if the club is empty, that attitude becomes a problem. So how can it be that there are still so many people skating (almost everyone we talked to confirmed that), but the scene feels like it’s shrinking? Well, maybe because the same as you have to distinguish between skateboarding and the skateboard industry you also have to distinguish now between the skateboard scene and the core scene.

“You have too many people skateboarding, who are no skateboarders”, says Yannick Wijgman from Public Skateshop in Arnhem and hits the nail on the head. It seems like skaters nowadays are not like the skaters we used to know. You might be a kid and you might like skateboarding, but you also play basketball, make beats, ride a bike, and whatnot. Back in the day, being a skateboarder meant that skateboarding was the center and the everything of your life. Like David Turakiewicz from A skatemag experienced it: “We would eat and breathe skateboarding [...] we weren’t as open-minded to other activities as the younger generation is today. There was no way I would do anything else than skateboarding. The industry was smaller but we were true to it. We were spending our money in skate shops. At some point, people from outside the bubble wanted to look like us and started to consume skate stuff. It was a great time for skateboarding: every city had a skate shop, there were tons of magazines [...] Now they don’t need to look like skateboarders and support skate brands like we used to.” Tura mentions two points that show how being a skateboarder seems to have changed. First, a lot of the new kids don’t get as deeply invested in the culture anymore, and secondly, they don’t buy as many products from skate brands. During the hype in the early 2000s, even a lot of non-skateboarders wanted to look like skaters and bought Osiris shoes or DC logo shirts, but there’s no hype at the moment and even core skaters don’t dress in skate brands anymore. 

Kaspar van Lierop, who does consulting for brands in skateboarding, mentioned how he was recently hanging out with his friends talking about this topic, and none of them wore skate brands. They wore their chill shoes and some thrift shop gear. So yeah, who should buy skate brands if not even core skaters do? But Kaspar always tries to see things more positive and also thinks people sometimes misjudge their personal situation as a general problem, when he hears people say “skateboarding is fucked.” He’s like, “Maybe your brand is just not that relevant anymore.” Which could relate to the already mentioned fact that skateboarding got old and most brand owners are not in their early 20s anymore (or the also mentioned fact that there are too many small brands out there). But besides the softgoods sales, what’s going on with the hardgoods? Well, first of all, shops never made much money with hardgoods and they also come with their own problems. There is still the overstock from Covid (“There’s so much stock available that everything is on sale. So if you pay more than €60 for a skateboard at the moment, it’s dumb,” says Seb) and it seems like the new generation of skateboarders isn’t going street skating as much. And if you only go skateboarding here and there and do it in the park, you won’t need as many boards or wheels as if you go on street missions all the time. But why isn’t skateboarding – how former generations experienced it, as an outlet for misfits – speaking to the youth anymore?

One thesis is that a lot of kids nowadays are getting in touch with skateboarding through the Olympics. If you look at Google Trends, those have been by far the biggest spikes in searches for skateboarding in recent years. Maybe it’s because that’s their first touchpoint with skateboarding, so they think that’s how you do it. That’s also what Olaf Küsgens and his team experience in his skate school in Cologne and Nuremberg: “It’s certainly more mainstream now, also because of the Olympics, it’s perceived more as a sport. And we also have kids who have seen the Olympics on TV and said: ‘I want to do that.’ One of our best students, she fell in love with the idea of flying around on a board, but if she hadn’t found skateboarding, she’d maybe do figure skating.” Many beginners today see it simply as a physical activity like any other, while Olaf, who started skating in ’89, experienced it the old way – but also acknowledges that things have changed: “There have been skaters for a long time who are more performance-oriented, who want to be fit and eat healthily. It’s just being crystallized even further now. So I think the Olympics give it a massive tailwind, and the sports side of skating will probably become much more popular.” And nowadays there is another entry point to skateboarding that hasn’t existed for very long – skate schools like Olaf’s are becoming a normal way to start. Talking to skate coaches, we heard of some “hockey mums,” but according to Olaf, that’s the exception. Most parents just want their kids to learn in a safe way. He also mentions a social barrier – that some want to start skating but are afraid because skaters act overly cool, which keeps beginners from daring to go to a skatepark (like Max Ritter also mentioned). But nowadays the bigger problem might be the opposite. If there’s a teenager who would’ve become a skater in the 90s, he might now see a skatepark crowded with either older guys drinking beer and doing slappies or little kids in helmets and full pads – and that’s not something you want to get involved with as a teenager trying to rebel against the world. So skateboarding doesn’t speak to the “cool” teenagers anymore, but it’s become easier for children to enter through a skate school, and “there really is such a huge demand, it’s unbelievable. I’m always baffled as to why no one else has done it already. Because with any other sport, it’s totally normal that there are courses for beginners. We have a holiday program and more and more cities are knocking on our door. We can’t handle all of them because we don’t have enough manpower. We have a growth of about 20% compared to the previous year.” So it seems like skateboarding is still attracting young talent, but kids do it the way they experience it – and that depends on who they learn it from. Olaf warns against scammers: “There are lots of bad skate courses and YouTube tutorials by pseudo-influencers who have discovered the topic” (and sell shitty completes for 200€ on their websites while you can get quality ones for less in a skate shop). But we as a scene have it in our own hands to do something about it, as Max Ritter says: “The fact is that the guys who are doing skate schools are saving our ass with what they’re doing. Because the people they’re speaking to are not on the radar of the skate scene, but they’re absolutely important. I always give one piece of advice to all skate shops: ‘Guys, the best thing you can do is to open a skate school and create your own clientele.’ A lot of shops just reel off their program without even thinking about whether it’s something that people are actually interested in.” And he adds: “I have skate coaches as customers who also sell boards and other stuff that we produce for them, and they order more from us than most skate shops.”

So there is big potential to boost both the business and the scene, because if there are proper skate schools that teach skateboarding in all its facets, you’re nurturing the culture and building a healthy foundation, as Olaf explains. “We also have a little entertainment room with a projector where we watch skate videos with the kids, we do griptape art with them and hand out mags. We had a girl in our courses who was a typical horse girl when she first showed up. Then you could see the transformation starting and now she has the core style, goes street skating on the weekends and is jumping stairs. She’s really into the community now and became one of our trainers.” That’s also something Mathias from Cosa Nostra Skatepark near Paris sees. He started skating in ’79 and has run the park for 20 years, so he’s seen skateboarding evolve. He says it doesn’t matter what the entry point is, as long as new kids get into it. Just because someone discovers skateboarding with pads on in a skate school doesn’t mean it has to stay that way. Kaspar sees it similarly and points out that participation numbers in Japan are through the roof. Skateboarding is huge there – but only the clean-cut park skating. Skaters in the Japanese national team even have to sign a contract that they won’t go street skating in Japan, he says, because it’s seen as a crime and representatives of the national team can’t be allowed to do criminal things.

That’s an extreme example, but overall skateboarding is moving in this direction, and if we want to change that, the scene has to put in the effort to introduce newcomers to the beauty of street skating, the cultural aspects, and the rich history of our beloved skateboarding. Because on their own, they won’t understand why it’s worth buying a Baker board for €100 instead of a random one for €30 at a sports retailer. Speaking of sports retailers, there’s one out there that just launched a skateboard program, and their sales are probably doing okay. They’re selling price-point boards and even price-point clothing, which is perfect if you’re a parent wanting to buy skate gear for your kid who might be into something completely different next month. They even gave a pro shoe to someone I hadn’t heard of, and he’s also sponsored by some non-endemic brands, which probably allows him to make a decent living. So this “new scene” seems to be doing pretty well financially, because there’s contest money to be made and outside brands are interested in sponsoring athletes, heroes, clean-cut role models – something I couldn’t care less about. And while I don’t know the skaters competing at the Olympics anymore, today’s kids might not know a single core skater. They think what they see on TV – people with helmets in skateparks – is skateboarding. Back in the day, there was only one skate scene, protected by gatekeeping. But today, because of things like the Olympics and social media, there are more and more parallel scenes – and the Olympic scene is probably the one getting most money and more push from the outside. Whatever speaks to the youth is more attractive. That’s probably why the new “Skate” game looks like Fortnite and includes parkour elements. You think that’s corny as fuck? Well, who cares about the old guys and their holy core cow?

As we’ve seen, there are different reasons why skateboarding seems to have changed and why that puts the industry in a tough spot. There’s not much we can do about the general political or economic situation, online shopping, or the short attention span of teenagers, but we do have the power to tackle the problems within our own scene. Retail has to change – so why not rethink what a skate shop can be? Brands already seem to get it; they’re going on demo tours again because they see how much personal connection in a digital age matters. Or as Kaspar puts it: “Kids have to see skating in person. And most kids, when they see it, they think it's the coolest thing ever. So do demos and travel.” We have to get kids in contact with real skateboarding so they can catch the bug. Why do we laugh at skate schools? What’s wrong with kids trying to learn an ollie with proper help? Sure, we could sit there and gatekeep the culture because they’re not cool enough to just walk in – but then they’ll learn from some random YouTuber, and the problem we have now will only get worse. A shrinking core scene that keeps aging, longing for the golden days and complaining that kids today just don’t get it. I didn’t get into skateboarding just because it looked like the most fun thing ever – I was drawn in by the culture, the zines, the videos, the DIY spirit, the stories, the weird characters. If that were to stop mattering and skateboarding became just another sport people do at the park, I’d rather see it go down in flames – even if that means something like Bubble magazine would disappear too. But I’d prefer no skateboarding at all over a watered-down version that no one even notices anymore. A sport. Luckily, we’re not there yet. Skateboarders still have the power to shape a future that helps the scene and the industry. And since kids are the future, it’s key to connect with them the right way. Or as photographer Gerard Riera puts it: “I think we need to start telling skateboarding stories in a more real way again. In recent years, everything has become super-fast, the main focus was for social media and some of the essence got lost. I believe that if we do our own shit, skaters, photographers, artists, and creative minds, we can recover what makes skateboarding unique.” We hope he’s right – and that if we just keep doing cool shit, skateboarding will once again speak to the same kind of kids it did in the 90s, and the scene can be healthy again. Realistically, since we’ve seen that there are numerous problems, that alone won’t be enough. Maybe it’s already too late and we have to accept that skateboarding has been captured by the mainstream, turned into a sport, and only a few old heads are left romanticizing of the good ol’ days.