Big Meeting and Florence Sesh...

Today we had a big meetup about stuff down at Matt's house... then we hit Florence for a few hours. This is the life. While we get things in place, there's so much skating to be done. Huge thanks to our man Ian Brown for all the electric he puts in for us. Thanks to Native Nik for showing up and putting up. All the guys on our crew are preparing to get things rolling in a whole new way here.

To be clear, we aren't a normal regular skateboard company. The normal way to do this stuff is to get someone to press your wood, cut it out in your shapes, and apply the heat transfer candy graphics after they're all cut out. Kind of like making cookies. Then, they ship them to you from wherever they make them (Mexico, California) and you get them at your HQ in boxes. You unpack the cardboard boxes and sell the cookies to shops and customers...

You also find someone to screenprint your stuff for you, and someone to make your art, and someone to make your hats and shirts for you and you have them all work together so you can get all kinds of stuff in the mail, open the boxes and send that and take that to the shops and customers you have...

If you run a really really normal, regular skateboard company, you get picked up by a distributor and they take control of your process and make sure that you get into a higher-volume situation... If you're successful you die of a heart attack trying to keep it real in the high volume, or you sell out to curb appeal and just let the thing roll on fashion prestige...

As for us, we aren't even in that world. We have a little tiny workshop and a press and a screenprinting setup... we get our shirts right here in Cincinnati from TSC at whatever price they'll sell them to us for. Our hats come from Otto, for the deeper trucker hats, and our beanies are from TSC, cos they're softer.

We direct buy the separate veneers for our boards straight from Canada. Old Lew even speaks French to them! And they speak back! We have a spring trip to Canada to visit our wood source coming up. It's going to be epic.

So everything we do is done by hand. This takes us solidly out of the running for anything like "dominance" and pretty much extinguishes any hope of "high volume". But what it does do is make us proud of what we produce, and makes YOU glad there's a crew in the area that is committed to amazing quality and handmade DIY skateboarding.

We are on our second backyard ramp build this fall, as well, because wherever Fickle goes, we spread the stoke by installing the backyard element to the max.

Keep your eyes peeled for more Fickle Boards in your local shops, too. The time's drawing near. You'll know! Until then, get some sleep.