Native Nik Update

As many of you know, our beloved Native Nik is almost fully recouperated. Josh and the crew were stoked to have him and Weston in Knoxville, but we all are looking forward to his full return to front lip nose manual 3 shuvs this spring! Here's a reminder of the daily sickness and style of last year. and let's not miss that shot of Matt Simpson keeping a mind-altered state of stoke flowing to Nik during the second try:

sticker team

this is only the beginning of our sticker teaming! go team sticker team go!

poppin colors...

really having trouble getting pics that show how the wood grain and the color pop on these reds and yellows. they're SIIICCCKK! They are sick sick sick!
sick sick sick!

really.

Reds and yellows...

8.25 with 14.75wb

8.126 with 14.5wb

And our new kiddie sized 8.0 with 14wb...

We still have a few 8.5's in stock, too. Hit us up direct to get your shop orders straight. For folks whose shops arent carrying Fickle, ask them to start! We want all of you to purchase your boards in ways that support the shops that serve the community! Thats your skate-culture hub, there...

Support your shop, and ENJOY proper quality wood, daily!

Cold and Wintry and San Diego

Well, as a whirlwind chain of events, Lew is heading to San Diego on Tuesday till friday latenight to attend a trade show...

Our friend Michael Brooke, the publisher of Concrete Wave magazine hits me up on Skype and pays my ticket, so there I go. What am I supposed to do?

But what does FickleBoards have to do with Jamie Thomas' trade show, you may ask? Where is the connection between the Black Box Dist. tradeshow in the Petco Stadium parking lot and little, tiny Fickle Boards Ltd, here in Cincinnati? Here it is:

The whole show was started as a "core" contrast to the ASR deal that goes off like a neutron bomb around the same time. Jamie started the thing to showcase the companies that are doing it authentically. At FickleBoards, we have made our stand: Quality Wood.

Quality Wood. Everyone who skates our boards gets this (except for that one shop that I still owe a quality swap to, but I'll get to you in a minute, just be patient!). Our partnership with our pennsylvania-based wood supplier is a product of our number one priority: to get you on the best skateboard wood you've ever had.

If we wouldn't love to ride it, we won't waste our time developing it. Everything we are doing is about ensuring that there will be wood-houses in this country that produce Quality Wood.
Concaves, Kicks, Fades, Wheelbases... in widths that you wouldn't dream you'd love, but once you tried them, you knew that we were on to something.

So when I'm at the CCwave booth with a duffle bag of Fickle Boards, I'm going to rep the one cause we have: to get quality wood back on the top of the stack in the skateboarding community.

We don't begrudge anyone the right to import cheap junk, and with all the ad dollars and shoe ads, we're not surprised that the kiddies are beggin their moms for cheap junk...

...we understand why those inferior products sell for more than Quality Wood, too. Hype has always run the show.

...but lifelong skaters and beginners alike keep stoking us onward with comments like "this is how it ought to be" and "you're changing skateboarding". Naaw. We just care about what is most core of all: how well the thing under your feet works.

Ask the dude that tried for 30 minutes... to focus one of our boards... in a senseless act of brand retaliation and turf aggression. He ran out of energy... that board was then skated for weeks by one of our former riders who just doesn't want another kind of board, even though he's stepped off the team!

WE are having a BLAST producing wood that is at the absolute top of production standards, industry-wide, world-wide. We are committed to providing just that quality to the skateboarding community, long term. So to heads in the Northwest who order us online, or to shops who carry us, we are STOKED and we thank you!

Starting Fickle last year, I would not have imagined a trade show in SD. Since I am going there I'll just keep my head and stay on target: All we want to do is produce wood that WE are stoked to skate. Just doing unto others...

Knoxville Recap

Wow...

Highlights?
Edge Park
Agent Orange
Boardroom
Pluto
Menace and Moonshine
woodstock

we didn't get to Fetch, our favorite tanning/skateshop combo... but we'll be back down soon!

Knoxville Outdoor

Josh Viles!!! Josh is a super great guy and a terrorizing ripper! No video footage shot to date does justice to the creative whirlwind that is Josh's skating...

North GA skatepark!!! Loretta, we love you!

Latino children of Dalton GA, we are coming down soon to eat your food and shred your spots! Our whole crew almost got arrested after we skated NGA, at the wendy's in Dalton, skating this great ditch bomb there...

Look, we travel with a light crew, and nobody's down to film when the session gets hot. Short version? Weston slammed hard on the first stop and skated hard, hurt, the whole trip. Native went down there on the mend from a serious broken bone in his foot, so not much from him. Old Lew is old and he is Lew, so it's mostly just some front smiths and a lot of smiles... Josh Viles reinvents physics with joy from above... Daniel, our rep down there, skates our boards backwards... so do his kids, and a few of the locals...
Mike, Kellie, Shane...daniel, Michael... the whole crew from N.Atlanta met us at N.GA and shared ditching the cops in Dalton. It almost got mass heated there... that was a great team-builder... it included Lew booking through the building and us cooling it in the van while units patrolled across the street to spot us... Nothing better to do in Dalton than to keep skateboarders locked down...

So there are some verbal snapshots for you all...

Knoxville Visit...

Weve been in knoxville for about two days. Last night we skated the Edge in Pigeon Forge with our Rep Daniel and our Knoxville rider Josh Viles...

Right now we are sitting down to pizza. So later!

AmPunk Tribute Logo Boards (Red)

This is the red board... it  is our AmPunk Tribute Board... the yellow ones are BritPunk Tributes... photo forthcoming. I snapped this one in the car after pickup from the secret pennswood treehouse. 

Meeting Carrie Willis

Dude, Carrie Willis is RAAAAD. Period. If you know her, you know that. She eats more than you, can bench more than you, can kickflip down more stairs than you, cares when she gets hurt less than you, slams harder than you... Carrie Willis is BEAST!

Please enjoy Carrie Willis!

Thanks to Seattle, Straight Eights, and the Nine

Here's a note we got from a customer in Seattle, who orders our boards from our online store link. We thought it would stoke all of you to get a feel for what Fickle is about: Amazing quality, Fresh, Made in the USA wood that has dimensions designed with Skateboarding People in mind.

Buyer Notes:
A good board is harder to find than it ought to be. I just set-up my new Fickle 8.25" w/14.75" WB and it's so good I'm ordering another right now. In my experience, when I find a board I like it's only made for a while and then I have to find another source for a really good board. Thanks for making great boards and keep up the good work! -Andre D

Don't miss our new shipment! We have the Straight Eights, again, with a shorter, 14 inch wheelbase, for the children among us.

We also have a new, Experimental board (only 15) prototype in this shipment. It is a 36" with a 17" wheelbase. Its nose is like 8", and it's tail is 6.75"... it's an amazing ride. A straight Nine inches wide, without the trademark "fade" that Fickle is known for. For now, we're just calling it "The Nine", or "The Big One" (props to Sid from Toy Story)

We have ten folks out there who have opted to pioneer this new shape with a pre-order at a significant discount. It will come with a "Fickle Experimental" stencil. It will blow minds. It will be followed by a graphical model at a substantially higher price.

We're available!

Cincinnati HQ: electricity

many of you out there know that Fickle Boards is HQ'ed in Cincinnati, Ohio. We come from all over the country: Lew from NY, Ben from KY, Matt from KY, Carrie lives over near Beechmont, Native is Westside via Arizona, you get it...

...and being in Cincinnati has left us with several months of the year in need of shelter.

We were stoked last year to receive the invitation to watchdog an upper level of a warehouse building in OTR--that's the legendary Over the Rhine neighborhood, and we are honored to play a part in bringing more skateboarding to that neighborhood. We say ...bringing more skateboarding to... because as we have been moving in, we have found that mass people skate there and that there are a lot of skaters with an interest in that neighborhood...

we have found that it is in "economically depressed" areas like these that scumbag little skateboard companies and cutting-edge music can find cheap space for shelter from the storms...

...and with our new friend, Ian Brown, we are getting light in our little piece of shelter. Tomorrow is the install of a new electric line, paid for with wood and blood, on the cheap, with Ian Brown.

We have found a true HOME at a lot of your spots, shops, parks and houses, in all the different places where Fickle is found. A lot of you have taken us in on the road. Daniel and Amanda, Bob and Diane, Landshark and Lisa... We are stoked to have the chance to create a space to share with those of you who have sheltered us along the way. Hopefully there will be light and heat in this borrowed space for a long time, since the need for watchful caretakers has created this opportunity.

We also hope that serious opportunity will exist in the future, in the form of proper, concrete municipal parks in urban 'hoods, so that we can share the love with a larger and more diverse crowd every year...

Please support your local skatepark efforts. Volunteer.

Support you local skate shop, if they're not blowing it. If they're all cruddy, give 'em hell and get it straight. Shops are the number one advocates for proper parks. There's nothing worse than a bad skatepark. ugggh. let's not even think of how bad a bad park is...

Some thoughts from fickle corporate...

cincinnati skatepark dreams ...

Working today with some guys and gals on a plan to put multiple neighborhood skateparks and architectural skateables into the urban landscape, here in Cincinnati. Parks are going up in suburbs all around the city, offering opportunity forr those with access to cars (affluent america), but what about thousands upon thousands of urban youth? Will there be opportunity afforded to them?

This is a quote from this post from the Four Vermont Horsemen that our junior crews met up with in GA. Props to Josh Viles not only for ripping, but especially for being a proper human to everyone he meets while he's out there... keep ripping faces off with your skating, Josh...

Here's the quote: (check out the whole blog, though)

Thanks Fickle. Thanks Zion. Support your local skate scene and purchase yourself a Fickle board if you skate in the south. Pierre says they're solid, and after spending less than a day with them, we all consider them the homies. It was a weird, wild, bewildering 24 hours. It's hard to believe that we had only been on the road for 13 days at this point...

Spaths

These two guys, and their mom, Kellie, have done nothing but be awesome in Fickle's short North Atlanta lifetime. Over the last year, they've teamed up with Mike Mills, our local rep down there (mike got called "Squidlips" by Jay Adams, back in the day), and have ben killing it.

Some of these pics really capture the radness of what these two are doing. Thanks to Nick Scott and ATLskater for their attention to these two. The full story behind each rider is the best part, and we can't wait to get everyone up to the Cinci Area this summer for a huge campout park tour or something so all these stories can bundle up and get us all stoked, amazed and ready for what life's going to dish out next.

Kellie, Michael, Daniel, thanks for holding it down for Fickle on so many fronts! Stay in the Love and we'll see you soon! Love and props to all the heads with ATLskater and chernobyl we think the best of you and brooke and all y'all and y'all...