Skate industry insiders Ryan Clements and Rob Meronek are expanding their new business venture, The Boardr, by adding retail both online and brick-and-mortar. They have also bought a warehouse and are planning to build a private skatepark in the building.
All of these new efforts come on top of the work they are doing with their growing events business.
The two used to work at one of the most important skate accounts in the industry, Skatepark of Tampa, and were formerly partners with SPoT owner Brian Schaefer in SPoTlight Products, an events company.
I asked Ryan and Rob some questions about their expansion strategies.
Why expand into retail – both online and brick and mortar?
Rob Meronek: There are a variety of reasons on that one. We’re fairly good at it from doing it in the past. It’s pretty easy and simple for us to run the crazy details portion of that business with proper information systems, accounting, tracking, etc. that most people find boring or just don’t like to do.
We also missed the retail business, customer service, being around all that new skate product all the time, being super close to our friends that own all these companies and doing business with them, and for me personally, I like the shoes. I’ve always been a half sneaker head since before skateboarding and hip-hop took over my life.
As successful as the events business has already become, it doesn’t fill a full work schedule most times of the year. We’d probably go nuts if we didn’t have retail to fill our basic need to just be doing and creating things in skateboarding.
Why are you adding a skateboard park, and why make it private instead of public?
Ryan Clements: Well, it just seemed odd to me to have a store and offices, while managing skateboarders and doing events, and not have anywhere to skate or a place to do events as well as create content for us and our friends. It’s like, ‘Why are we doing this in the first place?’ Well, because we’re skateboarders. It’s as simple as that.
It’s “private” in the respect that you can’t pay to skate here on a day-to-day basis, like a traditional skate park. But that business model is an older one anyway. There are six skate parks within an hour of here that are free, so why try to charge? Let’s just get people through the door with fun, unique events, and make enough to pay the bills via retail.
With our experience, we know how this will work. We just need to apply our experience to make it successful.
Who are some of your main clients on the event side of the business?
Rob: ESPN has us signed on for X Games Street, Park, and Girls now.
Zumiez is using The Boardr Live, our events administration and live scoring app, for all 40 of its stops in the Best Foot Forward series.
Cowtown, the group that runs Phoenix Am is also using The Boardr Live for all its events. Our good friends at Copenhagen Pro have us back out for another year of Copenhagen Am and their new Bowl Jam this year in August.
We’re on for Kimberley Diamond Cup again this year with the World Skateboarding Organization. Vans is using us for the Van Doren Invitational, too.
Adidas signed on with us to run its entire Skate Copa Cup, a nationwide series of shop vs. shop contests. Zappos awarded us the contract to run its annual Ride Shop Skate Series in Las Vegas in May.
See Page 2 for The Boardr’s retail strategy
Are you staffed up to handle retail?
Rob: We are running minimal hours and staff right now and starting everything out in retail pretty slowly and growing it slowly. I don’t think the retail part of our business is going to take off as quickly as the events side has. So, we’re good on the retail side with our main guy Bob who we used to work with and who can handle it all.
One area we were not fully staffed up on was media and documentation of our events and everything that’s so fun about what we do. Starting March 1, our full time filmer started with us at The Boardr. It’s HiDefJoe who you know from doing our old YouTube show, SPoT Life, and all the media at Skatepark of Tampa.
Joe will be the sixth full time person on our staff and completes our former crew all back working together in our new home and for our new future. We are beyond stoked.
How big is the store, and what categories will you focus on?
Rob: The store is super small and we’re taking baby steps in pretty much all categories, but in the long run, we will focus on footwear. I wouldn’t mind if we expanded outside of skate footwear sometime in the future.
I love the old Jordan’s, Converse, etc. – all the shoes we skated in before skateboarders somehow declared that they are entitled to own the shoe market in skateboarding just for being skateboarders. Nope, you have to work for that just like anything else. Everyone can kick flip, even kooks. That is no longer the factor to determine if you deserve business or not. It takes more than that these days and should have even in the old days, too. Oops, harsh tangent.
Your business model is sounding very similar to SPoT’s business model. Should we read anything into that?
Rob: Yep, it reads this pretty clearly: “We LOVED our old jobs.” We created those jobs ourselves, built all that from scratch, and there was nothing better, so we’re recreating them.
Ryan: I would also point out that Rob, Brian (Schaefer), and I owned SPoTlight Productions equally so we weren’t his employees on that side of the business. Yes, we did work for him in the Skatepark portion of the business, but Skatepark didn’t invent retail.
The Boardr model is different in the fact that we are a retail store with a private training facility, whereas SPoT is the traditional pay-to-skate deal with a snack bar and all of that stuff.
Rob: There’s definitely room for multiple healthy businesses in skateboarding in the same town.
