Nike: BS
How and Why to Hate Nike SB
Unless you’re insistent on wearing leather pants and hating anything remotely popular, there is no reason to hate Nike simply because they are a corporation. The fact that they are successful is not necessarily a reflection of greed, evil, or wrongdoing. Blaming a dislike of Nike on sweatshops overlooks the fact that almost every shoe company is just as bad, if not worse.
No, the real reason to avoid Nike SB lies in the ownership of the company. Those who skate know that skateboarding has always been a self-supporting industry. Skateboarders start board and shoe companies, sponsor their friends and fellow skaters, and eventually grow to a point where they can pay a team of skaters to use their shoes/boards, wear that company’s logo, and film video parts. In this system, while money is often scarce, skateboarding as an industry has mostly stayed in the hands of those who have a genuine love and respect for the culture.
In the last twenty years, there has a been a massive shift in the industry away from skater-owned companies. As skateboarding has gotten more popular, larger companies have begun to capitalize on the subculture as a viable market. It was once unthinkable that larger corporations like Nike, Adidas, or New Balance would be filming videos, paying skateboarders, or producing skate shoes. Now, however, all three as well as Converse (now owned by Nike) have become bonafide mainstays.
With the dawn of these athletic footwear companies’ rise to popularity, there has been a significant diminish in the ability of skater-owned companies to remain afloat. How can a small, skater owned brand expect to compete with an enormous, multinational corporation like Nike? The simple answer: they can’t. In an industry where investors typically consist of one’s friend group and family, even the biggest skater owned companies couldn’t possibly match the capital of the aforementioned giants.
Now, this is not to say that these companies are strictly negative entities. The money they are able to pay their team has pulled skaters out of the hood, fed families, and bought houses/cars that would otherwise be out of the question. However, this same powerful financial force has taken money away from skater owned companies, and paints an ominous picture for the future of skateboarding. What if ten years from now, these companies monopolize the market, and quality goes down? What if all the skater-owned companies disappear, and these giants decide to cut their team’s paychecks? These are bleak and possibly hyperbolic scenarios, but they are still absolutely possible. When a small group dominates a market, it is always the consumer that suffers.
At the end of the day, all of the rantings and grumblings in the world won’t stop Nike SB’s steady domination of the skateboard market. The only way to bring about any kind of change is to support skater owned companies, to vote with your dollar, and to keep skateboarding in the hands of those who love it, not those with deep pockets and Lunarlon™ insoles.
Here is a list of some skater-owned companies with exceptional shoes:
http://www.esskateboarding.com/us/
https://www.dvsshoes.com/shop/pc/home.asp
https://www.hufworldwide.com/huf_en_us/
(This is by no means a complete or comprehensive list, more of a jumping off point. Kind of like a boiled egg.)
