Hey everybody, my name is Olga Bouwhuis. I have been skating since 1996 and like every little kid I've been dreaming of working in the industry since the first day I strapped a pair of skates on my feet. I always kept this dream a secret, and never let my fantasy take the better of me, because I never thought I could make it... That is, until I met Pieter.. Fifteen years later and it is starting to hit me..My childhood dream is becoming reality!
55 days til clash! The counter on the Winterclash website is making us feel quite nervous. Are we going to make the deadline we gave ourselves? On the Winterclash, we want to show our skate to the world. But before that time, we have a lot to do. First of all, I have been testing our latest adapt prototypes. I'm absolutely in love with them, they look beautiful, they fit my feet perfectly and I couldn't be more happy!
Since the weather sucks most of the time we have been going to some skateparks. The people in our local skatepark already know what's up, but when we travelled to Area51 two weeks ago we had a nice little surprise. Some little kids came up to me and asked me if those were the adapt skates! It was so cool to find out that in this little time that we have been working on adapt, people already know about the skates. We talked to the kids for quite some time, answering all their questions. It was great.
Something that also came as a surprise during this visit at the skatepark, is that I found out that our boot maker forgot to put some padding at the heel area of the skate. I was really bummed about this, because we hoped that this prototype would be our last one and the next one would be perfect. Now we need another prototype to make sure it's perfect before we make our first complete skates for the team. But, no worries, the new prototypes should be finished by next week and then our boot maker will immediately start with the new skates for the rest of the team.
Pieter has been extremely busy at work, and this is making everything more difficult for us. Because Pieter is so busy, there hasn't been any time yet to make the final version of the soulplates and the first version of the frames. We know that the soulplates are perfect, they just have to be made and that's it. However, for the frames we are not certain. We know the material will slide well, and we are quite sure that it can take the impact. But we haven't been able to test if the spacers we chose will work with the frame. So, we are anxiously waiting for some free time so that the soulplates and frames can be made.
A skate company isn't just a product, it is much more. So besides working on the skate, we have been busy with setting up our website, advertisements, ordering new clothing for the team, designing stickers, finding boxes to put our products in, etc etc.
This month we had our first two adverts, one in [MAG] a very good Dutch online skate magazine, and our first print advert in Be-mag. The advert in Be-mag is together with Chimera, whose wheels will be on our skate. We are very happy with this collaboration. Not only because Chimera wheels are very good wheels, but also because Ben Harmanus has a lot of the same ideas as we have about the skating industry. Next to that, he has also been giving us great ideas that we can use in our products. When you visit the link in our advert, you will find a disappointing 'coming soon'. This because of a little misunderstanding with Be-mag. We thought that the new Be-mag issue was going to be released on Winterclash, giving us the opportunity to present the completed skate on the website and giving us some time to come up with other nice stuff for your viewing pleasure. But, unfortunately the Be-mag is already in stores now and we are hoping to put our first content on the site at Christmas Eve.
Will we make the Winterclash deadline? Check back in a week or so for our next What's up with Adapt!
