Not everyday is a party

02/05/2012

Well, where do I begin. As you have all been aware, the new collection launched last friday. The quality and final results of my first time doing “plain colored” hats like the “Red Bottoms” collection has been perfect to say the least. Really happy how it all came out but happier on your support to this collection of solid and well executed designs with a twist.

The whole printed hats as usual, top notch. Great feedback from you guys from all over the world… and the stores, amazing, great. BUT… with every masterplan something might happen, and here is when UPS enters the game.

If anybody reading this works at UPS all I have to say is that if you guys have lets say 1 million boxes and you deliver 900.000, obviously, those 100.000 boxes should be somewhere, and is impossible they have been signed for when “delivered”. So thats been my issue: Some of the boxes never showed up, they appear as delivered and signed by the office frontdoor crew (Who couldn´t count the whole boxes delivery), and now UPS says they did everything right and that everything got delivered.
To sum up drama to a colossal fuck-up from UPS, most of the missing boxes had “Cosmos” on ´em… fucked up.

I´m really, really happy that at least all the preorders with the “Cosmos” shipped, all the web orders shipped, but some of the stores who ordered the hat will not be able to get it at this time, thanks to the fuck ups from UPS.

The decision about all this craze, is that the “Cosmos” will be released in Collection 7, again, but with another woven label. And to answer those questions “Man, why you keep changing the front label?”, the answer is basically “I want to change things up!”.


So some of the hats are low on qtys because of this, and I have to accept that shit like this can happen. I know money will be lost and probably nobody will be able to solve this unless some detective gets in the mind of whoever fucked this up… but anyways, just want to thank again all of you for the support these days.

Can´t stop won´t stop. Collection 7 on the way. And pocket tees from Collection 6 coming soon….!

{ 0 comments }

Everything has a story

27/04/2012

It´s been only about 5 weeks since I launched collection 5, the 1 year anniversary. It was sold mostly in the webstore. This time, we come again with a strong 10 pieces collection. Let me explain you why this collection comes with these pieces, as every hat has a story:

“The Mia”- In 2010 I got this puppy chiuhuahua I called Mia. I was living a completely different life then, with a called girlfriend and working too much, stressing too much and stuck up on an unhealthy mental state. That dog was the purest thing in my life. Now, looking back, I regret not spending more time with her. When I broke up with that girl, she took the dog as I was unable to give Mia a good life in NY. I have never seen my dog again. Sad but true, this hat is a homage to that dog who used to bite my Eames chairs and sleep with me every night.

“Postage”- My grandfather was heavy into stamp collections. He had massive stamp books. You can think of your Jordan collection, or rare shoes, or limited editions…well, he had everything related to stamps, and beyond. Big books he treated with so much love and took hours and hours to put together. I remember how he arranged the stamps with pliers and took all the time in the world for one single stamp. I didn´t understand then why he was so careful with those little pieces of paper. Years later, when I was heavily sending letters with people from the Hardcore scene, I used to save all the stamps and built this booklet with stamps from all over the world. Now I understand why he was so careful with everything.

“The Cosmos”- I fucking love stars. Every time I go to the mountains (Which happens once or twice a year), one of the best things is looking up and seeing this many stars shining, creating patterns and just chilling up there. It is a wonderful view. Throw in a blanket, a perfect companion and you are set for a good one hour or two. This hat originally came out in 2011, in like…collection 2 I think. By popular demand had to reissue it!

“The Unperu”- In august 2011 I travelled to peru to visit friends, see the amazing monuments in the small town of the peruvian mountains, and wonder at the marvels of construction these fellas had thousands of years ago. From that trip I took some learnings, some personal, and took also some fabric I got in the highest town in the peruvian area, Cuzco. With that amazing fabric created one of the most celebrated limited editions from Skulls, the “Peru Capsule Collection” that sold out in less than 24 hours. I loved the results, but the quantities I could come up with were so short, people was asking for me. This is called “The Un-peru”.

“India”- Im a big fan of these curtains from back in the day. It was all about hand made details, golden touches, the royal color (purple), and an inmediate touch of royalty to everything that has gold and purple. Sometimes feeling like a king or queen can be such an amazing feeling, so with this hat, I want to be closer to feel like it. A clean, stylish and distinctive design. personally one of my favorites from this collection.



“The red bottoms collection”- Will be honest: I have such a hard time deciding what to wear sometimes, I know it might sound girlie, but fuck it, that´s the truth. And I usually wear really boring stuff. I´m not a colorful type of guy when it comes to clothing, so my hat is always the piece of clothing that gives me that touch of color, or accentuates some part of the outfit. I created this collection to have 5 hats with plain colors with a different touch, with the red touch on the under visor and the eyelets. I came out with this while looking people shoes in the subway, and some tall girl was wearing the famous “red bottoms”, the high heels with the red sole. With 5 different hats to choose from, I know I will be able to mix and match with my … “boring clothing”.

I hope you like this collection as much as I do. A lot of sweat, work and time to come out with these hats, designed in Brooklyn and made in the United States by hand.

Thanks for all the support, and hope you like the small tweaks I did to this collection, with different woven labels, solid colorways, storytelling and of course… ugly hats!

ivan skulls.

{ 0 comments }

Sandra

26/04/2012

“Sometimes the best people in your life are those who give you everything without expecting anything”

{ 0 comments }

Brotherhood

25/04/2012

How many years, how many afternoons spent in Sants, the mecca of skateboarding, the outlaws of spanish skateboarding and at a certain point, one of the most hated crew in the european skateboarding scene.
Yes, when Barcelona became “famous”, we held our ground in Sants, not allowing crazy stuff from foreigners to happen. It was us. It was our spot, our ground, our obstacles. Still some people call the “Sants Crew” as unfriendly”, “rough” or plain and simple, “stupid”. There was a huge difference between the “Macba” crew and the Sants crew. We usually were the locals, and the Macba crew was mostly foreigners playing to be locals, more worried on drinking and eating falafels than creating something out of those exciting years.

Our generation, what some people call the “second generation”, skated this place since 1991-92, and made ours a plaza that was born with the Olympic craze of 1992 in sight, and won some awards because of its modern approach by the time it was built.
No matter what people say, we gave life to this place. We learnt how to be adults (somehow) here, and with this crew I learnt to be a man, to discover life, travel the world, make business (Selling and buying) and the few tricks I could do on a skateboard were enjoyed in these grounds and with these guys.
I found a used roll of film in Spain this last time. It was around my room for years. I had no idea what was on it, and I remember I shot it like 8 or 9 years ago, not even sure. I took it and developed it in new York. To my surprise, all these photos came out.
How we were building a planter, with pieces from one of the marble benches. How amazing. We were just turning architecture into… skateable architecture!

Some of the people in these photos are still great friends, and will be forever.

Sants Forever.

{ 0 comments }

Sophie

25/04/2012




{ 0 comments }

That city

23/04/2012

Los Angeles mon amour.

{ 0 comments }

Doing things

22/04/2012

My now famous fast-as-lighting visits to my country, Spain, are always productive… not as I expect them to be thou… I always get caught up with the siestas and the food, the walks and the coffees under the sun, but somehow someway, the stars align and I get productivity time too.

The guys at street and urban lifestyle blog-zine “25 gramos” travelled from their city Valencia to Barcelona to do some interviews with notable individuals for their side project “Backseries” (Web store of limited stuff, lifestyle and everything in between). I happened to be one of the chosen ones to get an interview.

Covered the beginnings of the brand, the importance of social media for the brand, and the future of Skulls. Personally, this one went much smoother than the radio interview I did last time in the city, and being on video, its a different vibe.
I even brought the very first sample of a hat I did back in 2007, and that linked with a tee I did with digitalgravel.com called “Hustlers Marathon”. For some reason I never happened to launch the hat, but having it in the interview was important to me, as I have always been into hats, crazy color ways and as some people say “ugly hats”.

You will be able to peep the interview (yes, again in spanish) really soon, meanwhile, some photos of the afternoon we spent together.

{ 0 comments }

Groceries

22/04/2012

Grocery shopping is one of my fave adventures ever since I begun visiting the States. getting into a supermarket was, and still is, a discovery process. We are pretty more basic in Spain, and in Europe in general. Options in the US are overwhelming sometimes, specially in the first days, weeks or months of shopping here.
Luckily for me, I got used to this and now I make my shopping more focused on what I really need (Yeah, I used to spend money on a lot of unnecessary stuff like Ziplocs of any size, glow in the dark drinks or weird pastries).
Some photos of the stuff I got today…

[click to continue…]

{ 0 comments }

Fight day

21/04/2012

Yesterday got killed at grappling training… Its really obvious not training for a couple weeks can take a toll on conditioning and specially on cardio, at least with me. Luckily for me, and for my ego, could sweep a 200 lbs guy I really like to train with as he is super heavy and I can force myself not to get under him (Yeah, he might be heavy but he is good also).
Anyways, today Jon Jones and Evans are fighting and looks like this UFC fight will be amazing, one of the nice things of living in the US is having pay per View options!

Sorry if some of you dont care about UFC, or fighting, or grappling or anything having two guys sweating and trying to choke each other, but maybe you like this one:

Gina Carano and Chris “Cyborg”, two of the best female fighters in one of the most intense fights I remember.

Ok family, now some work for the whole day and UFC time with a homie later at night (22:00 ET).

{ 0 comments }

The Yousendit case (edited post)

19/04/2012

Today in the plane I was reading one of my fave magazines, INC. and couldn´t resist to draw parallelism to certain industries and what so many people call streetwear, or urban “industry”, or “Market”.
To to put this into context, Inc. is a magazine that focuses on young companies, start-ups, smart moves, business cases, marketing moves by small or big companies that proved to be really successful, or terribly wrong…etc… you get the idea. It´s a really interesting mag if you are into brand building and marketing, or if you are an entrepaneur of any kind.

The Yousendit case went something like this: Some guy who dreamed of owning a Ferrari and living in Silicon Valley, leaves everything behind in canada and moves to the U.S to intern for Microsoft. Some time later he comes up with the idea of building a site that would allow users to send large files through the internet from a user to an email adress. From internship to temporary job, he writes the code for the first Yousendit code and built server on his spare time, everything really DIY. Things get big, big, big. His brother gets in the picture. They can´t be more different. They both wanted to get rich basically. With no clue on how to speak in public, they get $3 million in angel investment, and then is when they begin “saving”… this meant user base decline, issues between a newly formed board, and personal issues between the team… One bought a Porsche, the other brother a house… then to make it simple, one of the brothers starts doing random crap sleeping on those initial $3 mil and gets eventually fired by the board…of his own company! Basically the people who invested on his company fired him because he wasn’t being productive. On a rampage, was forced to sell his shares at a laughable price, ends up divorcing his wife, and ends up partnering with a hacker to crash yousendit servers on a rage attack.


In this vid, one of the brothers tried to launch this “Punchtab” thing but didn´t quite work as expected (Maybe the masks were to blame)
———————————-

The outcome of all this?
The guy who wrote yousendit code, sleeps these days in a Motel 6, the FBI charged him on the attack the company he founded suffered, no money, debt and most interesting, he has no part on yousendit success, shares, revenue and profit.

Sounds familiar?

Please read the article, its worth every word. Things like this have happened over and over again in the “streetwear” industry… that´s why SKULLS is 100% independent. If you do something, try to retain your soul on it, and grow it organically, no need for Porsches or big houses.

//////////

Note (20 april)- Amazingly enough, got an email from Ranjith Kumaran, who I assumed was one of the brothers from the Inc article, but he was one of the founders of Yousendit. Wanted to clarify certain things I stated and give him the voice that looks he lacked in the article:

“Just want to let you know that I am *NOT* one of the brothers (Khalid Shaikh and Amir Shaikh) that started YouSendIt. I was the third founder that stayed with the company for over 6 years and led the company to $39 million in revenue last year.

PunchTab, my second company, is also doing well. I raised $5.2 million in investment last year and PunchTab already has over 7000 customers using us with many large paid accounts. I hope this clarifies the story a little bit, it was written somewhat
dramatically and some details are hard to pull out.”

{ 0 comments }

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →