What I've Learned Part 1 of 6

As promised.

Over the next wee while I’ll share some of what I’ve learned in the last 4 years and some of what I’ve been doing to keep the brain active over the last 9 or so months.

Problem Solving.

To create anything you need to solve problems.

From my point of view there were loads:

• How do I screen print?

• Where will I get blank decks from?

• What will my logo be?

• How do I do a website/social media?

And a 100 other.

Most of which NEVER GET FULLY ANSWERED.

And that’s ok. Doing anything that involves setting up a business and doing something creative is a constant challenge - even if you don’t take into account the current circumstances.

But the answers are out there.

My one piece of advice that I would give is this.

Use the vast amount of content on the internet, in books, in podcasts etc to help you solve your problem and get over those hurdles. If this leads to mistakes then so be it.! That’s a really important part of learning.

I get asked a lot of questions about various things. And for the most part I’m happy to answer (apologies if I’ve not answered some yet though!).

But for me the process is as satisfying and important as the outcome. Probably more so. It’s where you learn what works and what doesn’t. It’s where you really understand how things go together.

So get your hands dirty. Be curious. Solve problems by doing, not just asking.

And make mistakes! It’s all part of the fun.

2020 Review

And so that’s 2020 just about done with - a few hours to go so lets not tempt fate. ; )

Its been an odd year. If you’d told me what would happen and all that that would mean I would probably have predicted that Doric Skateboards wouldn’t survive. Although I generally sell online I do a lot of Pop Ups each year and we’ve got used to doing our own events too. But amazingly we’ve churned out designs that have resonated with people and grown. I think the world is learning by force that retail is changing/has changed.

But lets set that aside. Here’s a wee run down of what went down for us this year!

January

In Jan we invested in all new Screen Printing equipment. This was a 4 screen carousel that would enable us to screen print clothing that uses up to 4 colours on one design. Now up until that point i’d only screen printed clothing with 1 colour. As with a lot of stuff i’ve done with Doric Skateboards - i made the plan but would worry about the actual details later.

February

And so in Feb we started screen printing the newest design - Donuts for Daze by Chris Graham. Big up grade for me:

5 colours on the deck;

3 colours on the topside logo;

3 colours on the tail - i’d never printed tail graphics before.

Clothing - committed to 4 colours across a variety of clothing!

And so on February 29th we launched the decks and clothing.

March

Earlier in the year i’d signed up to a course via RGU/Grays School of Art/Look Again called Creative Entrepreneurship. For some unexplained reason we had to do the whole thing online via video conferencing….

Anyways - it was really enjoyable. I had gotten to know some of the other people on the course over the past few years which helped but there was also new people to chat to and share ideas with too. One of those ideas was to do a design competition via our social media pages. And so..

April

We kicked off the Doric Deck Design Competition.! The initial idea was to pick one winner and produce one deck for that winner. But the competition grew arms and legs - or Tee Shirts and Stickers to be more precise.! See our previous blog post for lowdown and keep yer eyes peeled for another one next year!

May

What happened in May? Honestly have no idea. We did spend time with Stu Allan discussing our upcoming collaboration.!

June

Then we launched it! : ) See this blog post for the lowdown on that. What a design. Up to that point most of the Doric Skateboards designs had been fun/colourful so it was great to see some darkness come along!

July

Muddled through. Does anyone else remember? Was it sunny?

August

Dan! We added a new member to the team. Dan has been a big support to us from early on and we’d always earmarked him to be on the team. Stoked to have you onboard buddy! We will hopefully find one or two more to add next year - one already earmarked! ; )

September

This month we got back onto screen printing some new Skyline decks. These were inspired by the fading sun and some of my favourite skate brands - Alva and Dogtown. I used 3 colour spray paint to give them all a fade and then screened the Doric Skateboards Skyline design over it but only in outline - that way you could see the fade behind it. This was of course the opposite of what I did previously - blank deck with the Skyline having a 3 colour fade.! Really enjoyed doing these and thats all 10 of them gone, I’ll play around working with spray paint and screen printing together next year.

October

The Gull Has Landed! When Neil sent his design in for the competition in April I knew this one was going to be popular. I asked two other people to judge the competition and was glad that they also picked this one! I think its a belter of a design and the Tee Shirts have been really popular too. Well done Neil!

November

Peep Peeps Tee! Really loved this from the competition too. - nice one Phil. Babycham Blue coming soon…

December

Well this month got off to a flyer when the Look Again team asked myself and Big Up the Deen if we wanted some window space for some advertising. Absolutely delighted with it. Thanks to Sally and the team there - not just for this but for all they do in Aberdeen! Go check it out on St Andrew Street before we take it down. : )

Then of course there was the Christmas Market at the Bon Accord Centre. Can’t thank Aberdeen Inspired and Charlies House enough for this. Best one i’ve done in terms of sales. And so chuffed that the majority of the 100+ customers we served were known to us or us to them.!

And we managed to squeeze in a wee interview for local media giants in waiting Post! Read all about it.!

And thats 2020. Although just when I thought i was clear i ended up in A&E for the first time since i was young lad. Asthma is not fun. Either is getting old. : (

So take care of each other and hopefully see you all next year in some capacity. Sincerest thanks for all the support. I hope you take an ounce of the pleasure from it we do.

What's New?

Its been a while for a Blog Update (what blog doesn’t start with that?) - so here goes.

What’s new?

Well we’ve got 4 new designs coming soon. One that will be for Deck and Tee and the other 3 for Tees/Clothing only.

Read on to here about them!

Back in April we did a wee design competition and got some amazing stuff. We already did a couple of them as stickers and donated that money to Mental Health Aberdeen.

But the standard was so high and the reaction to some was such that we had to do a couple more - its taken a while but here we are.!

First up - a T-Shirt for the Aberdonians of a certain vintage.

Peep Peeps design by Phil Lyon.

This was a notorious bar down by the harbour in Aberdeen and the subject of that classic Sky TV show Britain’s Toughest Pubs. I was in once - eventually getting chucked out. Here’s Phils take on his design:

'I'd been reading about the Dada art movement when I seen the competition pop up on Facebook, figured I'd kinda draw some inspiration from that and go for a collage approach but simplify it a bit to make it easier to screen on boards/tees. I've seen a few other brands using that sort of thing with collages of random stuff but wanted to put a local twist on it. Always loved proper pubs with lots of character and characters and thought that Peep Peeps really summed up that working class pub that we seem to have less and less of these days so I decided to combine Chris' infamous hardest pub appearance with an art style I doubt he ever heard of and the result was the graphic I submitted. Still so stoked people liked it!'

Big thanks to Katy from Katys Studio for the assistance with this one and to Lee at Milk Print Studios for printing them. Both are creatives in Aberdeen doing their thing - go follow them. These Tees will be online in November with very limited numbers - no preorder!

Cull the Gulls

And here was the ultimate winner of the design comp. Initially we were just going to print one deck for the winner but after a chat with Neil we decided to do a full run. And its looking great.! Pre-Order for Tees are online soon and decks will follow very soon.! We’ll also have a chat with the designer Neil to talk about the inspiration.!

Spider From Mars T-Shirt

Not part of the comp but from the mind of Chris Graham aka DFunkt Robot - another local loon making his name and someone we’ve worked with before. A wee revamp of the Spider from Deep Fried Mars design will be coming to tees soonish!

Street Dreams Tees.

When we started this nearly 4 years ago our original design was of local diva Annie Lennox and a play on the song from her Eurythmics days Sweet Dreams. We went with Street Dreams being that thats where we learned to skate - no one said it was a clever play on words. ; )

We’ve threatened tees before. These are coming in November/December.

We’ve also got new beanies and a restock of Donut ones plus some Buffs coming soon! : )

Going back to Basics

Its sometimes easy to get carried away with adding new designs and associated merch. Its probably a product of excitement and trying to please everyone.

But i’m beginning to get a hold of things now and hopefully this will mean a few goals can be achieved:

• Less waste.

• Slightly more exclusivity.

• Migration to more eco friendly material and process’s

All printing of clothing has now migrated to an Aberdeen based DTG printer and screen printing from myself - whichever suits the design best. So that means less delivery time between printers, suppliers and myself = smaller carbon footprint. It also means i’ll always have my hands on all merchandise we sell as always. I’m not keen on third parties sending out stock on my behalf - albeit that would be less work.

All of this comes at a cost of course. The basic price of a blank t-shirt has doubled, the price of printing DTG is higher too but i think that for £20-28 for these tees (depending on style etc) is still good value for money when you consider it also includes 1st Class Postage and that these t-shirts are premium (regardless of whats printed on them).

And so now we’ve launched the new old tees.! These were the first ones we ever got printed and truthfully i never even thought about printing tees - thats changed.!

Really happy with the colours we’ve went for - i’ll be unveiling some of the real articles very soon for folks to see. Pre-order is online now and aim to deliver these by 1st/2nd week of August.

Going back to basics - less is more sometimes.

www.doricskateboards.com/?category=OG+Logo+Design

Clear the Decks

As I posted on FB this week I’ve been digging through the clearance stuff and having a think about how that reflects what i’m doing and how i’m doing it. This definitely signals a change that started earlier this year when i started migrating my clothing to more environmentally friendly stock.

When i’m left with excess stock its either one or a combination of a few of these:

• Totally missed the mark on the design/didn’t resonate;

• Getting stuff printed by a 3rd party often includes minimum numbers (perhaps too high for me);

• Too enthusiastic about stuff - particularly if i’m printing. I enjoy the process so much i can get carried away;

• Not asking people what they think before going for it;

• General anxiety to ensure i have enough sizes/colours of designs.

So pre-orders seem to be the way ahead. I’ve always done informal pre-orders - no money exchanging hands until i have the product ready. But that’s left me stung on a few occasions when folk change their mind/lose their job or just ghost me - no criticism there, shit happens.

The Stallan pre-order worked really well although due to shortages i’m still waiting to fulfil 4 orders. But overall it seemed to be a good way to gauge interest and only produce the tees that i needed with a few extras for the website. Decks are a slightly different proposition as for ones i get printed there are minimum orders and for the ones i print it takes a great deal of effort so i have to do a decent amount to make it worthwhile (in terms of time).

But for clothing i can be in much better control. Some of the new tees i’ll be launching soon will be printed DTG (direct to garment) by a local printed Grey Area Ink. Pete used to be a screen printer so knows his onions in the print game.! It also means i’ll be supporting another local business on a more permanent basis. Doing this should give us more control to produce what we need, when we need it. My tiny wee loft space is only so big.! I’ll also be working on a more formal basis with a local designer soon - more news on that later this month.

So hopefully in the future i won’t need to do too many clearance type sales. That means less of those “MEGA SALE GRAB A BARGAIN” type posts which i’m sure we are all sick of and reduces the amount of future landfill that i’m directly contributing to.

This year we’ve missed about 4 pop ups due to the global crisis so its reduced our capacity to sell. But the upside is the website sales have been much higher than before (thanks for that!). And i’ve spent less on stock - mostly because i’ve had no choice with places closed for a while. At the start of lockdown I held off on “selling” posts and did a bit more sharing of other local businesses which I feel like I’ve always done and still do. But after a wee while I felt like it was time to go again with my own stuff. And that’s when we kicked off the Stallan colab.

I’ll stick the link below to the clearance page on the website. Some gems in there for good prices.! : ) Have a look see. Maybe give it a share with someone you think would appreciate it.

Thanks for reading and thanks for the support. Always appreciated and never taken for granted.

www.doricskateboards.com/clearance

Stallan X Doric Skateboards

Thought it was worth the time to document the latest collaboration that has culminated in this cracking design.

When i started Doric Skateboards a few years ago i very quickly learned the depth of talent Aberdeen has to offer in terms of creativity and design. This was helped when we launched coincidentally at roughly the same time as the first NuArt festival. It was amazing to see the talent in the city via Look Again, Painted Doors and Throw Up Gallery. I’ll be the first to admit i didn’t know much at all and certainly didn’t really know anyone involved.

Even the concept of collaboration didn’t occur to me when I started - i just didn’t really have that word in my vocabulary! And to be honest I don’t think that its easy to collaborate with established artists when you start up. Why would anyone want to work with you? What do you bring to the table? But slowly I made contacts and dare i say friends with people in that community. And so a few years in i had met Stu Alan a few times at various events and was aware of his deck he designed for the skate shop Granite Reef in the past. And obviously a fan of his art - the pop culture influences and love of the film franchise (i hate that word) Aliens was totally appealing to me.

When I approach Stu i had no idea what he had in mind but he did hint at a metal theme and William Wallace was mentioned. I think what he’s produced is absolutely top notch - i kinda just stared at it every now and again when he sent the artwork. I also love that its a totally different direction for Doric Skateboard designs - its still very much Aberdeen and Scotland - but its way darker that anything from before. Its definitely attracted some new people and satisfied some established customers with some much wanted darkness!

This was the first time we ever did a proper pre-sale and i think its worked out ok - please let us know what we could do different? Obviously we missed our target of mid -May but all things considered i hope you can forgive that delay. Hopefully well worth the wait. I think for the tee shirts its worked as i haven’d made many extra and so there’s no waste.

So big thanks to Stu for his work and to everyone who’s supported it. I’ve added some spare tees to the website and a few decks from this first drop so if you missed out on the pre-order you can hopefully grab something now.

Here are some links to Stuarts work including his email address. Go check it out and see some of his work including some cracking commissions.

www.etsy.com/uk/market/stallan

www.instagram.com/stallan_/

stallan.artist@gmail.com

And look out for another tee using this design in some way in the coming months…!

Doric Design Competition

Well that was fun wasn’t it?

The idea for this came from a chap called Chris Rae who runs a drone photography business called Aperture Aerial Photography. We are both doing the same course at RGU at the moment and the idea of a design competition popped up! So thanks for the idea!

I think we had over 70 entries in 14 days.!

It started out as just a deck design, a one off.

But as it went i thought we should expand it. So I thought stickers and tees too.

To be honest we could have had 5 deck winners easily. So i whittled down that list to to 5 or so and sent to Mike from Transition. And thankfully he sent back a top 5 in almost the same order as me! Same winner so that was perfect.

Neils Cull the Gulls/People is spot on. So much so that we’ve decided to do a full run of this in the future.! It definitely has some fun about it but also a little bit of menace which i love. Keep your eyes peeled for this later this year.

Then we thought about a T-Shirt. Again - loads of possibilities but one stood out for a few reasons. It was very very local and niche. A reference to a notorious harbour bar in Aberdeen - Peep Peeps. No longer with us but immortalised on Britain’s Toughest Bars! So that was a great shout from Phil. Some locals are going to be sporting this tee very soon! : )

Then we picked two designs to do as stickers. Roberts Aberdeen Football Club inspired one and Stewarts Keith Haring one were fantastic and will be produced soon. They will be available on the website very soon with all profits going towards Mental Health Aberdeen.

Next we picked some runners up for some extra prizes! A very generous local donated £25 for a Hobbycraft gift voucher and that went straight to Zack! Really loved his drawing of Union Terrace and some Burns for added Scottish!

We had to pick another 5 for sticker packs so congrats to Justin, Andrew, Patrick, Livi and Sandra.! Those packs are winging their way to you folks now (if you haven’t sent me your address go for it!).

And again thanks to all that entered and all the comments. It certainly distracted me from the realities of life at the moment and i hope it did for you too.

Maybe lets do this again next year?

Didn't See This Coming...

Well that’s not quite true. We had warning. Examples. Cautionary tails.

But it looks right now (24th March 2020) that the UK’s decision to go into lockdown may be too late to head off the worst? At least that’s what the experts and infographs say. And we all know how much people trust experts at this point in time. What do they know? More than my mate that’s watched some videos on YouTube from David Ike?

Aye probably. ; )

Anyways.

Where does this leave Doric Skateboards? Well i’m lucky that this doesn’t provide me with any income. Every penny goes back in, plus we always give donations to various causes and of course support a couple of skaters with our merch. Although like most folk i’m concerned about my day job - i’m working from home at the moment but who knows whats round the corner?

Sales have obviously been quiet. I’ve scaled back on sharing “sales” posts but i have to stay positive and look forward to whats next for us. So i’ll maybe see where i am in a week or so and start sharing some stuff again - new colabs etc. The only stuff on social media i am sharing is that stupid March Meet the Maker challenge.! Ha! I’ve started it so i’ll finish.

Any shares, likes, comments, recommendations and reviews online are very very welcome.!

Once this is all over we’ll be kicking off a celebration for our 3rd Birthday which is next week. Plans to follow in the coming weeks. Months?

For now i can still post stuff if anyone needs/wants something. All my stock is bagged and boxed up safely.

Until then - stay safe and i hate to say this BUT think twice about going for a skate. If you injure yourself and end up in A&E? Well this ain’t the time..

Finally - another wee nudge to check out our People We Like page. Perhaps someone there that could do with some support in any way you can.

Oh! And keep your eyes peeled on social media this week - i’ll do a live screen printing session and you can fire questions/insults at me.

Cheers

Gary