brand profile
DISTRIBUTION
UK-based I Five Skateboards have established themselves as one of Europe’s finest skate distros and are now pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in skateboard printing. We speak with company founder Adam Wood (who also started Karma Skateboards in 2002) about their cutting edge printing techniques and find out more about their setup. Please could we have a history of I five/skateboard printing and yourcustomskateboard.com Growing up skateboarding, working in several skate shops and then as a buyer for a skateboard distribution company, it was a natural progression to start my own company in an area I already knew well. Subsequently, I Five Distribution was created in 2002. We started with importing unknown USA Skate brands like Capix, Randoms, Momentum & Colosseum. After a short while I saw there was room for another UK skate brand and created Karma Skateboards in late 2002 (now under different ownership). Over the years we had spent much time & money growing brands, importing, and distributing Deck Brands/
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Clothing Brands/Accessory Brands etc, but this version of our business model had some great success and a fair share of tough times too. Why did you enter the skateboard deck printing market? I decided to invest in our own printing equipment to run alongside the distribution operation as importing printed decks from the USA had become somewhat difficult. We wished to reduce errors and speed up customer order turnaround times. So by creating our own decks, we could control all production factors such as the deck quality, transfer printing and finishing. We now have much more flexibility and less money tied up in printed stock.
Tell us about your board printing set up. We initially bought the first heat transfer machine in the UK back in 2007. This allowed us to create our own bulk/ long run high-definition prints on our decks, and for our customers own brands of decks as well. In 2016 we were the first in Europe to develop a digital hybrid process which enabled us to print ‘on demand’ singular decks and short runs. We now have a B2B website www.skateboardprinting. co.uk and a B2C website www. yourcustomskateboard.com here’s our 5 star rated trustpilot reviews. uk.trustpilot.com/ review yourcustomskateboard. co.uk
