Illusion of Success

Last month I posted up something on social media about not making a sale in 8 days – turned out to be 10 actually. It got some press coverage but the headline may have been misleading for some.

The point I was making wasn’t around feeling sorry myself or concern that I wouldn’t make another sale – I was more trying to redress the balance. The perception people might have is that of success and making loads of money. The truth is of course very different – not just for me but for many.

For all that social media has given us in terms of opportunity to get ourselves seen, it has also allowed us to see others. And compare and contrast.

I see a lot of small/micro business’s online who definitely only talk success. No challenges, no bad days. To me they are missing out on connecting with people. In an effort to finely polish our “brands” you can see these business’s becoming tiny little corporate looking entities. They rarely if ever share any personal information, they follow no-one, engage with no-one, share nothing of anyone else’s. But it seems to work for some. Maybe they’ve found their people that way.

However, I think the key differentiator for most micro/small business’s is the person behind it. Their values, their personality, integrity, character. If we only talk success, avoid sharing our hopes, fears and failures then I think we are only one step from a hyperbolic Apprentice contestant who thinks you can manifest success out of thin air. Or maybe bending the truth about how popular your creations are – hoping that you will attract people who get caught up in hype and FOMO.

What’s more important to you? The perception of “winning” or the truth? Maybe somewhere in the middle?

Social Media seems to be losing the “social” and becoming more “selling”. I’m guilty of it too but I am trying my best to resist that and be more “social”.

Most of us don’t like the hard sale in a shop environment. Why would we like it on our phones? Its all becoming like a billboard. A paid billboard for that matter.

Perhaps the next phase of Social Media will be rougher around the edges. Look at Tik Tok. Huge numbers and certainly to begin with the content was less than polished. But the paid adverts have started there too and then the anxiety for small business’s start.

Should I get a slick video promo made?

Do I need to do professional photos?

Should I “fake it till I make it”?

I’ve done them all but also try to keep things grounded. Its not the same for everyone but it works for me. I see success as feeling happy with what I am doing and how I am doing it. The outcome from that could result in financial success – if that’s your starting point then maybe the illusion of success will get you there quicker. But the journey won’t be as much fun. Success should be defined by you and not anyone else’s metrics.

And for all the worry I had about not having a sale things turned around pretty quickly.

June has without doubt been the best month for Doric Skateboards for a variety of reasons. None of them sales related - we’ve had better months for sure.

Here are some highlights:

• LinkedIn Live with Yekemi Otaru chatting all things Marketing, Creativity, Social Media -watch it on YouTube here;

• Newspaper articles about my approach to having a bad week in terms of sales;

• Newspaper articles about my involvement with Curated Aberdeen;

• Social Media coverage for all of the above;

• Asked to talk to young folks for a second time for The Prince’s Trust;

• Launched one collaboration – planned two more;

• Attended Curated Aberdeen and had a great time;

• A few shops enquiring about stocking Doric;

• And had a meeting about something that will possibly be the biggest achievement of my life. If it comes off - I can’t wait to share it.

All of this feels like the culmination of the last 4 years – momentum. Like the penny arcades – each coin is your effort and with enough and some strategy you will eventually knock that wee pile off the end. Maybe you’d rather be a high roller throwing all your money on the tables - that might just work. But you probably won’t find me there. : )

Fear.....

My list of fears are large and varied.

One of my earliest memories is being at my brothers school assembly of some kind at Bramble Brae Primary Northfield circa 1980.

There must have been a performance and we had to clap. Surrounded by strangers I felt something that made me clench my fists and clap like that instead. Somewhere inside I realised that clapping made a noise, noise brings attention, attention brings people. And I didn’t want that. At least thats my memory of it.

A few years later I may or may not have swallowed a bit of lego (it never “passed”). I had to stay in hospital overnight and as I lay there tucked in like I was planning an escape (I probably was) I felt a cough coming.

I held it in because I didn’t want the attention of the staff on the ward. But what happened was a small cough turned into a loud splutter and my intentions were in tatters as the staff came running.!

It seems bizarre to me and possibly disingenuous to you that I would write this blog post, do videos, podcasts, social media, work shops etc all in the name of starting a business and be scared of attention. But then we are complicated creatures full of contradictions and I’m no different.

What has any of this got to do with Doric Skateboards, skateboarding, screen printing, design blah blah?

None of this started out with a plan and a destination. It ‘s just morphed and grown in various directions organically. Perhaps if I had been more business/financially focused I’d be writing this on a brand new macbook (and not my day job laptop) and be doing this full or part time. Perhaps I would be following a Dropship type business model for the clothing. But I do things my way for good or bad! Thats not to say I don’t take advice, I really do. No one is a one man band.

I work on my fears all the time. Each time I post on social media or do one of these I am already second guessing what people will think, followed swiftly by the other part of me that tells me people are way less interested in me and what I do than I think. ; )

I’ll always be a fearful person. Its like that game where you whack all those moles with a hammer, then one more pops up! I conquer one for a day and then it transfers to something else. My main fear now is getting back on my skateboard. It consumes my thoughts at times and the longer it goes the bigger its built up. I am 100% embarrassed by how bad I am and that is part of what stops me.

My approach to handling these things has always been the same. When I was young and went to the skatepark I was elated when it was empty. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy skating with friends (shout out Team Oatcake!) - I did. But if I was solo I didn’t have the social skills to adapt if there was a group there. So if it was empty I would anxiously have fun until more people turned up then I would slink away.

And 25ish years later when I started to learn to screen print I would turn up to Peacocks Studio with some screens under my arm. But if anyone else was there I would either:

1. Change my mind and go home.

2. Do the absolute bare minimum and then scurry away.

3. At all times keep what I was doing hidden so no one could see it.

I’ve become way more relaxed when going to Peacocks now. I understand when people think of these places as pretentious, arty places that are impenetrable.

Some of that is true. ; )

But mostly its just normal folk getting on with their own thing.

Will I find the same peace of mind with getting back on my board? Will I find the confidence I had a few years ago when I would go for wee night time skates on my own?

Who knows?

Your Custom Skateboard x Doric Design Challenge

First of all - huge thanks to all who got into the spirit of this challenge/competition.

Although there was an actual physical prize up for grabs I hope that the posting, tagging, sharing and the engagement across all the social media pages has brought some new followers to your page, some inspiration, more friends and contacts, perhaps some future collaborations and ultimately maybe even a commission or project.

I wanted to get something here on the blog - social media comes and goes so quickly - at least this is here forever.!

Big shout out to Adam and the team at Your Custom Skateboard for collaborating on this and offering discount codes should anyone want their design printed. Get in touch if you want to do that.

The winning design by Alex aka mokoyo.robo definitely caught some eyes early on in the challenge! Congratulations to Alex - can’t wait to see the deck printed.!

But because there were so many entries YCS wanted to give special mention to two others.

Steve Stark design aka stevestarkdesign on Insta was pretty much the first to submit so it was nice to see that his Croc design didn’t get lost in the pile!

And Hello Radical on Instagram with their Fish Food design. Definitely a favourite of mine.!

For these two they will be offered a special discount if they want to print their designs and to everyone else who entered they will also get a discount should they wish to do the same.

From my point of view i wanted to give something away too. So a blank deck each will be making their way to Corey and Reuben to design their own in any way they like.! Well done guys!

That’s it for this year. Lets do this again next year.!

Cheers

Gary

Why the Sad Face?

Growing up as I did I became very familiar with Catalogue books. You know the ones - Kays, Freemans, etc

They sold everything - like an analogue Amazon.

And it had the option to pay it up. So as a kid I’d always pester my mum that i could use my pocket money to buy the latest Action Force playset over 20 weeks. I obviously had no idea how long 20 weeks was!

Obviously these books were full of models. And the tropes looking back were pretty hilarious. A LOT of smiling and laughing, flying kites, having picnics, eating around a dinner table - basically the exact opposite of life for a lot of people using this kind of service.!

And so rolling on a few decades I find myself needing product photographs for Doric Skateboards and think back to these.

Product photos with models isn’t something that I particularly paid much attention to over the years. And so I started to look at Skate/Street wear/Fashion pics.

Something was wrong. They all look aloof, miserable, too cool for school. Looking into the distance, hunched over squatting on a manky side street - its said “fuck you, you aren’t cool enough to wear this shit”.

Of course that assumption is very much coloured by my own low self worth…

But it did plant something in my mind. Why do some models smile and some don’t?

Seems the answer is depressingly simple.

Smiling is associated with being an idiot. Lower class.

Frowning or looking dismissive is associated with power. Higher class.

These conclusions came from some googling - i would add references but this isn’t a dissertation.

So where is the room to express what the brand is? Apparently you shouldn’t? The product should do the talking and the model should do just that - model.

I’ve been lucky enough to have some mega talented photographers do stuff for me. Dean Gray and Pirate Photography spring to mind. Both locals who were kind enough to reach out. Thankfully they displayed flexibility so that the work they did for us wasn’t one or the other in its entirety. Way back in the beginning I was also lucky enough to be contacted by a couple of local chaps - Ryan of Westburn & Granite and a lad called Dominic who i’ve lost track of. Below is a selection and looking back I think they reflect Doric Skateboards pretty damn well.

A bit of fun and a lot of colour.

Check the links above to those talented folk - each picture is also linked to who took it. Thanks again to them all.! : )

Also below that - some classis catalogue modelling!

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?

Fresh out the oven - Donuts for Daze

Online now.!

Well that was a massive effort.! And a lot of lessons learned. Some painful - as are most lessons worth learning.

Over 3 years ago when i was sitting at my desk facing possible redundancy i had made the decision to do something creative. Something that wouldn’t cost a lot and that i could control. At that point the idea of Doric Skateboards was pretty much as it is now - i wanted to screen print as much of my own stuff as possible. Its taken until last year to venture into clothing. A couple of factors contribute to this.

Mainly Time and Confidence.

It takes time to plan venturing into new process’s. And i really had to wait for the down time of post Christmas to achieve that. And thanks to all the lovely people that support us i ended up with the budget to purchase new equipment too.

A four screen rig, new screens (you can’t use the same type of screens on a skateboard as a tee.! ), squeegees, ink (again - some different inks can be used.).

Its been a tough learning curve and i hope i’ve got that message across on social media. I’m not sharing the process to show how busy i am or anything like that. It’s meant to be a way of being totally transparent. I’ll share mistakes and concerns. No faking it (although i did used to think “fake it till you make it” was a way forward). I got very despondent that the tees etc weren’t printed “perfectly”. I’ve kinda got over that and realise i am still learning and i hope that people who support the brand will be ok with that too. If i wanted perfection i’d do them a different way - this way you can see the work that’s went into it all.

I’m not a confident person in many ways. I allow that negative voice to dictate - sometimes its my voice, sometimes its other peoples. But i’ve pushed through and am really proud of the new range. Its the fullest, most complete range we’ve done yet. Big thanks to Designer Chris Graham - amazing work by him again.

We both hope you like the new stuff - generally Doric Skateboards is a playful brand and this design keeps that. Although wait until you see the next design/collaboration. This one ain’t playful… ; )

Until then - thank you for all the positivity sent my way. Never taken for granted, always appreciated.

Cheers

Gary.

Donuts for Daze and other news....

Its been a really busy start to the year for Doric Skateboards. After the Christmas madness we took the time to plan out some things for the year ahead.

If you follow us on social media you’ll maybe have caught a glimpse of the new design.! Really stoked to be working with local loon Chris Graham again. Check him out on Instagram here. Release date is Saturday 29th February.

This new one is a ramp up for us in a few ways:

• Tail graphics. We’ve never done anything on the tail of the screen printed designs. Its definitely a bit harder but we’ve engineered something that works.!

• 3 colour topside logo. Way way back we did two colour topside logos for the Jetpack Dinosaur collaboration. This time we’ve went 3. Now i know that a lot of people simply grip tape over the topside but i prefer to do them anyways. And doing 3 colours requires a lot of time and patience. Working within the concave of the deck can be really tricky - its all muscle memory eventually though.!

• 6 screen graphic. For the main graphics we used 6 separate screens/layers. This is on top of the 4 for the tail and the 3 for the topside. That’s a total of 13 passes needed to complete one deck. I think the finished article will show where that effort has went.

• Multi screen clothing. For the last collaboration deck we did with Fit Like we dipped our toe into screening the clothing too. That was all one colour stuff. This time its multi colour/screen designs so we’ve invested in some new equipment to facilitate. Excited to get going with it and show it all off.!

So keep your eyes peeled for the reveal early/mid February for the release on the 29th Feb.!

In other news:

• Organic clothing. We’ll slowly move on to clothing that is at very least ethically sound but also coming from organic cotton. I’m well aware that i’m producing “stuff” and sometimes the world/us don’t need more.! So the least i can do is make sure its better for the environment. The goal by the end of the year is to have all tees/hoodies done with this sort of clothing.

• Future collaborations/designs. We’ve got a firm date for another deck and clothing design plus other new bits and pieces in the first 6 months.

• 3rd Bday Bash. Possibly schedule another Bday Bash this April.!

• Pop Ups. Some planned already - others TBC.

• We added a load of screen printing tutorials to the YouTube channel. Please head there and subscribe.! : ) We also added it to the website here.

• Last year we added a page to the website that features people, business’s, organisations, brands, artists etc that we admire. Check it out here. You might find something you want/need!

• We also restocked some of our stuff. Plenty of PoP tees in Black, White and Olive Green. !

• And to make room for new stuff you can grab the Scotch Tee design on sale for a bargain £10 posted.!! Black Front Print, Black Back Print, White Front Print, White Back Print and a kids one (aged 3-4 years old) for a fiver.!

Next month we’ll have revealed the new design in its entirety - we hope you like it.! Until then - thanks for the support. : )