My favorite shot of the team. Really the only shot of the team 🙏 . When I started @tkflt in 2008, I had a vision to build the company around Parkour athletes. What does every prominent Traceur naturally do? Make Parkour videos and take photos. In essence, they are consistently making high quality, engaging advertisements. So my vision was, get all the best Parkour athletes in the world associated with one brand (Take Flight®), and then literally pay them to keep being themselves. . I believed that through this method we could keep everyone in their bliss, and with a singular brand focus we could sell tons of apparel and pay the pros endorsement salaries large enough for them to live off. No doubt it was a very cool dream, and it was ahead of its time, especially for the Parkour world. . In the years that followed, some of the most iconic Traceurs in Parkour history passed through the Take Flight ranks including @pashatheboss, @salgadopk, @tobysegar, @shaunwood, @stanislavlazdan, @joeyadrian, @baityk, @tappbrothers, @luisalkmim, @osc.gup, @thibautdecassagnac, @alexseguralr and many others. Of course the most iconic member of the team was David Belle, the founder of Parkour. He was on the team for a few years, and we launched a brand line for him. We even got @danielilabaca to wear one of our tees on MTV’s Ultimate Parkour Challenge. At one point the sponsorship team was made up of more than 50 athletes from 13 countries. . The concept worked amazingly for 5 years, but then the market changed, some pros split off to start their own brands, and some other things happened. In retrospect, one problem was that the team was too big, so endorsement salaries remained small. Also because of the size of the team I never got the company to a place where we could afford to bring everyone together to build a real sense of unity and focus. The closest we got was this photo from a shoot we did for the original Take Flight Ultras Shoes. The photo features @dondraijones, @joeyadrian, @daneemarmolejo and me. . There are many Take Flight stories. This one is just a small version of a much more complicated story. . 📷 Photo by @daniel.broccoli. November 8, 2015 . #TakeFlight #TKFLT (at Ira Keller Fountain Park) https://www.instagram.com/p/B48lcFZBcY4/?igshid=mz8fi2fplxoi
