Vivien Feil and Soy Panday discussing the original idea behind Magenta Skateboards
Soy: In my head, the idea was to make a brand that was not based on performance. That goes for the actual skating as well as the graphics.
Vivien: I'd say three quarters of the companies today are based on the same universal business plan: "We'll take ten dudes who are amazing at skating, whoever they might be, nice guys or not, creative or not. We'll put them in a van with a local guide and the put the footage on the web. People will be stoked, we'll only have to slap our logo on boards and t-shirts and sell them." But there is no content, it doesn't "mean" anything. There are many brands out there that could switch their logo and team and it wouldn't make a difference. So, the idea was to do something honest, in the sense that we skate with other people. So, if we go to San Francisco, you'll see the people we skated with in the video from our trip there. We are not a team of superheroes coming to destroy your sports. This is not the point, for us. Our goal is to document and exhibit the feeling you get when you're skating with your friends. If a friend is not super good, but does something that is good for him, we'll show it. A lot of people don't understand that, actually. But we are just showing what is going on, in all honesty.
Soy: It's very human, in a way.
Vivien: We did ask ourselves who we were going to put on the team. And sometimes, you skate with a guy, and he's good, but you can tell that his vision is dictated by that culture of performance. Skateboarding is not about sitting in a van, being driven somewhere to do a trick. Performance is fine, if you're able to do something and pull it, that's amazing...
Soy: But it's not the primary goal! We're trying to offer an alternative to a skateboard industry that tries to make you believe that you have to do difficult tricks that fit in to the history of certain spots, when you could be doing a trick that's "easier," but uses the spot better.
Vivien: It also depends on how you do it. An argument that we hear all the time from people who don't like what we do is that Magenta is not "pushing the envelope." But is skateboarding advancing just because someone backside 360 kickflips the Bercy blocks? The people who truly push skateboarding are all the guys who walk out their doors to skate and return with smiles on their faces.
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