NB# – Still Kid
Video by Josh Hallett
Photography by Sam Ashley
Interview by Will Harmon
In the following pages you’ll see photos of Andrew Verde and Davide Holzknecht bluntsliding (backside nose and frontside, respectively) pristine granite ledges in Warsaw, along with Flo Mirtain alley-oop fakie 5-0ing in Switzerland and Massimo Cristofoletti wallie backside tailsliding a spot where it seems inconceivable that the landscape architect didn’t have skateboarding in mind when designing it. But have you ever considered that perhaps we take for granted how much goes into making all this happen? And I’m not talking about how many tries it took, or how hard it was booking the flights, the Airbnbs, the rental vans, the negotiations with security guards at spots, the rain, breaking boards, etc., I’m talking about how a corporate sportswear brand (in this case, New Balance) has found it in their best interest to support these skateboarders (along with Tom Knox, Jamie Foy, Andrew Reynolds, etc.), essentially funding their lifestyles, so that we can continue to witness and admire their incredible abilities all around the world on these four-wheeled toys.
A lot of credit (but by no means all, as our interviewee is quick to point out) goes to Seb Palmer, the “General Manager” of New Balance’s skate program, also known as New Balance Numeric. I talked to Seb about his humble beginnings as a young skater growing up outside of Birmingham, to his current role at a brand that’s become a major player in the skate shoe game, plus his journey in between.
Massimo Cristofoletti, wallie backside tailslide all the way, Rothrist
It’s been 10 years since the Quids In video, the UK and Europe’s introduction to the New Balance Numeric team. What do you remember from that time?
Seb Palmer: It was like a really small operation at that time. I organised that whole trip pretty much. We didn’t have a team manager I don’t think at that point. Levi Brown became the team manager, but I think on that trip he still wasn’t. I mean, it was me going back to the UK, just kind of easy in some regard. I think I drove a van, maybe Levi drove a van, maybe somebody else… It was pretty simple, but it was great having Tom [Knox]. He ended up being the voice in the video and he was relatively new to a lot of people in the US. This was before Atlantic Drift…
Before his Isle Vase part too…
Yeah, that’s right, and yeah, it’s funny, because his reason for coming to New Balance was because he’d had a bad experience on an Emerica trip. Like full irony, it comes all the way around…
[Andrew] Reynolds on New Balance now!
I mean I don’t want to speak for Tom necessarily, but I don’t think it was particularly Reynolds that was kind of rude to him. I think it was just the general Emerica rockstar, superstar kind of thing.
I see… And then what was so unique about Quids In was that it was a UK trip, but it looked like you guys purposely excluded London.
I think the whole rationale of that was, you go to London, it’s like a big city, 10 million people, it’s crowded and Americans don’t like getting on the tube… And so you can go to the M62 corridor and accomplish a lot, you know? Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds are all great cities, and just a lot easier to get around. Yeah, I think that was the basis of it. And then we went up to Cumbria, which was a nice diversion and we took in Sheffield somewhere along the way. That was my memory of it. Oh, and we went up to Scotland! Scotland was amazing. You know what Scotland is like weather wise, but it was just really good.
Andrew Verde, backside nosebluntslide, Warsaw
You got lucky! So how did you convince Knox to sign with New Balance quite early on?
I don’t know how. I knew Tom’s brother, Sparrow, like way back, early 2000s. He had been on like a Nike 6.0 thing, and I knew of Tom, but I didn’t know him, you know what I mean?
Yeah.
It wasn’t really difficult to convince him. I think Emerica just wasn’t right. And I wanted him to be the first European rider. And the way that we did videos was we were opening up markets, right? So we opened up the UK and we did that video. Then we opened up Spain and did Tinto de Verano. So we would go to places as the shoes became available there. So they were just like strategic trips, and then, obviously, you’re creating content back to the global audience too.
I see. So right now, as we’re speaking, you’re at an airport in Indonesia, heading to Japan, but I know you live in California. To go back a little bit, what was the job that brought you to the States?
The job that took me to the States was brand manager of éS, so it took me there at the beginning of 2011. Unfortunately, before the year was out, they put the brand on hiatus. Sole Tech imploded pretty rapidly that year.
Filip Dziewiecki, frontside boardslide, Warsaw
That must have been pretty stressful for you? After leaving England and moving all the way over there…
Stressful yeah… My daughter was born the week that I was laid off and my residency status was directly tied to the job. So I’m supposed to leave the US and also I didn’t have health insurance; when a job expires, you lose it. So you have to pay this emergency insurance and it was like a fucking grand a month. So, I didn’t have a job, had to pay health insurance, daughter was in the hospital for four months… And so yeah, it was an insane time, a really insane time, but we got through it.
Glad you did. Before we talk about New Balance, I wanted to hear a little bit about your background before that and talk about Sumo and the other shoe brands you worked with. Where exactly did you grow up?
I grew up in a little town just outside of Birmingham, Bewdley, and it’s a strange small town. One side is countryside, like kids would come into school in the morning having worked in the fields, then if you went the other direction, you go into Birmingham and that’s where skating took us. When we discovered skating, we just explored the brilliance of the West Midlands. That’s where I grew up. I didn’t move to Sheffield until ‘91 to go to university.
And then in Sheffield you decided to open up a skate shop called Sumo. What year was that?
That was ‘93. It was me and a few friends that opened up Sumo. And, yeah, I guess I was the driving force persuading them to risk all, put in and do it. And I liked it so much, I dropped out of college to just focus on that.
Davide Holzknecht, frontside bluntslide gap-out, Warsaw
And Sumo was around for a while right? When did it eventually close?
Eleven years. It didn’t close until 2004.
And then what did you do after that? Is that when you began working for shoe brands?
Well, halfway through Sumo I started being a sales rep for New Deal.
Ah the UK distribution.
Yeah, they had become the powerhouse, lots of brands, and I sold the first season of Lakai in for them, or rather Warrior actually, a sub distribution. So I got Lakai going in the UK, and then they asked me to do DC for the North. They split the country in two, and I did the North of England for DC. You know shops are hard to make money from, so in addition to Sumo I was just ambitious to do something else as well.
And this led to working for Nike?
So with Sumo we did Nike in the mid-’90s when they did the choads [laughs] and all of that. And one day they said to us, “Hey, we’re pulling the skate program.” And we’re like, “Yeah, I understand.” It was shit, you know? So we carried on being a Nike account, but we were just selling other Nikes, like we just did ACGs and a few other things. But right at the end, and Sam [Ashley] worked at Sumo too, but at the end, after hearing that news, we got a box of samples from someone at Nike. We don’t know who sent them, but in there were the first dunks. And I took one pair, Sam took the other, and we were like, “Why didn’t they make these?” They built a skate program and they had the shoes right at the last minute, you know? So we had these first dunks, I still have them at my parents’… It’s like 1999 so it’s really one of the first ones.
Dale Starkie, 360 flip, Warsaw
Oh gosh, yeah that would have been years before Nike SB started…
Before the Alphanumeric dunk, yeah that was really early. So I was always like, if Nike gets it right, they’ll figure it out. And then they came back and released the dunk properly. In the UK they only sold to Slam and Ideal, and I asked Kris [Ludford] at Ideal, “Who’s your contact at Nike?” And so I called Nike, and I said, “Hey, I’d like to sell your shoes again in my shop. I used to be an account, and you should employ somebody from one of these shops, one of us, you know? Or you’re gonna fuck it up again.” And that conversation went on for months. I was talking to people at Nike sporadically for eight months…
And would this be people in Portland, or people in Amsterdam?
In Amsterdam, yeah. It was this guy Jason Fulton… And then they gave me an interview and Sumo was still going, but I started working for Nike at the end of 2003. And the mad thing was, one of the problems with Sumo at the end was Nike wouldn’t sell to the shop because I worked for them.
Oh, like a conflict of interest or something?
Yeah… Essentially handing everybody a check by giving them dunks at the shops… But because I couldn’t sell to Sumo it was one of the last nails in the coffin, which is the irony of it.
Dee Collins, backside 360 heelflip, Zürich
That’s so weird.
At that point, I was just over some of the difficulties of running the shop, I guess.
And then when Sumo closed, you started working for Nike full time?
Yeah, and then I moved to London once Sumo closed. I put [Dave] Mackey on, he was the first European Nike rider. Then I put on Korahn [Gayle] soon after. Little Korahn with his shoes spilling out of his backpack. He’s the longest running Nike rider of the whole team. And Korahn is incredible; he’s an amazing person.
He is. And when/why did you leave Nike?
I did a really dumb thing in many ways; I quit Nike because of Nothing but the Truth. I was so bummed, and I’d expressed it really vocally, and I put on the European premiere at Southbank.
That was an epic premiere; I was at that one!
I put Slam (City Skates) in NikeTown. We had people queue outside for four days for the “What The Dunk” shoe. I did this whole thing for them, and I’d been in Portland, and I told them to cut the skits, or at least cut them down… Or at least provide a DVD version where you didn’t have to deal with them, and they just didn’t listen. And it just ruined the video. There’s some great skateboarding in that video… I don’t know, I was just bummed.
Flo Mirtain, alley-oop Pupecki grind, Aarau
I remember that video came out in 2007, so after leaving did you start working for Sole Tech soon after?
I had the worst year of my life, just drinking too much and broke… It was awful. I wanted to just leave the skate business at that point… My shop had gone bust; I was really kind of over things. And then Don Brown asked me some stuff, and I think I wrote him a piece about, just like, what Sole Tech should do with itself… And then he was like, “Why don’t you come work for us?” And it felt good… I had worked for the biggest sports company, and there were incredible points. That time at SB was amazing in those beginning years… But it felt like a redemption to go and try and work for a skater-owned company.
And then in 2011, as you said before, they stopped éS…
Yeah…
So how did New Balance come into the picture? Actually first, can you tell us how New Balance got into making skate shoes in the first place?
So it was a guy called Mike West, and he had 686, the snowboard brand. Mike had a relationship with New Balance, because he got to know someone there, and he made some snowboard boots for them. And then he said to them, “You know, you should do a skate shoe.” And he got the deal, like the licensing to do it, but part of that was to bring on a skate company, to do the distribution and things. So he went to different companies and proposed it. And it was Jamie Thomas and Frank Messman that saw the vision of it. Frank Messman was Jamie’s partner at the time at Black Box, and Fallen had been huge… It was really big in the US. I guess I hadn’t realised… People weren’t aware in Europe how big Fallen was in the US, you know?
Henry Fischer, boardslide, Zürich
Yeah I had a few friends go work for them.
It was really big, and then yeah, Jamie saw the big accounts coming in, and saw this opportunity, so he partnered with Mike West, and that was how New Balance Numeric came about. I believe Mike West came up with the name, a trademark. He wanted “Numeric” referencing the way the numbers are in the company. Also a word other than just “skateboarding”.
Yeah… And what year was this happening then?
That was happening in 2011. And then they signed the deal in 2012 and then they brought me on to manage the project. So they’d done the deal then they brought me on to set the direction of the brand.
And how did your name come about for this?
Frank Messman… I didn’t really know him before, but if he just knew of me, maybe it was through that European connection? I’m not sure if Don Brown passed my name on, but Frank’s a pretty astute guy. Frank gave me a great break there. Actually, I had a job lined up with Bod [Boyle] and Steve [Douglas] at Dwindle. The European connection is strong out there…
Andrew Verde, kickflip backside tailslide, Liestal
I see…
And I was like, “I’m sorry, guys, there is a shoe thing and I’m more of a shoe person than a board person, you know?”
And so now at New Balance, what’s your official title?
I have another title, but I just prefer to say General Manager, because my role is unusual in that I oversee product sales and marketing.
The actual shoes seemed to have changed quite a bit from the beginning of New Balance Numeric. Is this due to newer designers or changing factories? Can you talk about that a little bit?
Yeah, so the licensing with Black Box and 686 didn’t last very long. The first shoes that they made the quality wasn’t there; not necessarily the designs, but just the quality of manufacturing. So New Balance brought it in house, and they brought me in house in 2014. I had to completely set it all up again.
I see, because before that you were working out of Black Box basically?
Yes, I first started out of Black Box, and I set it up, and then I set up an office for it and then I recruited one designer, Kelly Kikuta. Because the first designs I was working with, I was working with a designer that wasn’t really from a skate background. It was quite a challenge at the beginning, but then I recruited Kelly Kikuta, who had worked for Gravis, but they had finished. So we were quite influenced by Gravis, like low, vulcanized, but I always believed in cupsole, like the true strength of an athletic brand, you know?
Janos Herzog, backside 180 heelflip, Zürich
Yeah.
And then the brand really changed in 2017/2018 when we took on our main designer, Jeff Mikut. That’s what really got the brand to its best place, I think.
Yeah that’s what I wanted to ask you… If there was a particular moment where you really saw things change and New Balance really became a major player?
Yeah, it was when we got Jeff on board. And not just Jeff, but it was like a real kind of makeshift situation, and then as you got more established people in, New Balance was patient. They gave us a chance, but they wanted us to go slow, so we went slow and steady. But yeah, in 2018 we released a shoe called the 440 and that was the change for me. That shoe was amazing.
Did you also see a turning point with the brand signing big riders like [Jamie] Foy and Tiago [Lemos]?
Yeah there were different turning points when we signed Jamie Foy and then we signed Tiago, and you appeal to different people obviously. Jamie’s an incredible, gnarly skater, but he was still kind of unknown to some people at the time. We got him just after he won his first SOTY and then we got Tiago after that. They were really purposeful signings, right? We get the hesh, hardcore rail skater with Jamie, and the younger following and the Zumiez crowd, and then with Tiago we get the style god.
Massimo Cristofoletti, kickflip, Aarau
How big of a discussion was it? Like, obviously signing skaters of this calibre is probably quite a big thing, isn’t it?
Yeah, there’s a big discussion, and New Balance were always wanting to approve it. The funny thing with Tiago was that one of the owners of New Balance, Chris Davis, and I were at a trade show, and I was watching the skating with Chris, and he said, “That guy there, that’s the best skater.” referring to Tiago. This is probably 2018 and then we signed Tiago two years later, and he always says that was his call.
Oh, amazing.
We were watching him live in front of us at that trade show in Long Beach. And Tiago… It was just something about him, just like a presence we felt. That didn’t transpire for a couple of years, but when I finally brought him to New Balance it was like, “Yeah, perfect. We got it.”
And then what about getting Reynolds?
That was the opposite. That was a fight, because they’re like, “We’re not signing a 40-year-old, no matter how legendary he is.” But Andrew for us was the right thing at the right time, and it rounded out what we have as a squad, and it’s been amazing.
Michael Brunner, fakie pop-shuv, Greifensee
Indeed.
But all alongside this is in Europe, and in other regions, we had people who were doing different things. We had Ant Claravall doing Asia for us. Mackey came on board for Europe, and then [Mark] Baines came on board to help us build that.
That was my next question actually. I wanted to ask about what it was like working with these people. How did you get them on board?
That, you know, there’s my heart… Baines and Mackey are two of the people I love the most in the world, and to have them work for us is amazing, just the best people. Things come together at the right time, that’s all it is I think. But those relationships are long held, I’ve known Baines since he was 13 or something. I’ve known Mackey since before he opened Lost Art. I mean, it was hard at first, but they believed in me and the brand.
It’s interesting how the market share has evolved with New Balance in the skate world. Have you seen spikes when you sign these big names, kind of like when you signed Foy, Tiago, or signed Reynolds? Seems like you guys are doing really well right now. For you, has it always been business as usual, or have you relished in the brand’s success at all?
It’s not that you see huge spikes, you just see the next step, right? It’s just slow and steady and Jamie opened up things for us, as did Tiago. Each one is like you’re trying to reach and convince a different audience, yeah? There’s this one shop, one of my favourite shops, Atlas, in the Bay Area. I would go and see them, and it’s one of my favourite stores in the world, right? And, and they’d be like, “Yeah, I don’t know about New Balance…”And they were so hesitant to take in the brand, they just weren’t convinced. They weren’t convinced with Jamie Foy, they were put off by the Red Bull hat, but then when Tiago came on board, they called me up, they’re like, “All right, we believe in you now.”
Davide Holzknecht, 360 flip, Warsaw
Haha, yeah…
I think it’s just been slow and steady since. Tiago brings Andrew, because Tiago is Andrew’s favourite skater. So each move brings on another. Nothing’s been like a huge sudden spike, everything’s been slow and steady.
You’ve taken so much of your experience from working with a lot of other footwear brands to get to this point, it’s impressive. But knowing you, you obviously won’t take all the credit. You work with a lot of amazing people, as you mentioned…
The only credit I’ll really take is that I assembled a team of people to do this. I helped assemble these amazing people, and hopefully that’s evident…
I think it is, yeah.
I won’t take credit for any of those individual things, I guess that’s it. And then just my experience being a retailer, because without the skate shop, skate culture is just not the same, you know? That’s the most important thing too.
Andrew Verde, switch frontside feeble grind, Möhlin
Here’s a question from Smasher [Sam Ashley]: What was your best shoe versus your worst shoe, and why?
That’s a hard one. Yeah, I can’t say which one was the single worst shoe, but the worst situation is anything that has poor quality. And that was just how it was right at the beginning. It was just always disappointing. As far as the best shoe, everything new is the best shoe, right? Because you’re learning all the time from it, yeah, and the future things are coming out… But yeah, the 440 is… It’s like, put it this way: Tyler Surrey is the best skateboarder on the team, and he’s also the backbone and the example for all of the team riders to live by. The way that he acts on trips, the way he conducts himself… And he, for me, is my backbone, you know? And the 440 is the backbone of the shoe line. It’s the middle shoe, right? Not the cheapest, not the most expensive, not the most cushioned. It’s just an all-round shoe. Like, if you’re gonna say, “What NB# shoe should I try?” I’d start with that one. You want something a bit more cushioned, you go to the 480 or 1010, if it’s too much shoe for you, step down to the 272, or whatever. And to extend that description of Tyler Surrey: he’s the perfect skater. He’s tech, but he wears really bad hesh shorts at times as well haha, so it’s like right in the middle. He’s the best.
Nice one Seb. Anything else you’d like to add?
I mean, just to reflect on 10 years, it was always my vision to try and build something in Europe, but also not to exclude what European skaters are doing, and try to integrate them into everything we’re doing. So for our global campaigns we are always trying to integrate skaters that choose to live in Europe. Tyler is a US skater, but he moved to Spain. And Tiago is a Brazilian skater that moved to Norway.
The cast of Still Kid
Yeah, New Balance is very worldwide in that respect. Like starting with Tom Knox and how he’s on the proper team. It’s not some international deal like brands did in the past.
There’s very few European skaters with signature shoes, and he’s one of them.
Thank you for all you’ve done, especially for the European scene. And thanks for sparing the time for this.
Of course… Sweet, well I’m gonna get some food before my flight. I wish I could chat to you more… Miss you guys.
Click below for more photos of the NB# squad shot by Sam Ashley
