This time on the Rad Rat Video, we figure out what happened to Seek
Skateboards. Let's get started.
Welcome to Rad Rat Video! Here on the channel, you
can learn all kinds of stuff about skateboarding three times a week. Every
Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we talk about trick histories, game reviews; we
talk about your favorite old pros, we learn tricks on the shred school, and we
also learn about some old companies on this new series. I haven't named it yet
in real time, but there's the name right there that I came up with. This series is
going to be about looking back at companies that have died out, and talking
about what happened to them and remembering how cool or how uncool they
were, and this is the inaugural episode of that where we're talking about Seek.
So Seek Skateboards started in 2002, and it was started by Rob Dyrdek and Josh
Kalis. So what happened was, there was the main team at Alien Workshop, and they
had split off into Habitat already. Maybe I'll talk about them some other time, but
then Heath Kirchart and Steve Berra had joined at Workshop, it was starting to get
really big. They were worried that there were too many pros, and people were going
to be overlooked, or that there wasn't a solid direction for the company with so
many different kind of skaters on it, so what they wanted to do was branch off
and start Seek as a third company in this whole family of skateboard brands.
And the idea behind that has a lot of benefits. So for example, if they - all
three companies were one giant team, they put out a 3-hour skate video every few
years. But if it's three separate teams, they all have separate videos that come
out at a more regular time period. They also have the ability to market to
different crowds, so maybe this brand is more kid friendly with the graphics and
the way that they do all their ads and stuff, maybe this one is more artistic,
maybe this one is more inspired by this or that. They have just different
opportunities to market to different directions, and that would be one big
benefit as well. But what was the point of Seek? Where did that fit in? There's
actually a couple of different answers, and it kind of foreshadows what
eventually goes wrong. So I'm going to read a couple of quotes
for you. First this one from Rob Dyrdek, and he says, "I consider it the dope
section of the Alien Workshop sect. Me and Kalis are a little more extended
than everyone else on the sect, a little more hip-hop influenced." Not sure what he
means by "extended," but his point is Seek is the hip-hop version of Alien Workshop,
but no one else seems to agree with him because Josh Kalis, the co-founder, he
has a different story. He says, "Seek happened because we wanted
to do a world company, where it was like writers on the team, but it wasn't like,
'He rides for the Euro team.'" So in other words, it wasn't the international team
for Alien Workshop, it was a brand that happened to be international from the
ground up. So was it international? Was it to be the hip-hop version of the brand? Actually
there is a third quote I want to read for you, and this is from Chris Carter,
who is the owner of DNA distribution. He says, "It's hard to pigeonhole Seek into
one thing. They don't want it to look like Alien Workshop or Habitat, but
certainly their direction is being influenced by Alien Workshop, which is a
good thing." So it's very unclear what the direction was from the start and that
can be a real problem. So they didn't have a solid idea of what their branding
was going to be, they didn't have a certain market that they were going for.
Was this supposed to be, you know, European and all this kind of stuff or
was it American, hip-hop type of stuff? They weren't sure which direction they
were going to go, and one of the big problems with having three different
brands, especially if they don't have obvious directions to them, is having to
do all these different ads. Do all the different graphics. Have them all have
their own look and feel. But when you don't have a solid direction for that,
that can be really tough. So Dyrdek was talking about it being hip-hop
influenced and everything, but I try to figure out exactly in what way that was
true. And one thing that their boards were known for was having like a
metallic silver rim around it. And it had a lot of metallic types of graphics and
things like that, which were cool. I don't know if that's necessarily hip-hop
inspired, but look at some of these graphics.
So they were really into badminton and puke, which is really weird to me. I mean,
they're well done and they look kind of cool, but how does that fit either
international or hip-hop? I'm not really sure. Also their graphic design in
general was a little bit weak. So I have an ad that they made right here, and I
use this to try to figure out who was on their team at the time. But you can
barely even read this. So let's look at it. "The Seek Seven. Rob Dyrdek, Mike... Josh?" Wait.
"Mike Josh." No. "Mike Taylor." Okay, "Josh, Josh, Kalis, Colin McKay, Flo... Alex?"
Like, it's a mess. It's really hard to tell exactly what they're trying to go
for here. It doesn't have a solid direction. I like their logo, but aside from that
they had a lot of issues with their branding and things like that. But let's
talk about the name at least. So where does Seek come from? There's a really
confusing Dyrdek quote about that as well, but I think what the point was
that it was more about seeking the truth. So related to the Alien Workshop.
So you're trying to seek the truth about aliens or you're trying to seek out life
on other planets. Something like that. Just kind of a feel that would kind of
go with it without being too similar, and I think that's pretty cool and I do like
the name, but it is a little bit generic too. But what about the team? You had Rob
Dyrdek, Josh Kalis, Mike Taylor and Colin McKay. Those are the big names that you
would probably know, but there were a few more that I want to introduce you to in
case you haven't heard of them. First is Alex Carlino. So he is from
Brazil, and he had this really clean style. I'll show you some footage of him
right here. There's not that much footage of them
out there that I've been able to see, but he did have a few video parts. The second
guy is Florentine Marfaing, who's French, and he has some really sick
footage out there. He actually turned him pro, which you can
see in this ad right here, that he did have a pro model. Last upis Greg
Myers, who was a kid at the time. He was from California, he was on DC with Dyrdek
Kalis and McKay, so they just kind of brought him
along, it seems like. They also picked up Bjorn Johnston along the way as an am
from New Zealand, but they picked him up pretty soon before they closed,
unfortunately for him. So they had a really solid team put together, but they
weren't really taking off. They weren't really getting the market share that
they were hoping for, there are a lot of quotes about how they weren't a
household name yet, but they're going to get there. I have a quote from Rob Dyrdek
right here, he said "Seek is headed straight to the top. It's taken a year to
really define itself and become its own entity. Now it's just a matter of when we
put out our video. It'll really add the true definition of being a top brand
from DNA distribution." So since they were kind of failing to get a lot of
market share at the beginning there, they were about to put out a video, and at the
time especially, that was a great way to really build up your fan base and get
things going in that kind of way. And if you look back on their site on the
wayback machine, you'll see March 2004, they were talking about the video called
"As Is," which is going to come out soon. They just returned from a filming trip
in Barcelona, but unfortunately, before that ever came out, Seek closed down in
early 2005. Talking about what happened then Josh Kalis said, "They just deaded it
overnight. They wouldn't bring Flo and Alex back on board with us, which was
another thing that pissed me off, and they just wouldn't do anything. They were
just like, 'no we're over it.' We were like, 'hey, well wait till the video comes out,'
and see what happens, and they just deaded it." So you think that the plus side of
having this whole family of DNA distribution with their three different
brands is that everyone would have a place, even if they had to close on one
brand. That doesn't mean that they have to let go of all the skaters, and all
that. But it doesn't really seem like that's what happened.
Josh Kalis, Rob Dyrdek and Mike Taylor all made their way back to Alien
Workshop, like you might expect. Colin McKay
actually hooked up with Danny Way and they started Plan B around that time,
a little bit after. So at the time, there was a rumor that they had done that
before Seek closed, and that's what caused Seek to close. That doesn't seem to be
the case, but there's another rumor that said that hearing about that
rumor is what made them branch off in the first place."
It's kind of a murky story. Maybe I'll be able to dig into that a little bit more
when I talk about Plan B in the future. So Carolina got shuffled away on to
Habitat international team, and Bjorn was on the Alien international team, and
Myers was on flow for Mystery or something I guess. What about Flo
Marfaing, the guy that they just turned pro? What happened to him? It kind of seems
like they wanted to just shuffle him off under the Alien Workshop international
team, and that kind of sucks because he was pro for an international skateboard
brand based in the US. And the next thing you know, they just want to flow him
boards and maybe go visit him on tour every now and then. Huge step down, and it
really sucks that he ended up in that position. Luckily he ended up on
Santa Cruz instead, but one thing that's interesting is that he talked about
moving to the US for Santa Cruz, and they said 'no, why don't you just stay there
and you'll be our connection to that area?' And so it makes me think that he
would have been willing to move to the US most likely, but he wasn't given
that opportunity. I don't know exactly how it went down, but it kind of seems
like they screwed him over. But why did Seek shut down? So you hear about brands
shutting done all the time. Usually it's bad sales, sometimes the distributor goes out
of business themselves, stuff like that. And maybe bad sales were part of it, but
the actual reason that I found was actually really weird. Something I never
heard of before. So let me just quote Josh Kalis. "The story I got told was
that there weren't enough graphics people, and they weren't able to spend
enough time on the company, so they just deaded it." Wow. So like I mentioned in the
beginning, having three separate brands can be a real problem, especially when you
don't have clear direction on what they're all supposed to do. But you could
fix that. You could hire some more designers, or you could shut down the
whole company ,and it looks like they went for the shutting down the company
route, which is pretty crazy. Especially because Kalis said that
everyone was caught off guard, and they had no idea, which is a little bit weird
to me because I was going through the Seek-Skateboards.com archives,
and they hadn't posted anything since August 2004, then they went out of
business, I think the official announcement was in April 2005, so it was
quite a bit of time there, with what seemed like nothing was going on with the
company. Maybe in retrospect it was obvious there were problems, but in the
moment it seemed like it just kind of happened. So it really sucks that that's
how it worked out, and there are also rumors that because Seek shut down, that
put DNA distribution in general in a lot of debt because they overextended
themselves to make this international brand and that eventually led to them
being bought out by Burton in 2008. I'm not sure how true any of that is. It's
not like this knowledge is public, and I can look it up, but there are rumors that
that was the case. And then later after Burton had him for a couple years, Rob
Dyrdek bought DNA back in 2012. Seems like things kind of went bad. They were
out of business for a little while, they had a big farewell party and all this
kind of stuff. But then they came back for a little while and now Rob Dyrdek's
not involved at all anymore. Maybe I'll get into Alien Workshop
proper a little bit more in the future, but don't expect to see Seek coming back
anytime soon. So that is the story of Seek. Let me know what other defunct
brands you want to hear more about below. but until next time, here are some more
videos you may want to check out. Don't forget to subscribe so you can learn
more about skateboarding 3 times a week, every Monday Wednesday and Friday. And
thank you for watching.
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