Decathlon is a French sporting goods retailer with a skateboarding team.
Description from Decathlon's Website:
In a way there always has been skat...
Decathlon is a French sporting goods retailer with a skateboarding team.
Description from Decathlon's Website:
In a way there always has been skateboarding at Decathlon, as this vestige picture of this skate corner at Villeneuve d’Ascq in 1991 shows.
Some skateparks and mini ramps projects were created here and there but it was mainly individual actions at local scale supported by skaters working at Decathlon. There was no brand in charge of the development of skateboarding products like there is Quechua responsible for camping and trekking gear or Tribord for sailing gear. In fact, not much happened before 2009.
In 2008 the brand OXELO was created. This brand was in charge of the development of inline skate, scooters and skateboards. Regarding the skateboarding side, there were only a few people involved and even fewer resources allocated to the project. Oxelo was mainly focused on inline skate and scooters.
It is in January 2018, with a dozen people passionate about skateboarding, that a big shift happened. We created the brand Decathlon Skateboarding with the ambition to promote, all over the world, this sport, this art, this lifestyle. This split was a big step in the right direction to develop better skateboarding products. First, the team from now on is 100% independent meaning that we have our own resources and our own team thus more energy to develop skateboarding projects. From this day, the team is composed solely of skaters whether it is in product development, design, engineering or communication. We found that sharing this passion for skateboarding within the team was really important and that recruiting skaters was the right thing to do.
When we created the brand Decathlon Skateboarding, one of the first steps was to sit together and define our sense, what we wanted to do and would be proud of. After a while we found something that we all agreed on, a sentence that sums-up pretty well what is motivating us.
Let’s dissect this holy sentence to get a better understanding of what we mean by that.
SIMPLY is important in the sentence. It expresses that we want to develop our products, with respect to the people, the environment and to the skateboarding ecosystem. We aim to evolve in an authentic way with humility yet ambition.
SERVING SKATEBOARDING because we try to be useful to skaters and the skateboarding scene in general. Over the years we took part in several skateparks projects. We developed a free indoor spot at our office in Lille, a city where the weather is pretty rainy during the year.
We also partnered up with the Decathlon Foundation, to develop a free indoor skatepark in Roubaix and after that with Make Life Skate Life to develop the first public skatepark in Beirut, Lebanon.
We recently helped out a Decathlon store in Bangkok to build a concrete skatepark by putting the local team in touch with skateparks designers and builders. We helped to organise the first contest at Janwaar Castle in India.
We also try to employ skaters in our team or offer them career opportunities at Decathlon worldwide.
Lately we partnered up with several skate schools in France in order to help them develop their services. We are also taking part in various “social skate projects” around the world by sending some gears to those in need. Through these different actions we feel we are doing our share to ensure some bright days to skateboard.
Another way of serving skaters is to develop the best value for money equipment on the market. Decathlon's mission is to "make the pleasure and benefits of sports accessible to as many people as possible in the long term". Accessible, in every sense of the word, but particularly in terms of price. So what makes us cheaper? By making useful choices in conception. We concentrate our energy and resources to develop functional, intemporal and well (eco)conceived products while spending the bare minimum in marketing and publicity.
THROUGH OUR PASSION Everyone in the team is skating, of course some are skating way more than others these days but at the end we all share this passion and we all have our history with skateboarding. This passion and knowledge about skateboarding has proven really important. It sounds obvious but yes, it definitely helps to have skated hundreds of boards when it comes to developing one. You know what makes a board great, you have knowledge about shapes, construction, etc. Therefore, it became a guideline in our recruitment process, we want to hire skateboarders. We feel it is the right thing to do.
