I grew up surfing, and I was raised in a surf shop.My teenage years all the way up to age 30 I lived at Infinity Surfshop, in Dana Point, CA. We saw every imaginable fad, trend and invention come through the shop, with the sales reps or the inventor of the product selling it to us as the next great thing.From surfboard, skateboard and snowboard accessories, to the off the wall bike boards and electric skateboards, we saw it all.We often were given shop demos to try-before-you-buy.Some good, some not so much.One of the categories in which there was no shortage of products was balance boards.Makes sense, right?Surfing, skating, snowboarding, all require balance.We would stand behind the counters while folding clothes, or ringing customer up, all while balancing on the different offerings of balance boards that we sold in the shop.Different products offered different benefits, some made better than others.One…Continue Reading
Today’s interview is with one of the founders from We Are Runts (WAAR), Michael Quinones. Michael and Matt Davis started WAAR as a mission to bring Made in the USA to market with influences pulled from the surf, skate and motorcycle culture. They have dedicated themselves to bringing an affordable, 100% USA made, product to the consumer. Can you give 50 BUILT readers some background on yourselves and how WAAR came to be? Matt Davis & I both have worked in the action sports and contemporary apparel market for about a decade now. All the brands that we have been apart of were developed and manufactured overseas with the intent on being more or less volume driven. We saw the issues of developing and producing overseas as startup companies. The constant ‘bait and switch’ that would happen with production, poor quality, and generally zero accountability for the issues at hand…Continue Reading
Matix Design Director Mike Gomez says the Capital Collection is designed to build awareness around the quickly vanishing art of American clothing manufacturing and to shine a light upon the quality produced by those that still take pride in the craft. “It’s surprisingly difficult at this point in time to make stuff in the US,” says Gomez. “There’s just not a lot of factories in existence that can do this work.” Matix VP Brian Dunlap says in addition to using the superior quality of American made textiles, Capital Collection designers went the distance and challenged themselves to source everything, down to the trimming, domestically. “There’s a lot of stuff you see that says Made-In-The-USA,” says Dunlap. “But many of the components that go into these products are actually made overseas. The thing that sets this collection apart is that we’ve gone to great lengths to actually build every trim, every…Continue Reading
There are few industries that are as quintessentially American as the Motorcycle industry. Iconic skateboard apparel company, Matix, teamed up Lossa Engineering of California to build an all-American motorcycle from fabrication to upholstery. The motorcycle build was based on the Harley 1200 a company dedicated to American manufacturing for over a century. The attention to detail, paint scheme and the end product is a great example of what can happen when you have the power of manufacturing at your finger tips. Cruise on over to Matix’s website for more on the project. The above video is from Matix’s Vimeo Stream.