Free Pizza Hardware (2013-) Four Down Dist. stories part 3.
Late 2013 I was having a Friday after work dinner with my fellow “Team Cuisine” homie & Happy Hour Skateboards team rider Tommi Björk in the best mexican restaurant in Helsinki at that time, Patrona.
While enjoying the lovely quadruple cheese queso fundidos and mind blowing corn smut huitlacoche quesadillas we started to talk about imaginary skate brands.
I remember one question thrown in the air was - “If you’d start a skate company right now, what would it be called?”
I thought about it for a minute and then a lovely word pairing came to my head - FREE PIZZA. Who the hell doesn’t love free pizza? It’s pretty much the best thing ever, right? Free Pizza.. sign me in!
OK, so we have the name, but what should we do with it? It can’t just be a name on a t-shirt as it has to be a skate company.
Bolts. The cheapest particle in a skateboard which is a must to have, but costs no more than 5€ retail. Free Pizza Hardware it is then!
After downing couple cervezas and some Patron tequila at Patrona, I was off to We Got Beef (R.I.P.), the most legendary bar Helsinki has had in 2000’s. The go-to bar to all skateboarders, local alcoholics, DJ’s and cool cats & kittens.
We Got Beef blueprint by Linda Linko.
Before I even got in, I met fellow skateboarders Simo Mäkelä & Kyy in front of WGB (öykkynurkka for those who know) where I told the guys about Free Pizza Hardware.
Their reaction was hilarious and definitely unexpected. As they loved my idea they were like “yeah yeah it all sounds cool, but what about a griptape brand called HOLY SHEET?”
Mind. Blown. OK let’s do it!
After that night, we had two new in house brands in the making for Four Down Distribution, just because we had the names locked that hard. I couldn’t back out anymore as I had promised the guys these things will happen in real life.
Free Pizza OG logo, design by Leo Karhunen from Double Happiness LTD.
Holy Sheet OG logo, design by Janne-Juhani Hyvärinen.
Orders were placed both for Free Pizza Hardware bolts and Holy Sheet Griptape only few days after this infamous weekend and we were looking into entering the marketplace for Spring 2014 with these new brands.
What really stands out here to me is the same intuition that started Four Down Distribution. There was no sign of hesitation on starting these projects, there was just a gut feeling that this NEEDS to be done. We wanted to do things and learn to do them properly along the process of actually doing it. No instructions needed.
Holy Sheet Griptape’s story is quite simple to tell. We had the best value griptape in European marketplace for years. The quality was better than any major brand had at the time. Yes it was better than MOB griptape or Jessup. There was bunch of sponsored skateboarders in Finland who could’ve gotten their griptape for free from other brands, but they came to us to buy Holy Sheet instead as it was that good. Better yet, it only cost 5€ a sheet where many other brands cost 8-10€ a sheet.
Holy Sheet was an eye-opening project for me that even though you’d have the best product, it can be hard to sell to international market. It was even hard to convince my friends outside Finland to try out Holy Sheet, which was shocking to me. With the quality and the price we had I’d say there was potential to become Europe’s number one griptape brand at some point.
For people outside Finland, well I think many people thought a small griptape project from Finland can’t be that good in quality. It would’ve needed a lot of time and effort to put into international marketing to break through in other European countries. This was the first time I realized Finland is actually quite isolated from bigger territories in Europe. “They don’t give a f*ck about us”.
Simo Mäkelä approves. “It’s grippy on the wood”
Majority of the world’s skate griptape come from factories in Taiwan. In Spring 2020 we received our biggest order of Holy Sheet to date, and after opening the first box of the shipment, everything changed.
No one from the factory had told me that there had been a quality change for the griptape. The new griptape was thinner (which can be a good thing by the way), but it was also “shinier” and less gritty than the Holy Sheet we had loved for years.
After some product testing with the team, the feedback was that it was “good” but nothing more. Some skateboarders can be really picky with the griptapes they can or can’t ride, and Holy Sheet’s goal was to be the best quality out there. We had used to have the super good quality so it was shocking to us. We re-branded the griptape as “Holy Sheet Ultra Thin” transparently telling the shops that the formula has changed, and started selling the griptape, at the same time solving the case with the factory.
We got the reply from the factory that because of some new rules and regulations in manufacturing in Taiwan, they had to switch the production process for the grip. After hearing that it wasn’t just a mistake, that they won’t able to produce the same grip that was sold to us for years, I was ready to give up. I sourced for some other options for production, but after receiving some samples from here and there, quality wise it was a dead end.
I made the tough decision to end Holy Sheet Griptape operations purely because of the quality reasons in late 2020.
Four Down Distribution switched from production to importing good quality griptapes from Shorty’s Black Magic and Jessup Ultra Grip from then on, so we could keep on selling great griptapes to our customers.
Free Pizza Hardware has a very different story.
What started first purely as a hardware brand selling bolts, it quickly became a “therapy project” of sorts for me and the talented graphic designer Janne-Juhani Hyvärinen.
Manuel Göttsching inspired Free Pizza Hardware B1-B8 bolts, as there are always eight bolts needed to assemble a skateboard.
As I had been doing apparel production for some years already, I knew how stressful it can be to fine tune graphic sizes, placements, printing methods etc. for mass production. Around the same time Janne-Juhani started to work for Makia, and I can only imagine how much of t-shirt designing etc. he had on his desk.
Free Pizza became a thing for me and Janne-Juhani where every stupid idea was possible to do, and it didn’t really matter if a certain logo was 100% correctly placed.
One of the first sketch sheets from Janne-Juhani Hyvärinen, who’s drawing style made Free Pizza well known outside skateboarding too. Probably half of these were produced as t-shirts at some point, that tells the level of vision Janne-Juhani had for the brand.
We didn’t care at all how the products would sell, as long as the sales were healthy enough to be able to produce the next collection.
The care free “that’s approximately ok like that” style of design process we kept from early 2014 was a big hit on apparel sales. I think we did something that resonated for the audience, and the sales were surprisingly good.
But as everything was based on this idea of a therapy project, the rule number one was not to stress too much about it, so Free Pizza became a project that could disappear for a year and then come back when we felt it was time to do new stuff. This sort of collection planning is also very against the standard rule books how to run a brand.
For example, we produced and launched a Summer 2021 collection in August 2020 so we could take a year off of Free Pizza Hardware. Confusing? Yes, intentionally.
Here’s an example to descibe our graphic process with Janne-Juhani, case Gooby.
I had found out a “goofy stance” in skateboarding, meaning that you have your right foot forward and push with your left foot, was coming from the year 1937. Disney’s short animation film Goofy’s Hawaiian Holiday. This was roughly decades before the actual birth of skateboarding.
So I’m telling Janne-Juhani this, and how cool it’d be to draw a wonky “Gooby” surfing goofy stance, but the shirt should say “Välil lomil” and “F*ck Babylon” just to make it even weirder. And let’s make it look like a surf-inspired Stüssy shirt with color choices and typography, but when you look closer, you realize absolutely everything is off.
Then a week or two passes and Janne sends me a pdf where everything is all f*cked up. “Gooby” was looking like he was having the worst hangover of his life. Perfect, it couldn’t get any better. Let’s go into production then.
Some of the ideas were coming from me, and then Janne-Juhani made those ideas look actually cool.
Then there was some things all Janne-Juhani, like our best selling graphic ever, “Palase”. Yes, basically a stupid looking Palace rip-off, but that is far from the point.
“Otakko palase?” design by Janne-Juhani Hyvärinen
For non-Finns, “palanen” is a bite / a slice in Finnish, and pitsa is the 1990’s spelling version of pizza. So if you ask “pitsaa, otakko palase?” that’s basically “Wanna have a slice of pizza?” It’s the word play from English to Finnish here that matters. This was all Janne-Juhani’s idea and I loved it.
We stopped the production for “Otakko Palase” graphic at some point as we didn’t want to milk it too much, but the demand would still be there in Finnish marketplace.
Free Pizza Hardware doesn’t want to be a proper business, it’s a therapy project. I can heavily recommend to anyone working with mass production to have a side project of doing things in a very loose style, it can help your other projects as well to have something going on where nothing can go wrong as it’s basically meant to be all wrong from the start.
I couldn’t summarize it better. Nothing really matters so better have fun with it while doing it.
Mozzarella Wheels by Free Pizza Hardware. Photo by Sami Välikangas
Mozzarella Wheels by Free Pizza Hardware. Photo by Sami Välikangas
We might always skip a year or two with Janne-Juhani with apparel collections, but I hope we can keep Free Pizza Hardware living it’s own weird life for many years to come. At the same time the brand exists, but it can be non-existent. We’re talking about skateboard bolts, wheels, t-shirts and hoodies here, it’s not that big of a deal.
Thanks for tuning in,
-Oki
