Nike SB - sales & marketing (2006-2021)

This’ll be a long one.

Before going in to details of my 15 year career with Nike, I want to tell a backstory of how it all started for me.

I had visited Barcelona in Spring 2003 with a skate photographer friend of mine, Olli Oilinki. Barcelona was the “mecca of skateboarding” at that time and skateboarders all over the world were flying in to BCN to check out the amazing spots Catalan architecture had to offer, so did we. 6-pack of beer was 2€, hostels were 20€ a night , and Maoz Falafel’s kept us fed with their 2€ fill-it-yourself falafel pitas which was pretty much all we ate there. Also the weather was 20 degrees warmer than Finland in March. Could be worse.

During our 11 day trip we got to skate with different crews from all around the world, some were just random guys like us, some were professional skateboarders living in Barcelona. The every day crew consisted of +/- 10 people depending on how much skating or drinking the earlier day had consisted of. On most days the main video filmer of the crew was with us, Eddie from The Netherlands. He was producing CapturEd Video Magazine mostly distributed in NL (not to be confused with Anssi Paukkunen’s Captured Video Magazine from Finland) and Eddie’s footage was also often shown in pan-European Puzzle Video Magazine.

On our last night of the trip we were hanging out in Bar Manolo, the most legendary BCN skate bar everyone was hanging out in. We shared phone numbers and email addresses with bunch of people including Eddie, talking that we should meet up again in BCN some day.

Ca. 1,5 years after this trip, when I was in the army, I got an email from a nike.com address. it was Kaspar Van Lierop who introduced himself and said he had asked his friends in NL if anyone would know any skateboarders from Finland. Eddie had given him my email address. Kaspar asked me what kind of skate shops are there in the Finnish marketplace, and where I’d see Nike Skateboarding could be sold in.

I sent him a long email explaining what I thought of skate shops at that time, and asked Kaspar if I could buy a pair of Nike SB Dunks from him. Two-three days later UPS Express comes knocking at the door and brings a parcel where there was a pair of Nike SB Dunk Low “Brown Pack” in my size.

Nike SB Dunk Low “Brown Pack” 304292-221

First of all, I’d never seen a UPS guy before. Second, how the f** could the shoes travel over 2000km in couple days?

From the moment I put the shoes on, they became my favorite shoes which I didn’t dare to skate on as I wanted them to last longer than couple months.

I thanked Kaspar for the hook up when I got to log into my emails, and then went back to army service.

After the army I moved to Helsinki in Spring 2004, worked few months at Funster warehouse and then started to work at Beamhill (more about these on separate project posts).

Once I started to work at Beamhill I remembered that I had Kaspar’s email address, and by approval of my boss Jusa, I sent Kaspar an email explaining that my army service was over and I was living in Helsinki working at this cool skate/streetwear shop.

I asked Kaspar if there’d be a chance to carry Nike SB at our store, which led to Kaspar flying to Helsinki few months after to check our shop out and talk more in person.

Kaspar had done a business school project for Nike in 2003 explaining how Nike should enter the European marketplace with their Nike SB line. After he had graduated, Nike had hired him to make this project happen. He was very motivated to do it properly, and his actions lead to change the skateboard footwear market forever in Europe.

Everything clicked with Kaspar right from the start, he was a genuinely nice guy, and he definitely was super motivated to help the brand enter the marketplace the correct way. I was all into his vision, and luckily he liked Beamhill a lot and was down to open us up as the first shop in Finland to carry Nike SB.

So we got our first shipment of Nike SB products in around February 2005, and sales were really good straight from the start.

Even though I was just a sales assistant at the time at Beamhill, I asked Jusa if I could take care of Nike SB contacts to stay in close contacts with Kaspar. I did all the future bookings for SB with Jusa’s approval and made sure we had enough products in stock checking the weekly stocklists they sent us over.

From Beamhill’s POV, highlight of 2005 was definitely the release of Dunk Low “Tiffany”, released in August 2005. A colorway designed by Diamond Supply Co. owner Nick “Nicky Diamonds” Tershay as part of the Team Manager series for Nike SB.

Nike had a maximum buy of 36 pairs per colorway at the time, and I remember telling Jusa that we absolutely have to order the maximum allocation for this style. He wasn’t into it at all, he thought the mint/silver/shiny black fake croc skin colorway was a hard seller, so we made a deal that I would buy 4 pairs from the stock in my size and I personally promised to sell the rest 32 pairs at Beamhill quickly.

On the release day we had our first sneaker queue I had ever witnessed. As we were in Helsinki, Finland, and the sneaker scene was still in it’s baby steps, there was only a handful of people waiting for the doors to open, but we were excited nevertheless! I think we sold like 15 pairs on release day. I have no clue how we got the word out there about the release as this was pre-Facebook era and not many businesses were in Myspace.

Nike SB Dunk Low “Tiffany” - August 2005 release

Out of 32 pairs, the first 30 pairs were sold in just few days, leaving a random couple pairs to sit in the shelf for couple weeks more. Still, Jusa was amazed how quickly they sold.

One of the pairs was sold to Melodica Skateboards’ owner Janne. I remember he picked his shoes just before going to Helsinki-Vantaa airport, he was flying to New York City the same day.

A week or two later Janne comes back from his NYC trip to Beamhill and he’s like:

“Guess what? I was casually walking past the Supreme store in NYC and it looked like there was a new collection releasing. They had over a block long queue to the store and two security guys at the door, so I wasn’t into trying my luck to get in and just walked across the street past the store. BUT as I had these Tiffany Dunks on, the security guy shouted me out pointing at my shoes and asked me if I want to skip the line to check the store! Isn’t it crazy?”

People had tried to buy the shoes out of his feet in NYC. In 2005 this was something unheard of for us Finns.

We still had our last pair of US12 in Beamhill for 89€ and the same shoe was going for over 300€ in resell market in US. We knew that things would change here in Europe too quite soon as we were moving into “internet-era”.

Over the months in 2005 we had very positive sell through experiences with Dunk releases like De La Soul, Pushead, Stüssy, Shanghai 2, Be True To Your School Pack etc. It seemed like for every new release there was couple people more coming to the shop on release day. For the serious collectors all of these releases were a very easy buy, you basically just had to show up on release day or a day later to secure your pair.

The word was definitely spreading around town that Beamhill was releasing HEAT, and sneaker collector scene was growing rapidly. At the same time a lot of skateboarders got interested in skating the Dunks, as they thought it’s cool to have super good quality “rare” shoes for the same price they’d buy regular DC’s, Lakai’s or Emericas for. This of course helped a lot to slowly change skateboard community’s opinion about Nike in general. But more on that a bit later.

I was definitely considering myself as a “sneaker head” at that time, I had gathered a 30-40 pair collection already, mainly Nike SB’s, but I had couple pairs of Adidas Attitude Highs (aka Ewings), Puma Suedes etc in the mix as well. I was all into talking about sneaker releases and rumors. I spent hundreds of hours in sneaker forums and message boards (Sneaker Freaker, Nike Talk etc.) searching for more info about upcoming releases and learning about releases especially Nike had done in the past.

At that time I was bombing Kaspar at least couple times a week with my emails asking for more details about some rumors I had read about for upcoming releases. There were few instances where I knew more about upcoming releases than Kaspar had heard about, even though he was the guy working inside the company! Mostly these rumors were coming from Asia, where people from Nike factories were posting leak photos to these sneaker forums about new SB colorways in the making.

I think this buzz around sneakers, and especially around Nike SB lead to something..

It was around January 2006 when Kaspar called me and said Nike has decided to properly set up operations in all European countries for Nike SB, including Finland, and he thought I should apply for the position to become the first sales & marketing agent for Nike SB in Finland.

I sent in my CV and waited for few months without hearing anything about it. Then Kaspar arrived to Helsinki on April 6th, 2006 for job interviews. He had mentioned that there was few potential names for Finland who he’d interview in Helsinki.

Kaspar asked me if there’s any nice coffee spots close to his hotel in Kamppi and we agreed to meet at Mbar in Lasipalatsi for my job interview.

Once I got there, Kaspar had a Nike consultancy agreement, written in comic sans by the way, that he handed over to me. He asked if all looks good to me and if I had any questions regarding the paper. I was in shock, I just looked at him speechless.

After catching my breath a bit I asked him what does this all mean and where are the other people for the interviews, but he said there was none, he had already decided months prior to pick me to run operations in Finland. I think I shed a tear there, actually writing this post almost 16 years later still brings me emotions. This was the biggest moment in my life work wise ever.

Years later reminiscing this meeting, Kaspar told me the main reason for the decision had been my passion and love for the brand. He knew that I didn’t have any experience from being a sales rep, but he knew I’d figure everything out quickly as I was so excited about the brand. I think he was right, and to this day i’m 100% sure he picked the right guy to do it.

After we had signed the papers, we walked to his hotel room and he handed me a huge Nike suitcase full of sample shoes. That was the Holiday 2006 line that needed to be sold to skate shops in Finland in just few weeks.

My first task was to open up Nike accounts with few selected skate shops around Finland, show them the samples and to do future orders for them to get started.

That first line was sold from my apartment as I didn’t have any other space to do the sales yet. Luckily I knew all the shop owners so it worked out casually, drinking beers at my home while checking the cool samples.

Nike SB Holiday 2006 line plan

As I had already years of experience of buying in to shops, it was surprisingly comfortable for me to step into the role of a sales guy. What’s even better, I was all into the products and the brand I was selling and I knew that they were the best looking, best quality skate shoes you could get in 2006. Product is always the most important part of the sales. If the product ain’t right, you got to fake it to make it.

Another task I got to do very early on was to build a Nike SB skate team in Finland from the scratch.

As Nike SB’s international team was built very differently vs. other major skate footwear brands, I used the same method to create the Finnish team. The global team was built in 2002 with a heavy focus on authenticity. Sure there was up and coming super stars like Paul Rodriguez there, but the original line up was mostly focused around iconic skateboarders who already had a legend status from their fame in the mid / late 1990’s. Names like Gino Iannucci, Reese Forbes and Danny Supa really helped to authenticate the Nike SB brand slowly and steadily.

Before going into Nike SB Team Finland, it’s worth to mention that a big push for the whole brand in Finland was “Nike SB Viking Invasion Tour” where a bunch of superstars from Nike SB’s global team came to Scandinavia for a demo tour. The first stop of the tour was Helsinki. As this happened in late Fall, we couldn’t do it outside, so we organized a skate demo in Kontula indoor skate park. The demo was on 3rd of September 2006.

Tour poster I have saved. Signed by Omar Salazar, Wieger Van Wageningen, Todd Jordan, Lewis Marnell (R.I.P.), Danny Supa & Paul Rodriguez.

I got to arrange most of the local things for the demo. Schedule check with the indoor park, transportation, DJ’s, flyers, invitations, local media contacts, dinners and afterparties. Even though I was scared a bit as this was a big project for a newcomer, I think I managed just fine. And after getting this big thing out of the way I felt all the local operations for years after were rather easy to do as I didn’t have to worry about making any international stars happy. Kaspar also came over so I knew I had a backup if there’d be any issues, but also it made the whole thing a bit more stressful for me as I really wanted to show him that I can handle my part here in Helsinki. All went well and both the SB team and the crowd at the demo were happy.

Here’s the video recap of the Helsinki demo:

Me, Wieger Van Wageningen & Omar Salazar at dinner after the demo. Helsinki 2006

Skateboarders from Helsinki have come to me even a decade after to tell me how amazing it was to witness stars like P-Rod, Wieger van Wageningen, Lewis Marnell and Omar Salazar to skate in Kontula. This was a HUGE push for the brand in Finland as we had just started the operations.

Omar, Kaspar, Pete Ruikka (Nike SB Finnish team rider) and Wieger at We Got Beef after party.

Back to Finnish SB skate team. For Finland, I picked a variety of riders all with a distinctive style and background. Also I wanted to make sure our whole country is represented, not just Helsinki. Ville Pietiläinen from Varkaus was an up and coming heavy hitter with really technical skills that had potential for him to become an international star, Pete Ruikka was a skate fast and dangerous style of guy with impressive switch skills, Tave Silvast was a tech wizard from Helsinki, Matti Sippola was the next big name coming from Oulu known from skating spots many wouldn’t even try skating. What connects the majority of the first picks for the Nike SB team Finland, is that most of these names were already buying Nike SB shoes from me at Beamhill for private use even though some of these guys had already sponsorship deals from other skate shoe brands. With this knowledge, I already knew these guys would be 100% in to represent the brand here in Finland. This was really important to me when I was building the team.

Let’s pause for a second and think about what era were we living in. The year was 2006, and Nike was just about to enter the skateboard scene in Europe big time. Nike’s previous attempts to enter the skate business in late 90s had been a complete disaster, and there was very aggressive anti-Nike campaigns going around in skateboarding at that time. The success definitely wasn’t a no brainer, it needed years of work from Nike SB crew all around the world to slowly change people’s opinions about the brand.

So this is the reason I wanted to sponsor talented skateboarders who I knew that would be down not to only wear the product, but to also help authenticating the brand here in Finland.

When i was stilö building the team, I was also handed a country marketing budget from Nike SB Europe. I think it was around 25000€ a year. A large part of it went to promo costs of the skate “athlete” team’s products. Another big portion was incentive fees, where I could pay the team riders some salary based on their coverage in skate media. A considerable part was also spent on seeding products to skate shop owners, influencers, local artists etc.

It was super inspiring to get to work around marketing properly.

Matti Sippola, FS 50-50 in Oulu. Photo by Olli Oilinki. This photo ended up to be a cover of Hang Up Mag in Spring 2007.

The team was built in few weeks, and we had around 6 guys in the main team plus a few flow guys who were receiving product, but were not officially in the team list.

Once you have the team, the next step for the team manager is to create projects around it. We did a bunch of tours, demos and events over the years. It was exciting.

Skate demo in Turku late 2006, flyer probably done by Aleksi Fräki who is still working at Cube indoor skate park. Sali Bandy!

Nike paid all the costs and even though the budget was limited, everyone in the skate industry knows that if you have, let’s say 8000 euros to spend on a tour, you can do a lot with it. We come from a mindset that everything is low budget or even zero budget, but we still make things happen. Those 5-8k € tour budgets were feeling luxurious to us. We did trips to Berlin, Copenhagen & Oslo with a full squad. Then there was a caravan tour starting from Helsinki all the way up north across Swedish border and then back down south through Sweden and taking the ferry back to Helsinki. Just the cleaning of the caravan bus cost 500 euros after the trip.

Nike SB Caravan Tour 2010, logo by Leo Karhunen

The media coverage we got from these trips was always definitely paying the effort. For most of the times, we got over 20 pages of coverage in Hang Up Magazine + the tour video views on youtube & skate blogs and an occasional share from international websites. People over at Nike SB in Europe were excited to see the output the Finnish team had. In media coverage, our output was worth multiple times than the yearly budget spent on us, so we knew that we were doing things right here in Finland.

Wussup haters! Caravan Tour 2010

Matti Sippola & me ready to fly to Oslo for a Nike SB trip, 2011. “Ballin’ on a budget” like my dear ex-colleague Danijel Stankovic would say!

Back to the team. My first “big signing” to the Nike SB team was Simo Mäkelä in late 2006. Every skater in Finland was talking about this long curly haired Mick Jagger looking ass teen skateboarder / model / all around cool guy coming from Lahti who absolutely destroyed the legendary skate spots in Helsinki.

Simo Mäkelä, 2007, photo by Tuukka Kaila

Simo was sponsored by brands like Volcom and Circa, which were distributed at that time by a company called Off-Consult OY.

Just few days before signing Simo officially, I got a phone call from Pauli Waroma, who was working at Off-Consult. He said Circa had big plans for Simo, and with a definite “listen now kid” -tone he demanded me reasons why this move would be a good thing for Simo’s skate career in general. That was my first tough phone call of my career at Nike, but it was nice to hear Pauli really genuinely cared for his team rider’s future.

I remember telling Pauli, that at Nike SB he will be considered as part of the international team, not just as a Finnish team rider, and he’d be flown in to Tampa Am contest in Tampa, USA by Nike SB the same year.

Simo Mäkelä, Fs kickflip, photo by Tuukka Kaila, 2008

Also he was invited to join the international stars on upcoming Nike SB’s Viking Invasion Tour’s stops as well to get to know the global team better and skate with them. Pauli was ok with it as long as if it’d be good for Simo’s future. I can tell it was the best move of Simo’s whole career as a sponsored skateboarder.

Simo was the first guy from Finland to actually sign an official “professional athlete contract” with Nike Europe, so he was treated like the other “big names” the European team had on it’s roster.

Simo Mäkelä, kickflip over the gap, Meanwhile skate park London UK. photo by Olli Oilinki, ca. 2008. Published in Kingpin Magazine, the biggest pan-European skate magazine at the time

Looking back at that time, it was also great from my perspective to have a local “star” on the team. From the very young age Simo had used to being in the limelight, and as he’d had various sponsorship deals before, dealing with him on everything related to Nike SB felt more “professional” to me as well. To summarize it, I had to be more “careful” with him vs. most of the team managing that felt like it was just basically giving free shoes and apparel to my friends and send them out to trips paid by the company.

Needless to say his presence in European skate scene also helped my career at Nike as people were definitely paying more attention now in what we did over in Finland.

I’m happy to say Simo’s still a great friend of mine today. He was also one of the first guys we picked for our skate shop My Favorite Things’ team in 2014, I’ll write more about MFT in a separate post.

At some point around 2010 Kaspar told me that in his eyes, Finland had the best Nike SB skate team in Europe talent wise. I think I had done something right.

Cali Helsinki x Perus Skateboards x Nike SB. “Best Random Hobo” award!

Cali Fried Perus Brews

With local events, the plan was to always get active with a local retailer. Wether it was Real Deal in Oulu, or Cali in Helsinki (R.I.P.), I wanted the shops to get their customers more connected with them and with Nike SB.

With the event budget, we probably did couple dozen events over the years in Finland.

Two names that I want to shout out here, Timothy Kühn from Cali Helsinki and Tuomas Vuorensola from Grey Market Supply. Both Timo and Tumppi were active entrepreneurs sharing the same passion as me, and they made organizing events super fun as they were really bringing in effort from their side to make things happen.

Tumppi Vuorensola @ Grey Market Supply, Lasipalatsi, Helsinki. August 2009

After 10 years of history, Nike SB as a sub brand was going through an identity crisis around 2012.

First Nike SB and it’s more commercially targeted Nike 6.0 sub brand and the newly added Nike Snowboarding merged together as Nike AS - Action Sports. Then shortly after Nike wanted to have all of their categories just labelled as Nike. For many of us working for Nike SB it felt that all the hard work with the SB brand was all of a sudden thrown into the trash bin.

Part of Winter 2012 Nike Snowboarding collection. I still have a pair of Kaiju (= godzilla in japanese) snowboarding boots and they’re the best snowboard boots ever created.

This, and many other changes inside the company lead up to cutting down the local country marketing budgets completely, and moving the skate team riders’ deals direct to Europe.

I don’t go into company secrets but I’ll say this.

For countries like Finland where our operations for Nike SB were running super well, for me personally it was a big let down to take basically all the fun parts out of our daily work. But as a leading sports brand in the world, Nike had to look at the big picture, and it was understandable.

In some countries in Europe their local operations (team, events, marketing) were not in the level they should’ve been from Nike’s POV, and with this bold move Nike wanted to streamline their marketing so it’d be guaranteed to be up to Nike’s standards in all countries.

If you look at brand marketing later on, almost all other brands in our industry followed the same footsteps few years after, and nowadays the marketing usually always comes direct from the brand and is targeted globally.

Still, I remember how bummed I was that my budget went down to zero just over night without a proper pre warning.

Also, a bit earlier, Kaspar’s hard work for Nike had paid off and he had moved to Portland to work at Nike World Headquarters.

I was excited for him of course, but me and all of my colleagues in Europe knew that things would change a bit for us as our father-figure who started it all was leaving the European operations.

I continued to do sales and also some marketing for Nike SB for the next 10 years more as an agent. There was some twists here and there along the way - at some point the contract was shifted to Nike Finland to take care of, and in 2014 the contract was terminated for a moment, before getting a new direct contract with Nike Europe again, but anyway..

I sold 62 consecutive seasons of products to skate shops from late 2006 to end of 2021. That’s roughly 3500 different shoe models / colorways to give perspective.

My contract with Nike SB finally ended on 31st of May 2021, just after I had celebrated my 15 year anniversary working for the swoosh.

Thanks to COVID-19 and Nike’s global re-organizing that affected thousands of Nike workers, my position was ended, and ca. 90% of my colleagues over Europe at SB were let go around the same time. Sales were moved to more digitally driven / centralized model operated from Nike European Headquarters in Hilversum, NL. No hard feelings, just pure business.

I was the first and the last guy to operate locally here in Finland for Nike SB.

I want to thank all of my colleagues I had over the years at Nike SB, all the team riders and all the skate shops I got to work with. Truly a dream come true job which I didn’t believe it would last for 15 years.

SWOOSH LIFE.

Thanks for tuning in,

-Oki