We are massive fans of Welcome, and it’d be an understatement to say we are super excited to show you Welcome Skateboards Summer 2021 drop. Since its inception in 2010, Welcome skateboards have been breaking the mould for what it requires to be a professional skateboarder. Welcome is a company for skaters on the peripheries of the mainstream, disillusioned by the repetitive nature of huge rails and massive stair-sets, and instead focusing on the more creative side of skateboarding. This is pretty clear when looking at their team, the board shapes (you will not be seeing a popsicle in this drop) and the edits these guys put out.
We have a huge range of both decks and clothing, all adorned with their beautifully eerie and distinct graphics, mainly created by the founder of Welcome itself, Jason Celaya. If the graphic hasn’t been made by Celaya it is usually the skater themselves designing their own graphic, proving again that creativity is massively heralded at Welcome.
The board shapes are incredibly important and so is the idea of having a favourite shape board. Welcome appreciate this and encourage experimenting to find your ideal shape which can be exciting, but also goes against the norm of getting a particular size popsicle deck and never moving away from that. Not to say that is a bad thing to do, just that some skaters enjoy experimenting with different sizes and shapes of boards and how they skate. This results in various shapes of decks becoming mainstays throughout the seasonal collections at Welcome. Shapes such as the Moontrimmer 2.0 or Son of Planchette have been around for a few years now and aside from the graphics (always brilliant), nothing changes about these decks. This means once you have found your favourite shape, and do want to stick to it, you don’t have to buy ten at once to make sure you have a consistent stream of them.
In the Welcome Skateboards Summer 2021 collection, the clothing is equally as high quality as the boards, with just as much thought going into the designs as the boards themselves, even going so far as to adapt various deck graphics to work on the clothing as well. I love the idea of being able to purchase your favourite deck graphics on t-shirts. Not only do t-shirts have a longer lifespan than decks, but there also is a chance your favourite graphic is on a deck shape that doesn’t work for you, so with it being on a t-shirt you can still rep your favourite graphics and skate the shaped board you love too.
Skateboarding in the 21st Century is amazingly broad, so broad in fact that it can be seen as both an art form or a sport. Welcome definitely place themselves in camp art form, and could be credited with being one of the main spearheads of the creative drive within skateboarding, at least from a board design perspective.
Not taking themselves, nor skateboarding too seriously with edits reminding me of skating with my friends as a kid and graphics that make me double-take in astonishment. I think it’s hard not to like Welcome and what they stand for. Fun and friends.
