This year, American lifestyle brand Converse sponsored Pushfest, Asia’s biggest skateboarding film festival to empower youth through the sport, with finalist screenings and the latest Converse skate shoes released in Shanghai on 3 December.
Converse has always been very supportive of local skate crews thus Converse China created the skateboarding event – Crew’d up combines skateboarding with videos to provide a platform for skaters to unleash their creativity and document the development of the skateboarding culture in China.
Apart from the videos from Crew’d up being shown at Pushfest, a feature length film called “Where do we land?” also made its debut at the film festival, which consists of footage of the Converse China skateboarding team venturing to different cities to land their tricks.
Skateboarding first arrived in China in April 1986 when an American skateboarder came to Beijing to study Chinese. As of today the sport has been around for over 20 years and even appeared in the Tokyo Olympics in 2020; great strides have been taken by this sport, turning it into more of a business.
According to alizila, the total sales of skateboarding-related items surged by 290% on Tmall, an e-commerce platform for local Chinese and international businesses during this year’s 618 mid-year shopping festival.
Sports brands have expressed a great interest in the Chinese skateboarding marketplace since September 2008, when Vans opened its first retail store in China, leading to more brands such as Nike and Converse to get involved.
In 2011, the City Jam skateboarding competition presented by Nike SB came to China and ran in 7 cities including Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Kunming and Zhengzhou, to discover emerging skaters and boost the influence of local skate shops.
X Games is the most prominent skateboarding competition today and entered China in the early 2000s. Despite the impacts of COVID, the X Games China Star held at the end of 2020 was still attention-grabbing, and resulted in the total number of live streaming views on Tencent Video to exceed 33 million during the two-day competition. A tidal wave of skateboarding interest has been set off among individuals in China, demonstrating that the market is still dynamic with huge potential.
