The Skateroom

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Art and skateboarding as vehicles for social change

The Skateroom, a new model of social entrepreneurship that brings together artists, art buyers, museums, brands and nonprofits from around the world, called on The Niche to completely rethink the positioning of its project.

The Skateroom values art, skateboarding and social change. They sell exclusive and original skateboards based on collaborations with the most influential international artists. Then, a portion of the sale of these boards helps to create skateparks around the world. The Skateroom is B Corp certified, a certification granted to companies that meet societal and environmental requirements, governance and transparency to the public.

The challenge

The Skateroom values art, skateboarding and social change. Through the sale of artistic and exclusive skateboards, primarily online, they help empower youth around the world, build new skateparks and develop educational facilities and resource programs. By purchasing limited editions from The Skateroom, buyers have a direct role in creating sustainable social change.

Our mission? To reshape their positioning and storytelling by finding a balance between board sales, artist collaborations and social projects so that their concept is better understood by everyone. Skateroom’s business model being unique, it requires a communication and user experience effort in order to make the whole thing more visible, efficient and enjoyable.

Our digital solution

It was essential for The Skateroom to highlight every feature of their activity and to widen their audience, not only to traditional skateboard fans but also to collectors and art and interior design enthusiasts, in order to reinforce the credibility of their actions.

Our digital proposal to meet this demand: to put forward in a permanent way the triptych between the board, the artist, and the skatepark project which will be financed by the sale.

We managed the UX/UI part as well as the front-end development. Our team also worked on some of the back-end development, adapting the payment system already in place, creating new templates in WordPress and mapping the old templates to the new one. But beyond that, it was a real collaboration between our team and The Skateroom’s team… we would even say the perfect match!

They had a clear vision and artistic direction already decided upon, which we tried to transcribe to perfection. Their positioning and branding were freshly established, and they had just been worked on for print. From there, many digital directions were available to our team. We investigated and proposed several options to best translate this identity to the web.

Niche always listened, was responsive and worked extremely hard on the details. Both teams were equally involved in the project and met regularly to follow up and move forward together. It was a true partnership in which we truly accompanied them from start to finish. The Skateroom teams had a lot of ideas, which we challenged and enriched daily.

We worked on the branding of the brand by going in the direction of the client: a very minimalist universe, respecting the codes of art and fashion. From the homepage onwards, the site tells in an obvious way, from the navigation to the bottom of the page, this balance between the work, the artist and the social project that depends on it. The Skateroom was supposed to remain an eshop but it is now more narrative, highlighting the social change they are implementing around the world.

Not to mention one crucial aspect, the site had to work perfectly on both desktop and mobile. Our team developed the homepage and the shop simultaneously for both devices, to guarantee the maximum success of this technical and ergonomic challenge.

Visit The skateroom

The results

Thanks to this ongoing collaboration between our team and The Skateroom’s team, this new site accurately reflects their vision, their new positioning and their ambitions. We created a branding and user experience that reflects their image, combining the world of art with the social impact that art can have. A branding that makes them stand out at first glance and the promotion of their blog were also issues in our work for The Skateroom.

The Skateroom is the ideal project in the eyes of La Niche: the collaborative aspect, the technical aspect, the aesthetic aspect and the socio-cultural aspect, which makes sense, are all combined in one project. This project allowed us to set up a beautiful collaboration with a passionate client who has ambition, a real accompaniment and a hand in hand work between their team and ours, which undeniably represents a strength and a role in the success of the project.

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