Baker have never portrayed themselves as clean-cut, nor do they succumb to trends as transparently as handfuls of other companies. While edits are appearing like wildfire implying that skateboarding is still experiencing a comedown from the overdose of HDMA (ever wondered why all that shit is in slow-motion?), Baker haven’t strayed from lo-fi lurker footage at parties and an IMPACT typeface. To put this in perspective, Impact is the font used on all those lolcat macros that dominated the internet for a while. Hardly Brooklyn-based fixie-riding designers flicking imported Lucky Strike ash on their Polaroid collection and doing polejams to Belle and Sebastian is it?
What it is, is fucking rad. Drew is called The Boss for a reason, and that reason is because he runs a tight ship that regularly throws out shitty (read: awesome) footage and crude (read: awesome) decks for beat-up sketchy (read: awesome) riders. I had the pleasure of riding Braydon Szafranski’s ‘Bad Guys’ deck this week and had a baller time doing so. The deck is a garish orange and the graphic is a flick lighter beaming away at you like only a waking baking and shaking hotel room trashing skateboarder can. A Baker design through and through that fits in perfectly with a brand that shoots their team portraits in a liquor store.
The board is an 8” so my clumsy feet aren’t at risk of flopping around like they tend to. There’s deep pockets of potential pop, the concave is shapely and while I’m not nailing full-cab flips down big stairs like Braydon let me just say that bitches don’t know about my slappy noseslides. Bangers bangers bangers.
Stanley