Clown Skateboards

Jeff Boardman and Vikas Malik met through their involvement in the Skateboarding, Music and Art scenes, going on to combine forces to create a brand that fused all three of these shared passions, served up with a unique British flavour.

CLOWN SKATEBOARDS was born in AUGUST 2000, launching with the inaugural release of the ‘CLOWN BANKSY TEST PRESS’  series, two skateboard designs and their legendary logo. They had one of the UK’s leading skateboard teams, with Simon Skipp heading up the crew and bringing onboard Chris Oliver, Benny Fairfax, Woody, Mattias Nylen, Bryan Jones and some amazing up and coming talent.

Operating from their East London headquarters, Clown were punching well above their weight. In 2005 however, it was consciously decided to put the brand on ice with the aim of restarting at some point in the future. They needed a well-deserved breather as the past five years had been a crazy whirlwind.

HOW WE GOT OUR LOGO

We’ve had quite a few messages asking us about the logo and if it really was BANKSY who did it for us – well the answer to that one is: YES. After yet another drunken night out with the man himself, we were all arguing about how to do a proper Exhibition in London that was not legal. As we were stumbling from pub to pub in Shoreditch we walked through Rivington Street which was THE perfect place to do something illegal, you had the tunnel to paint in and it would be easy to close the road off as no one really used it at this point.

Just one week later we were back with 2 buckets of paint, a letter and some painting company signs we nicked off a building site. The letter was forged from an arts organisation wishing us luck with the ‘Tunnel Vision Project’ in case we got a pull. An hour later the walls were painted, and the stencils were up, and we held an opening party three days later with beers and hip hop bumping out the back of a van. The police arrived but let us carry on and the petrol generator for the sound system caught on fire, but it was a night that goes down in history.

At that point, it was all about doing favours for each other to make things easier to survive; so we were helping Banksy put up, sell some works and pay the bills – and at the same time, we were just getting things together to open up a company that was skate, art and music-oriented and Banksy kindly agreed to do our logo for us – the Clown logo was born in July 2000.