Swedish gust, Bellows Skateboard Company

January 30, 2008 @ 11:15 AM

Love Eneroth teams up with fellow meatballs to form Bellows Skateboards

Spring, the time of budding and birth, is all over us by now and one of the more interesting things to take shape this time around is definitely all new Swedish board brand, Bellows.

The Swedish winter can be a pretty gloomy chap to be around but the general darkness and cold seems to be a good breeding ground for happier things. And it was on the sleety streets of Stockholm that the conversation got started between Love Eneroth, Johan Florell and Martin Karlsson about building something new and sincere. Europe is already well acquainted with Mr Eneroth’s unique skateboarding qualities by now but what about the other guys? Well, Johan used to be one of Love’s students back when the Skateboard High school became an equally questioned as welcome fact on the Swedish skateboard scene. Love must have done a good job as a teacher because Johan graduated as one of Sweden’s most respected young talents with the unusualness of being able to think about other things aside from his next kickflip backside tailslide and is now making his name known all over the continent, backed up by Lakai, Volcom and the ability to nollie flip whatever may appear in is path. Martin came from the other end of the time line. Having served as one of Swedish skateboarding’s most persistent workers for some 20 years he has logged in serious time both as a sponsored rider, team manager at WESC and editor in chief for two skate mags. Martin will function as team manager or as he puts it “Team manager is alright but I prefer head ideologist”.

The three friends came to the unforced conclusion that the time was right to do their thing. “We all felt pretty stuck in our positions back then” Love explains. “We knew we had so much creativity and drive but we had nowhere to go with it and the idea to form our own company was so obvious it almost came from our lips simultaneously”. The trio explains that they knew that they shared so much in their views on skateboarding and the politics that go along with it that they never doubted their ability to create something truly genuine.

The choice of team riders seemed to be an equally obvious affair. Johan explains: “We wanted a small team of people that we knew really well, loved and respected both as skateboarders and persons and like so many things about this company, the choice of Mika Edin and Ola Löwbeer to join Love and me on the team felt almost as it was decided long before we mentioned it ourselves”. Mika needs no introduction unless you have spent the last five years rollerblading. His part in Neighbours and his magazine coverage has spoken loud enough to earn himself nice deals with sponsors Vox, Thunder and WESC and there seems to be nothing slowing him down. Ola is more of the rabbit in the hat, a talent that just can’t be hidden for much longer and no matter how much Ola himself has chosen to dwell in the less highlighted parts of the skateboard community he might have to get himself a nice pair of sunglasses quite soon.

When asked about the company’s name Martin explains it: “What do you need to make a nice fire even hotter if you’ve already got plenty of wood and a good spark? And it sounds really good, don’t you think?”

Well, now the winter is gone, the warmth is here, the boards are on their way and the rest of us will just have to sit back and wait and see what will come of all this.