Interview with Baseline Skate Shop’s Owner, Adrian Day

For the store’s third birthday in December 2023, we decided to collaborate with two legendary forces in the South African fashion retail space, in Shelflife and Baseline Skate Shop. These collaborations symbolise a point of reflection and a change in outlook for our three-year-old store, turning our heads away from matters of survival and towards long-term prosperity. We feel accomplished about the fact that these two titans of the industry have decided to recognise the work that we put into making a cultural contribution to Cape Town and the country at large by honouring us with a collaborative T-shirt each. As a business that considers collaboration as one of its core values and aims, we are proud to add Shelflife and Baseline Skate Shop to our long list of collaborators. Following our interview with Shelflife brand manager Jake Lipman, we also sat down with co-owner of Baseline Skate Shop, Adrian Day, to help us shed light on the meaning and importance of our collaboration.

Adrian, along with his friend and business partner Clint Van Der Schyf, took over Baseline in 2011, at which point the store had already celebrated its 13^th birthday under the ownership of its founder, Jonathan Muir. By the time he signed the paperwork to take charge, Adrian had already enjoyed more than a decade in the skateboarding industry, boasting numerous professional sponsorships, notably founding Familia Skateboards, a board company that boasted both local and international acclaim, and bringing Nike SB from Europe to South Africa. After 2011, Adrian’s role in the South African community evolved from leading pro skateboarder to steward of the local scene. As one of Baseline’s new owners, Adrian managed to build relationships with globally respected skate companies, allowing locals to tap into a greater conversation in skateboarding with access to exciting international products. He ushered the store into a new era, solidifying Baseline’s status as a home for South African skateboarding, with an active team of riders that frequently release video projects.

Duck Duck Goose and Good Good Good founder Daniel Sher first got to know Adrian by supplying Baseline with by Parra product that he was importing from the Netherlands with his brother. Adrian would also become the first person to place a wholesale order for blank Good Good Good T-shirts – a memory that Daniel holds dear. Through their interactions over the years, the two became friends, and eventually collaborated when Adrian launched his new brainchild, Faux Pas. The skate and apparel brand manufactured their T-shirts with Daniel and teamed up with Good Good Good to release the infamous April Fools and Larry David/David Brent/Alan Partridge collections. I met Adrian for the first time on the day of our interview, but I knew who he was from my time as a kooky snotty-nosed kid with a fresh Element complete bought from his store, avoiding any and all eye-contact as I stumbled past the bottom of Kloof Street. Although I gave up on skateboarding as soon as I discovered how difficult it is, I continued to follow the scene from a respectful distance. As I sat down to talk to Adrian, I felt that same child-like, excited anxiety again. I could only hope to keep my composure as Adrian told me about his career, South African skateboarding, Baseline, and the fact that that Beck is a scientologist.

JOSQUIN: I couldn’t find a lot of information about you out there. Especially written information.

ADRIAN: There is some. If you want, you can go to Baseline and grab a book. It’s called “Heart” and it’s by a guy called Lucas Beaufort. He’s a French artist and he wrote this book about 40 skate shops in the world, and we’re in that one. I think most of the previous writing is pretty dated, because a lot of it was written when I was still skating for money. There must be some stuff.

JOSQUIN: The one solid written piece of info that I found was a thing that you wrote in 2016 about a playlist that you made for Superbalist. I wonder if this sounds familiar to you. “I just slammed shit together that resonates emotionally, for the most part. There’s a lot of sadness, a lot of resentment, lost love, found hatred… Lies… just things I personally feel at the moment.” Are you doing better this morning?

ADRIAN: Hahaha, yeah. Oh God, I don’t think I was in a good space when they asked me to do that.

JOSQUIN: It was a good playlist, though.

ADRIAN: Yeah, playlist was good, but I think I was just venting out at the time. Maybe I was sending a subliminal message to some people.

JOSQUIN: It 100% sounded like that.

ADRIAN: Hahaha.

JOSQUIN: I spoke to Yann Horowitz yesterday and he said that you’re a big music guy. What kinda stuff are you into?

ADRIAN: So much. Its hard to list bands or styles without sounding like a kook. But I like  a lot of 90s hip hop. I grew up on that stuff. A lot of left-of-the-dial music. Some of my favourite bands I guess are Fugazi, Sonic Youth… but then I also like Wu-Tang and the BJM. I love Slayer and I also love Beck. There’s too much to list. I like old versus new for the most part.

JOSQUIN: Beck’s a weird one. I like his more lo-fi indie stuff.

ADRIAN: Yeah, me too. Like Stereopathetic Soulmanure and One Foot In The Grave. I think when he was making those records he was living on the Lower East Side and just doing folky shit, you know. Yeah, I love those as well. But I think he’s kinda like a Prince.

JOSQUIN: Yeah, there’s a lot going on in his discography. 

ADRIAN: And he’s a Scientologist.

JOSQUIN: Is he?!

ADRIAN: Ya.

JOSQUIN: Epic. Anyway, I’m glad to hear you’re doing better this morning.

ADRIAN: Yeah. Thanks.

JOSQUIN: You said earlier that today isn’t really an average day, though.

ADRIAN: Uh, no day is really that average for me. I take my daughter to school, and then do what I’ve gotta do. I mean, I have loose structure to what I need to do every day, but I don’t need to go to an office. I do work for different people. Obviously, I have Baseline which I work on all the time, but then I also do work for certain brands. For the last eight years I was freelancing for Vans. My day-to-day is basically to wake up, see what I’ve got to do, and start getting through it, you know.

JOSQUIN: So that’s how this interview happened.

ADRIAN: Yeah, exactly.

JOSQUIN: How old’s your daughter?

ADRIAN: Three and a half, so she’s young and she’s wild. 

JOSQUIN: How involved are you at Baseline right now?

ADRIAN: Uhm, I’m fully involved with it. So, I don’t deal with the finances, but I deal with all the buying. All the products that are in there, all the relationships with suppliers. And then I spearhead most of the marketing, I’d say, between me and my partner. Video projects and things like that. Team riders, I’m a little more hands on with them.

JOSQUIN: So, definitely not a shadow boss.

ADRIAN: No. I mean, I don’t sit in the shop. I go in once or twice a week maybe, see what’s up. Sometimes less. It depends on what I’ve got on the go. I’ve actually moved a bit closer to the shop now, from Green Point to Tamboerskloof, so it’s easier for me to visit now. But I’m always watching haha!

JOSQUIN: You took over Baseline in 2011, but obviously your life has changed a lot since then. Your life has changed a lot since 2016! I’m interested in what your life was like before you took over the shop.

ADRIAN: Well, I’ll try to keep it short. When I finished school I went straight overseas, but all I wanted to do was skate, really. Did that gap year thing, then came back and went to varsity. Around that sorta time I was starting to pick up some little sponsors.

JOSQUIN: So, you were good by the time you left high school?

ADRIAN: I think I got a lot better after high school. I got very injured as well. But by the time I was 21, I was reasonably hooked up. So, then I had a lucky paid skate career for 10 years. While that was happening, I started a brand called Familia, which was pretty successful at the time. And then, around 2009, I went to work on Nike Europe to launch Nike SB here [in South Africa]. So, worked for Nike for six years, and then right after that I bought Baseline. So, I was doing Nike, Baseline, and still skating on a paid level a little bit, but not much. Then after Nike, went to Vans.

JOSQUIN: But this was after 2011, right?

ADRIAN: Yeah, Nike ended in 2016. 

JOSQUIN: When did you finish school?

ADRIAN: ‘97? ‘96!

JOSQUIN: Ah, so between then and 2011, where did you go?

ADRIAN: Travelled! I left first for the UK to basically just hangout, fuck around. But then, after that, and especially after recovering from the injury I had at that time, I was super hyped to skate. I was back here, but then I went to Barcelona. I started heading over there in 2003, like, a lot. Twice a year sometimes, with friends, a filmer and a photographer, and go skate for like a month. Some of the best times of my life. Other than that, we’ve done America a few times. We went to the West Coast, primarily Northern California. Had a skate trip in Poland too.

JOSQUIN: On what team was this all?

ADRIAN: This was on Familia. So, what would happen is, like, Familia could never pay for everyone to go overseas, so some people’s sponsors were paying for them to go overseas to come back with photos, but at the same time we’d film for Familia. A lot of people did it entirely on their own steam too I should add. Then we were able to drop a video called Bang Chong in 2007.

JOSQUIN: Yes, Yann told me about that.

ADRIAN: Yeah, that was quite a big deal for us at the time. Still quite a rad film. I haven’t seen it in a long time, but it’s pretty cool. But anyway, pretty much all my travel happened before 2011. I think my last big skate trip was to Barcelona and the Basque country. I’ve done other smaller skate trips since, just with friends and with no expectations. We went to Portugal for ten days to go skate, but we weren’t trying to do anything crazy. At this age, I don’t really have anything else to prove. We just have a good time.

JOSQUIN: From my research, I thought you spent quite a bit of time in the UK.

ADRIAN: I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the UK. I’ve lived there a few times, like for short periods.

JOSQUIN: How did your experience with skateboarding in Europe impact your attitude towards skateboarding back in South Africa when you came back?

ADRIAN: It’s hard to say, because I’ve always been looking outward. Not just looking at everyone skating in South Africa, I was always looking at what was happening in the rest of the world. So, when I got there, I got what I expected and that’s what I liked. The standards are higher. And the spots are amazing. That’s the main thing, the architecture. This place [South Africa] is rough.

JOSQUIN: Yeah, I’ve heard you talk about the Capetonian landscape as being quite gritty. But I’ve also heard people saying the same thing about London, for example.

ADRIAN: Yeah, it is. But it’s not as crusty as here, because you have a large amount of very modern architecture in London. So, some of the landscape is still quite crusty, but this place is crustier.

JOSQUIN: I find it so interesting that skateboarders have such a professional eye for how old a city’s infrastructure is.

ADRIAN: Yeah! And people will still skate anything, no matter how old it is. Skaters kind of destroyed St. Paul’s Cathedral ledges. Like, all the stone ledges are just worn out, and people will never stop skating it. At this age, I’m kinda like: “Ah, man, it’s so old and it’s all destroyed now.” Like, I pity it a bit.

JOSQUIN: It adds a bit of character, though.

ADRIAN: Yeah, I mean that’s just what happens over time. That’s a part of its history too, I guess.

JOSQUIN: I want to get back to that outward view you were talking about. Do you think you were unique in having that view at the time?

ADRIAN: No, I think it was also my friends and the people that I skated with. We all thought very similarly, you know. And we thought that a lot of [local] brands weren’t taking enough influence from the right places. But that’s all opinion, of course. Like, one of the things we were kind of anti about, well maybe not anti because we skated them still, was skateparks. We didn’t go to skateparks for years, like, very intentionally.

JOSQUIN: Like, as a statement?

ADRIAN: Well, mainly because we became so photo and footage orientated. You can’t get footage in a park, so we were dedicated to that street mission.

JOSQUIN: How about when you first started skating? Did you spend much time in parks then?

ADRIAN: Well, when I was growing up, there wasn’t really anything like a park. Maybe a little bit after I started skating, they built a park near me. But it was all ramps and vert – nothing like we have now. I grew up in the era of backyard ramps. I mean, skateboarding died right after that as well. Like, it was dead dead dead, so skateboarding was forced into the street anyway. And then, maybe mid-90s, parks started coming back up again. Then we would skate them quite a bit, but later we got to a point where we thought it was time to focus on something else.

JOSQUIN: How much time had you spent in Cape Town by that point in your career?

ADRIAN: Not that much, really. I’d been down here on skate trips quite a bit, but never stationed myself here, really. It was always like five days, and then gone. I’d never really come and hang out here.

JOSQUIN: So, what was your connection to Baseline before you took over?

ADRIAN: I was supplying Baseline with Famila and Nike SB. When they wanted to sell it, they approached me to take over.

JOSQUIN: What made you wanna take it over?

ADRIAN: Myself and Clint saw it as an opportunity to turn it around and still keep the heritage. It probably comes from all that overseas influence. The first thing I do when I’m in any country is go to the skate shop. It’s a destination, I can see a lot of the city, and once I get there I can connect with the locals and I’ll be told where spots are or whatever, where the raddest bar is, whatever. So, I think we wanted to create that kind of higher end skate shop experience, you know what I mean? Friendly, with a good look, good attitude, with riders and projects. 

JOSQUIN: What was it like before you took over?

ADRIAN: I don’t wanna insult anyone, but someone once described it to me as a bit of a teenager’s bedroom.

JOSQUIN: Wow.

ADRIAN: Yeah. That was our starting point. I don’t think there’s many brands in the store now that were there before we took over.

JOSQUIN: What were they selling?

ADRIAN: Just more mainline brands. I mean, it was still decent, but we were like, we need to do our own thing. We need to bring in our own brands, we need to pull that stuff, and that’s what we did.

JOSQUIN: Someone told me that they thought you might have been on the Hurley team at some point. Is that true?

ADRIAN: Nah, nah. I was on Billabong for years though haha.

JOSQUIN: Ahhhh, okay. Even that’s pretty crazy.

ADRIAN: Yeah, but in that era, they did sponsor skating. They kind of stopped around 2011. So, I rode for them for long. And it wasn’t like a cool sponsor, but it was a paid sponsor. And they paid for my travel, and a salary, so I’m forever grateful for that. It gave me ten years to have fun and skate.

JOSQUIN: Did you have any experience in running a skate shop?

ADRIAN: I’d worked in a couple of skateshops here and overseas when I was young, but definitely not in terms of owning it and being responsible for it!

JOSQUIN: Were you not intimidated at all?

ADRIAN: No, not really. We also had existing staff who were really good. I mean, if you told me to go in there now and turn on the computer and sell something, I’d be like, “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on.”

JOSQUIN: So, the setup was pretty good when you guys got started?

ADRIAN: Yeah, like, we had a great manager. And I love the team now. We’ve got a great manager and two guys working there that are solid, man.

JOSQUIN: When did the switch from Long Street to Kloof Street happen?

ADRIAN: Like 2012. I’m glad it happened.

JOSQUIN: Yeah, before Long Street went so downhill.

ADRIAN: Yeah, but what happened was, one of these Cape Town mafia dudes, I’d say his name but not on here, he bought our building, and they basically kicked us out. They times-ed our rent by three, obviously intentionally to kick us out. And the thing is, they told us that we needed to shut down for like three months because they had to renovate the building, and we can’t shut down for three months, because that would mean that we’d be out of business. So that was super stressful with the calibre of humans that we were dealing with. So, we just made the call and moved, and it was definitely for the better.

JOSQUIN: I’d argue that the spot on Kloof Street is more central than Long Street.

ADRIAN: It is now. I think back in the day, Long Street was perfect.

JOSQUIN: How has Baseline changed since you took over?

ADRIAN: Product-wise is probably the biggest factor. And it’s much bigger. At least five times bigger than it ever was. I don’t even mean physically. In terms of stock, and what we sell, it’s much much bigger. We also completely changed the aesthetic of it. Like, the previous logo had like an anarchy sign as the A in Baseline.

JOSQUIN: That’s so epic. Real teenager’s bedroom. Posters on the wall?

ADRIAN: Yeah, haha. And it was called Baseline Studio, which we didn’t like, so we got rid of that.

JOSQUIN: Were they marketing themselves as a skate shop before?

ADRIAN: Yeah, it was a skate shop – and don’t get me wrong it was still the best skateshop in the country then. At the time there wasn’t really a team of riders. We have a big team of guys who ride for us now. About ten riders. And there wasn’t any video projects in the past, which we do quite a lot of now. We put out like six videos last year, maybe. The Baseline Bonhomie series. Each team rider put out a part. That stuff was never happening before, but that was the era too. That’s something that we always wanted to do that we will still do.

JOSQUIN: It sounds like Baseline only became the central force in the Cape Town skate scene after you guys took over.

ADRIAN: I think it was always like a central visiting spot for skaters in Cape Town.

JOSQUIN: But it’s become more representative of the local scene after you guys took over?

ADRIAN: Like pushed the scene more? That’s hard for me to say, man. I’d like to think so.

JOSQUIN: What was the scene like when you guys took over?

ADRIAN: Kinda small, but still happening. And after we moved down here, not to say that we caused it at all, but the floodgates seemed to open and a whole bunch of skaters moved down. For the last ten years, skaters from everywhere have been moving here, from Durban and Joburg.

JOSQUIN: To skate?

ADRIAN: Not necessarily. A lot of them come for other work, maybe to party, of course, but it is also to skate. It’s cause the scene is tighter here, probably because the city itself is small. There are filmers here, there are photographers, there’s a few parks and regular street spots. 

JOSQUIN: So, the scene was small.

ADRIAN: Yeah, I feel like it was small. I mean shit was happening, but it sure feels a lot bigger now.

JOSQUIN: Is there any other way in which skateboarding in South Africa has changed since then?

ADRIAN: It’s more that skateboarding has changed globally. Like, the Olympics. You’ve got a lot of kids here who are hungry for that story. Like going to parks to train to enter all these legs of contests, to qualify to go somewhere.

JOSQUIN: I didn’t know that was even happening in South Africa.

ADRIAN: Yeah, it is. But personally, I don’t care about it, to be honest. So, skateboarding has changed in that regard, but skateboarding changes and it doesn’t, you know what I mean? In a sense, the outward projection on society is different to how it was in the past, but at the core of it, it’s still the same kind of people with the same mentality, skating the streets, skating pools, you know, getting gnarly for nothing and living it how I feel it should be lived. And a lot of brands still carry that ethos.

JOSQUIN: It’s so crazy to think about how skateboarding used to be a weird kid thing to do, because when I was growing up through the 2000s, everyone wanted to be a skateboarder, and a cool one, not an Olympian.

ADRIAN: Yeah, that’s different to how I grew up, because when I was kid, dude, there was a boom of skateboarding in like primary school, and kids were into it for a little bit, and then it was gone, dude. There was a point where I knew no one that skated, like, as a twelve-year-old. And then just through street skating and going out on my own I met people who are still some of my best friends today.

JOSQUIN: Like who?

ADRIAN: Like Ockie Fourie. Do you know Steak? Stefan Naude. He had the Lake Magazine. Anyway, I met those guys when I was twelve, and I was with them on Sunday. That’s one of the most amazing things about skateboarding, like, I’m super tight with all these guys that I grew up skating with. The 90’s bond in skateboarding is strong with about 20 of us at least and we all still skate or are in the skate business to some degree. Wherever we are in the world, we’re still always talking. Skateboarding is rad like that.

JOSQUIN: How has your life changed since 2011?

ADRIAN: Ah, man. More like how has my life changed since 2016! Because I met Miné, I got married, we had a daughter, so the biggest changes have happened since then.

JOSQUIN: Yeah, I wanted to ask especially about fatherhood. Has that changed what it’s like to run a skate shop?

ADRIAN: It hasn’t really affected it at all. It’s just time. Just hustling a bit more. It also depends on what other work I’ve got going. Sometimes I take on too much. Most of the time it’s pretty cool. Those are the big differences since 2011, I guess. And I’m getting older.

JOSQUIN: Yeah, man. How’s your body?

ADRIAN: It’s pretty busted. I’ve had like five surgeries. But I’m still skating. I just get hurt a bit and then I have to take time off. So much of me is pretty damaged, but at the same time I’m still skinny so don’t have heavy pressure on joints. I’ve still got my skill set. Not quite as good or ready to take impact as I used to be, obviously.

JOSQUIN: How often are you skating?

ADRIAN: It depends if I’m hurt. But in a good week, like, 2, 3 times a week.

JOSQUIN: Where do you go? That spot by the rugby club?

ADRIAN: Yeah, the curb. That’s my favourite spot. But I’ve been skating there too much. I need to move around a bit.

JOSQUIN: You don’t wanna become a full-on slappy guy?

ADRIAN: I am currently full-on slappy guy.

JOSQUIN: Haha. I feel like that’s the age arc in skateboarding, though.

ADRIAN: Yeah, it happens to a lot of people. Our generation didn’t learn slappies, though. Those came before us. This whole slappy movement is new to a lot of people, even though it’s an old approach. Slappies were invented before you’d Ollie to the curb or ledge. Like how to grind a curb without popping onto it. COVID had everything to do with bringing it back, at least for us here. We were laying low and skated when we could. And that spot was great, because those sports grounds were all closed, so no one was coming in there. That’s why we started skating there quite a lot, and now we’ve taken over.

JOSQUIN: What else have you got going on right now?

ADRIAN: I’ve got some stuff in the works with Daniel for Faux Pas. Other than that, I wanna keep marketing skateboarding and building skateboarding around brands. That’s what I like to do.

JOSQUIN: Why do you think that’s so important?

ADRIAN: I just don‘t believe in telling people “Here you go, here’s the product on the shelf.” You want an atmosphere around the brand, you want energy in the brand. And when it’s skateboarding, you have to commit to skateboarding. Skateboarders are fickle, man. They’ll be like “Those guys aren’t doing shit. Fuck’em.” So, it’s pretty important to be doing brand elevation all the time, like through video projects or whatever. Anyway, I’ll probably keep working in that area.

JOSQUIN: When did you launch Faux Pas?

ADRIAN: I don’t even remember, man, maybe 2018? 2019? It’s not something we focus on, though. We just make stuff when we’ve got time. But I am going to focus on it going forward, as I’ve now got the time. 

JOSQUIN: So, for you it’s like an outlet?

ADRIAN: Basically, yeah. When we did that T-shirt recently, that Faux Pas No Thanks shirt, with the graphic that came off an anti-nuclear PSA from the 60s or 50s, and that shit is very relevant today. I’ve got some more cool stuff coming. Yann [Horowitz] has a graphic.

JOSQUIN: Oh, sick. Are you putting a team together?

ADRIAN: No, I don’t concentrate on it enough to warrant a team. Yann did skate for it for a long time, but then one of the American companies that I work with was interested in him, so I spoke to him and said “You should go with them. Because this is this and that is that.”

JOSQUIN: Pretty cool that you would do that.

ADRIAN: Well, we work with them anyway. And I will always wanna see the skateboarder go further. You gotta go further than a skate shop and a small local brand if you wanna go, you know, further. I’m 100% always trying to push those guys in the right direction. Some dudes won’t do that. They’ll try hold on to these guys.

JOSQUIN: Do you ever see skateboarding reaching the kind of heights where an American company can come in for one of your riders and you can justifiably decline the offer?

ADRIAN: Yeah, yeah, possibly. I mean difficult, but doable. I have thought about all that. I mean, to create an all-African skate team would be good. To have all the best dudes in Africa on one team would be rad. But then again, it’s difficult to farm talent on this continent. Obviously, all the heaviest skating on the continent is coming from South Africa, because of circumstance, I guess.

JOSQUIN: What’s your relationship with Daniel like? What do you guys talk about?

ADRIAN: We laugh quite a lot, actually. Talk about our kids. I don’t know, we just talk shit. We always just got along well, so.

JOSQUIN: How did you meet him? Definitely not through skateboarding. Tall dads club?

ADRIAN: Haha, no. I met him and his brother because they were doing [by] Parra, Pete Parra’s brand. They brought it into Baseline. Then he started Good Good Good, and we stocked a bit of that. Yeah, we’ve always just linked up in ways like that.

JOSQUIN: He’s told me about how you placed the first ever wholesale order for Good Good Good.

ADRIAN: Oh really? I didn’t know that.

JOSQUIN: What was your thinking behind bringing a non-skate brand into the store?

ADRIAN: Yeah, it’s not a skate brand, but it was a blanks brand, and a quality blanks brand at that. Lots of skaters themselves don’t wanna wear big logos and stuff.

JOSQUIN: A lot of that merch is also kinda shitty on the quality as well, right?

ADRIAN: Yeah, sometimes. A lot of the overseas-manufactured stuff is really basic, like on Gildan tees and things like that. But with Daniel, I think I liked him and I liked the blanks.

JOSQUIN: I loosely follow skateboarding because it’s such a rich sub-culture, and I think it’s really cool how skaters will buy merch from skate shops, even if they won’t necessarily wear them, to keep the businesses that are important to them alive.

ADRIAN: Hahaha, I don’t know how true that is. No, but I have lots of people and friends who will tell me they’re going through to the store, and I tell them that they can get a discount, and they just go in and pay full price anyway. I always appreciate that kind of stuff. Friends supporting friends. Skaters supporting skaters.

JOSQUIN: It’s helped keep Baseline around for 25 years!

ADRIAN: Yeah. 25 years now. We didn’t even do anything for our 25^th either. We were just so all over the place. We should’ve.

JOSQUIN: It’s like when you reach a certain age and start forgetting when your birthday is. On the whole, has it been difficult to run a skate shop?

ADRIAN: Yeah, especially now, because the exchange rate is such a killer. Shipping is a killer as well. Since COVID, shipping is just a disaster, like, so expensive. And people’s disposable income is down, man. Everything is more expensive and people aren’t earning more. It’s a hard line to straddle at the moment.

JOSQUIN: Obviously this interview and collaboration is meant to commemorate two Capetonian retail stores who have killed it for a long time and pioneered the retail game for sub-cultures in Cape Town. What do you think has kept Baseline around for 25 years?

ADRIAN: From my perspective, it’s just staying true to what we believe skateboarding is, you know. We don’t water anything down. When things are tough, we don’t think “let’s get some mountain bikes in.” We don’t work like that, and we definitely never want to dilute the vision that we started with. That’s what’s kept us on people’s minds, I think. And also, more recently, I think a lot of our content has helped our overseas suppliers know who we are, so people want to deal with us, people want to be in that store. We’ve grown a good international reputation I think, which is nice to have, because if you’re just Joe Smoke on the street and call suppliers saying “Hey, I started a skate shop!”, they’ll be like “Who are you?”. It takes a bit of time to build those relationships. And it helps being a skater dealing with these overseas brands, because they’re mostly run by skaters.

JOSQUIN: That’s one of the interesting things I spoke to Jake about when it comes to Shelflife – having to convince brands that putting money into a campaign might not have a direct and immediate return on investment, but will be valuable in the long-term. I can see one might have to have similar conversations with brands that now embrace skateboarding but aren’t skater-owned.

ADRIAN: Yeah, man. That’s how it’s been for most of our history. There weren’t really any skater-owned shops until the end of the 90s. Before then, they were all just owned by businessmen.

JOSQUIN: What was Jonathan Muir’s vibe?

ADRIAN: He skated, but I don’t think he was skating much when we came on the scene. I actually don’t know where he is now. He might be living overseas. He did work for, like, Nike, I think. Then, he might have worked for TFG, but I don’t know what he’s up to now. I haven’t seen him for ages.

JOSQUIN: Thanks for coming through for this chat man.

ADRIAN: Thank you!