How did the idea for HOQ x Chuffed Skates come about? What is the concept behind the skates?
The idea came when we started in 2014, we would talk about the possibilities and what we thought was needed as park skaters. We met Samantha (Chuffed Skates founder, ed. Note) on one of her trips to Colombia years ago, and couldn’t be prouder and happier because she worked so hard on Chuffed and is and was already making big steps towards inclusivity and giving back to the community within her first years with the brand.
Last year, I came to Spring Cup and Sam was there along more of the Chuffed crew, we re-visited the conversation and a few months after we started thinking on the design and what we needed it to be: a good skate for basic/intermediate skating, that could be adapted to parks/street and as a full set since it’s hard to get a compatible set here.
The skate is now available through hellonquads.com for Colombian sales, chuffedusa.com for US and Canadá, chuffedskates.com for Australian and worldwide shipping and we’re working with local distributors on each country to make it easier to attain for skaters in Latin American countries. So far, you can get these in Chile through Arpía Roller Skate, and we’re working on getting a distribution in México.
Chuffed Skates has been giving back to multiple projects through their collab skates, as well as supporting their skaters with signature products. What we asked for our collab skate is to use part of the earnings on the worldwide sales to lower the price in Latin American countries. We are trying to set the lower price on a limited amount for the region.
This is an amazing concept! Were you involved in the design process? What features were important for you when creating the boot?
I was! I got to pick how stiff the boot needed to be but without compromising the price, which was a hard task. With Moon we have also decided which wheel shape, durometer, and diameter was our favorite for it. The set comes with a standard plate that is compatible with wide trucks and the angle allow big sliders on it. The hardest part was to create a good set up that wouldn’t be too expensive.
In terms of color and liner, Chuffed gave me total freedom, and as we picked the colorway with Moon, I proceeded to design the liner, wheels graphics and packaging. This was finally approved and improved by the Chuffed team and Cath helped us a lot with the infographics and packaging, and Sugu guided me through the liner design.
