Creative Direction — Have A Skateboard

Almost a lifetime ago my friend Hos (pronounced House) and I started a skateboard brand called Have Skateboards. Lot’s of the work we did, may or may not be on an old hard drive back in Australia BUT I somehow have the catalogue for the last range we did. It’s probably the best looking catalogue we made with graphic art by Aldous Massie and photography by Dan Goode. Both Aldous and Dan are waaaaay more famous than our board brand ever was these days, they are masters at what they do.

Funny story, Aldous said he’d do the graphics for free for us if we put his girlfriends - sisters - boyfriend on the team. In my head, I’m like: “here we go” eye roll, turns out the dude was Jae ‘Ovo’ Overton. One of Sydneys best skateboarders and bird watchers and one of my now, very good friends. Neither him or Aldous are with either sister these days, cool story though. Ovo went on to ride for adidas Skateboarding, Private Joy and my store U.P.S. Skate Shop.

Have lasted around 4 years from memory, we had a few ads in The Skateboarders Journal (my favourite Australian skateboarding magazine), we made a couple short videos, we made 3 ranges of boards on PS Stix wood with graphic art by Joel Cameron, Chris Yee and Aldous. I’ll try and find the artwork for the other series because they were great and I want to see them again. We were stocked in bunch of stores across Australia and 1 in Japan. It was such a cool feeling holding the finished products in our hands and then seeing people skating the boards.

We had to pull the plug on the brand because U.P.S. took off and I had no time for anything else. Prior to shutting it down I was running my gallery, Have and U.P.S. I was definitely not alone in any of those ventures but I was the face of all of them. Loved every sleepless minute of it though!