By: William Royce
For those who don’t know, Outside of the USA skate products can be super expensive. In some places skaters have to work and entire week to buy a nice set of wheels, in other places it could even take a month. I’m fortunate enough to always have the gear I need and some of the time it’s more than I can use.
It’s always nice to hook people up with gear you know they can use more than yourself. I have thought about just putting all the old gear from the skatehouse I live at in a big box and shipping it out to some skate homies that could use it. After thinking about it enough I finally just asked for any old gear people had, mixed it with my own and shipped a box off to colombia. The shipping cost was about $100 for a small box of wheels and gloves.
People saw a post of the box shipping to Colombia and I received a few messages from skaters in other countries. So several of the messages were from India. The skate scene in India was fascinating to me. They are in the very beginnings of a skateboard revolution. Currently they can only get cheap Chinese boards wheels and trucks. There are no skateshops or anywhere to buy good brands.
I knew I wanted to help get stuff out to them so I started to hammer out the details with my friend Pranal Chaven who had been talking to in India. Getting the address situation worked out (the first one didn’t work) and finding the best(cheapest) way to ship a box out there. I quickly learned that it’s very expensive to ship anything with regular FedEx or even the post office. Almost $200 to ship a small box. But I knew that Bustin had a special business shipping account and I could problem convince them to help.
So I brought all the old gear up the the Bustin Boards warehouse during a road trip to NY and shipped out a small tester box to India. The cost to ship that very small box and the taxes was already very expensive. But I wanted to send a BIG ass box so I knew I needed help.
I made a goFund me to help cover the cost of shipping and taxes. It worked and people were down to donate for the cause. Not only did we have to money to ship out the stuff we had enough to ship out a very big box! Bustin donated some boards and other new goodies to make it extra special.
Currently the gear has arrived in India and people are getting to experience real brands for the first time. I plan to ship more stuff to another country soon so if you have any old gear to donate to someone who needs it hit me up.