NMU student creates innovative skateboarding business

Starting a snowboarding design business was a matter of putting all the right pieces together for Adam Reed. He realized there was nothing stopping him: He knew how to use computer-controlled machining tools, he'd learned about 3-D modeling, and he had the know-how to create the designs.

"I thought, why am I not doing this? That was a cool realization, that I've learned so much and I can just go right at it--and it worked out pretty well too," Reed says.

Reed is both a skateboarder and a snowboarder, one of the reasons he chose Marquette and NMU. So it was natural that when he began designing skateboards, he looked for a way to combine the two hobbies.

His design is an innovative skateboard ridden like a traditional skateboard, but molded to one's feet like a snowboard, giving the rider more control for tricks.

"It's my own idea of what riding could become," Reed says.

He created a brand, preliminary designs and even some boards for his senior project in Northern Michigan University's art and design program last semester. His brand, called ReeDesigns, already includes two boards that Reed has found successful, which he has named nu(GEE) and oh(GEE), and are made of a variety of materials including bamboo, Kevlar, fiber, aluminum and foam.

Reed lights up when he talks about finding the best ways to make the boards, including what materials work the best and under what pressure they break.

He describes this experience in his video for the crowd-funding website Kickstarter.

"Taking the board out of the molds is like opening a present on Christmas Day," Reed says. "It's just super fun to see what happened to the board, what went well, was it what you expected, was it not? … It's the best part of the learning process, and I think each board has its own story and you learn something new every time you make a new board."

He created the Kickstarter to continue his business beyond just a school project, and raised $4,000 to produce the boards and increase his research and design work. He's used the money, so far, to create an area in his basement with molds for making the skateboards. With this start, he plans to push the boundary of commonly-held ideas about skateboarding.

"What can I come up with that's new and original that people haven't seen before that's really going to challenge the envelope even more? And then (I'll) give that out to someone and say, do you like that? Does it ride well? Is it good, is it bad? And then kind of go from there," he says.

For this part of the process, having people try out his designs, Reed says he wouldn't be so successful without the growing skateboard community in Marquette. The implementation of a new skate park in front of the YMCA has helped generate interest in skateboarding in general, but also in his designs.

To get a feel for whether he's moving in the right direction, Reed goes to skateboarders and asks them to try out his designs. He says those who regularly skateboard know what they like and they're really honest about what works.

"I feel like when I've won over the skateboarding crowd is when I feel like I'm ok with my product," he says. "Toward the end they were saying, 'Oh wow, this deck is really light, it's really responsive.' They still obviously had some complaints and critiques because the product's always going to be getting better, but I felt like once I convinced them, everyone else will be happy with my product."

Reed plans to stay in Marquette after he graduates in December. His hope is to eventually get a manufacturing contract so that he can keep prototyping and designing the boards, but put manufacturing in the hands of a company that specializes in it. Eventually, he'd like to create new designs for snowboards, too, but he says that's further down the line as he gets more of a community behind his brand.

Lucy Hough is in the English master's program at Northern Michigan University and helps write a blog about NMU history.