SUBANG JAYA, March 14 — Some businesses are just business: They sell, you buy. Others drive their communities, providing services where none existed before.
Such is the case with Girls Jom Skate, an initiative to create a safe space for girls to start skateboarding spearheaded by Khoo Wei Yeng of Wheel Love, a local skate shop.
It all started when his daughter wanted to skateboard and he realised there wasn’t a suitable environment for young girls to learn it.
Perhaps it started even earlier, when Khoo founded Wheel Love in 2006 with his childhood friend Chee Su Keats.
The duo shared a love of both skating and entrepreneurship from young.
Khoo recalls, “We first started a brand called KJRollers around the age of 17 together with a bunch of friends. From around 1997 to 2005, we made T-shirts, stickers, videos and all kind of merchandise to fund our skating adventures under the KJRollers outfit.”
Towards the end of 2005, the original crew began to go their separate ways to pursue their own careers.
Most entrepreneurs would call it quits at this point, with the exit of the original co-founders, but Khoo and Chee decided to press on. From the ashes of KJRollers, a new brand was born.
“We coined the name Wheel Love based on our love for skating, not limiting it to any discipline. By 2009, we were both working in the advertising industry which was unfulfilling. We decided that if we were to jump into something outside of our day jobs, let’s do something we love,” says Khoo.
That leap of faith led to the opening of their skate shop in October of the same year.
This coincided with the tail end of skateboarding’s prime period around 2000 till 2010.
To survive, they’d have to look beyond the sport’s biggest market segment of teenage boys. This was when Khoo observed a disconnect in the industry — and an opportunity.
He says, “From skate brands to skate media and even the pro skaters themselves, the message for so long has been that skateboarding is a male hetero space; skateboarding is not for girls.
"When my daughter Jade wanted to try skateboarding, we went to look for something that would appeal to her and found that everything was male dominated.”
As with some of the best ideas, here the catalyst to create a new space specifically for girls arose from the creator’s own burning need.
Khoo says, “So even at the starting point of products, there is already a sense of bias. What more when we had to bring her to the skate park that would be filled with boys skating in all directions. This would intimidate even a beginner boy skater what more for a girl. This was when we knew we had to create a safe space for girls to skate.”
Hence the idea for the Girls Jom Skate initiative was born. The goal is to create a space where girls can get together and learn and support each other.
Looking beyond skateboarding, which is designed to be a launching platform, Khoo hopes that the education and support will also come in the form of experiences, volunteering, mentorship and life skills.
To reach out to their target audience, Wheel Love is currently building the community based on the 10 years of running the Wheel Love Skateshop and also its database.
Khoo adds, “We also have a skate school called Jom Skate School and more than 65 per cent of our students are girls. We have been creating a safe environment for all our students to skate but with Girls Jom Skate, we want to bring the community together where they can just hang out and share their challenges and grow stronger faster.”
Watching the Girls Jom Skate at play and learning a new skill, Khoo is reminded of how he first started skateboarding when he was only nine years old.
He says, “But when my older brother broke his arm, that skateboard never saw daylight ever gain. It was only when I was 14 years old that I managed to save enough money but with inline skates this time. I made sure I didn’t break any parts of my body or else I knew my parents would never allow me to skate again!”
That challenge at a tender age — and the ingenuity required to surmount it — was an experience that made young Khoo skate his heart out.
As a parent, he’s concerned that the opposite is true nowadays. He explains, “Today kids are so easily distracted with their electronic devices. It’s worrying that they cannot hold their attention to something and finish it. If we don’t start changing this situation, we will end up having a fluff society.”
With Girls Jom Skate, Khoo is trying to foster an environment where participants can learn to focus, typically with a three-hour gather and skate session where they can learn to skate.
He says, “Obviously a selfie at the end of the session with new friends is something we want because that is how the community can be built. A full year program is in the works and we are excited that the girls can’t be intimidated anymore cause GIRL isn’t any four-letter word.”
To learn more about Girls Jom Skate, visit www.facebook.com/jomskateschool/ and Wheel Love Skateshop at www.wl33.com
