Discover and grow your audience with the checklists in our free guide.
The email you entered is invalid.
Thank you for subscribing.
By entering your email, you indicate that you have read and understood our Privacy Policy and agree to receive marketing from Squarespace.
Skateboarder and community organizer Briana King puts their passion for their sport and community above all else. Building a career out of these passions has happened very organically for Briana because, as they explain to Squarespace, “I’ve done everything out of the love of it—not because I needed it to be a job of any sort.”
Learn how Briana leverages their Squarespace website and social media to stay connected with their skateboarding community both online and offline.
Connecting community through products
For Briana, their Squarespace website showcases all the aspects of their brand in one place: skate meetups, products for sale, and links out to their thriving community on social media.
“It gives me an outlet to show my projects and my future meetups,” Briana says of their website, “but it also motivates me to start looking into new ideas.”
One of those ideas was to launch their online store, where they sell skate-related merchandise. Briana sees these products as another way of connecting with their community—by giving the community “something that makes them happy or smile.”
Briana has even employed a skateboarder friend to manage their ecommerce operations. “I believe we need to support the community in every way we can. Everything I ever do goes back into my community.”
Connecting community online
During the pandemic’s waves of lockdowns and social distancing, Briana’s skateboarding community found other ways to stay connected. “The community needed to find connection,” Briana says of those times when they weren’t all able to skate and socialize in person together. “Lockdown was hard on everyone, but we can make anything happen with love and passion.”
That optimism shines through in how Briana approaches community-building online. “I spent all my time with my mother during lockdown, and I had her help me shoot how-to’s on Tiktok, answering whatever questions people had,” Briana says, referring to how they’ve engaged their followers over the past couple years by creating an ongoing series of skate tutorial videos. “I figured out how to teach online, and it just made our community so much bigger and stronger,”
Connecting community offline
Briana has carved out a judgment-free space in the skateboarding community for anyone who traditionally hasn’t been included in the sport.
Their philosophy for building this kind of inclusive community of athletes? “Just do it,” Briana says. “Don’t work for a big outcome at your events—you’re doing this for the love of our people, and if two people show up you've done exactly what you wanted.”
When organizing any type of event, it’s common to worry about people not showing up. Briana wants more organizers to remember that “there’s nothing to be scared of, because you’re losing absolutely nothing.”
“My first few events outside of New York, I had two people come—and now they're my best friends,” Briana adds. “Honestly, small events are amazing because they are a lot more intimate.”
Everyone building a brand should be able to define their own values at the heart of everything they do. For Briana, putting community first is their brand’s number one value: “Go into this for the sake of helping others and nothing more.”
Inspired by Briana’s story? Start building your own brand on Squarespace.