Skateboarders are particular. They won’t ride just anything. And nowadays there are so many things to take into account when you’re buying a board—width, concave, nose size versus tail size, what kind of pizza is in the middle, wheelbase, length, etc.
Wait. Hang on. Did we just say “what kind of pizza is in the middle?” Yep, we did. Though it’s not usually something skaters are looking at in a new board, it’s a real thing thanks to a truly bizarre promotional campaign by &pizza.
The pizza chain has already established itself as a major player in the Brand Twitter game for throwing shade at its competitors and gratuitous meme usage. Now it’s giving away a one-of-a-kind, fully functioning resin skateboard with one of its pizzas hanging out in the middle like fruit suspended in those gross trendy Jell-O molds of the 1960s.
https://www.instagram.com/p/B2MI6puHni_/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
This is … sort of unprecedented. We’ve seen promotional skateboards, and we’ve seen plenty of pizza-related promos. But marrying those two is a match made in Teenage Mutant Ninja Heaven.
“We looked at &pizza’s shape and immediately thought, ‘Hey, that looks like a skateboard,'” MSCHF Internet Studios’ Kevin Wiesner said, according to Mashable. “So we made one.”
Wiesner might be oversimplifying it a bit. It wasn’t as easy as just cramming a pizza into some resin, throwing some trucks and wheels on it and cruising down the block. It reportedly took a month to build, and the company went through about a dozen pizzas while perfecting the process of drying, preserving and casting the pie in the resin.
“It got pretty gross sometimes,” Wiesner said in what might be the understatement of the year. “In the end it came out pretty well!”
So, if it’s always been your dream to shred on an actual pizza, then this is your moment. One lucky winner will receive the pizza board, and can rest assured that they’ll always have the most interesting board at the skate park.
Restaurants are continuously outdoing one another in the promotional products arena. When T-shirts and hats used to be enough to stand out, it’s now the bare minimum. With so much of advertising connected to meme culture, which moves a million miles a minute, these brands are constantly looking for innovative ways to reach the elusive and hard-to-please youth, and convince them to spend their hard-earned coppers.
Putting a pizza in a skateboard sounds like a half-baked idea by a fully-baked intern, but here we are. (We’ll give you a minute to recover from that incredible double pun.) But with brands like Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and more always finding new ways to promote themselves through hard goods and apparel with online tie-ins, it’s only a matter of time until someone one-ups &pizza.
Honestly, we’re disappointed Bagel Bites didn’t get to this first. It was so obvious.
