Space Skates is owned and operated by me, Marjolein or Mayo as most people call me. In this blog post I want to tell you about me and why I started Space Skates.
I have done some form of skating since I could walk. I started out on ice skates and I remember we had some ancient roller skates in our garage. I've tried them many times, but the metal wheels just weren't my thing, makes you wonder why, right? I also remember the girls in my neighborhood had roller skates, those fancy ones with really cool bright colors. I wanted them so badly, but I never got them. Later on in the nineties, inline skates became really popular and I got a pair for my birthday. I skated on them A LOT!
When puberty came I wasn't really interested in skating anymore, I had other hobbies like trampolining, a part time job, my first boyfriend, you know puberty things ;)
In 2010 I was introduced to roller derby and I was hooked! Not just on the sport, but also on that feeling of being on skates again. Me and my friend / teammate Emma noticed that it was really hard to get the proper gear for derby in the Netherlands, or even in Europe. So in 2012 we decided to start a rollerskate shop called Turn Left Roller Derby Shop. We started as just an online shop, operated out of Emma's attic and we ended up with an actual brick and mortar store, with mini ramp(!!!), in Eindhoven.
Life happened and our energy and focus shifted to other things. We decided to close the shop in 2018.
I was first introduced to ramp skating in 2012, when our roller derby team had Area 51 Skatepark in Eindhoven all to ourselves. I had never seen people on roller skates in the skatepark and it felt like a one off thing at the time. It wasn't until 2 years later when I started seeing more people on Instagram actually doing some really cool things at the skatepark on their rollerskates, when I started going to the skatepark a lot. I quit roller derby in 2017, but I never quit park skating, although I have been a little less active for a couple of years.
Flash forward to 2020, once again life happened and I rediscovered my love for skating and the skatepark. I skated over 40 skateparks in the time span of a couple of months. And with that I also made a lot of new friends throughout the Netherlands and Europe. I really missed being a shop owner and being able to talk about skating all day long and helping people find the best set up for them. I started fantasizing about a new shop and after a while I also started sharing these fantasies with some friends. They all reacted really excited about my idea of starting a new shop. I'm kind of slow when it comes to life altering decisions, so it took a while, but here we are: Space Skates is here and I cannot wait to see where it will take me.
Space Skates in not just a shop where you can buy your skates and gear, but I also started this blog to talk about my experiences at skateparks, to inform you about gear, to review products and who knows what else I might come up with. Besides the shop and blog there's also the skate workshops that I'm doing with my skate mate Yara under the name Rolmaten (the name is a pun in Dutch which does not translate to English well).
To be continued...
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