Archive for January, 2012

Searching For Unique Likes

Tuesday, January 31st, 2012

Well….it is now officially week 4. Things are moving quicker, and we now have our assigned teams. I am working on increasing likes on the BambooSk8 Facebook Fan Page with Gabe and Jamie. I am also working with David and Jamie on increasing unique viewers through Google Analytics. We have a long way to go but I know we can hit our goals.

It has been pretty hectic trying to hit all the deadlines assigned, but it should get easier. So far, I have been focusing on completing my Hookit contacts and the Master Shop List. Next on my list of things to do is get all of my team on board and implementing the many ideas we have come up with! It’s time to hit the ground running and get massive traffic to the BambooSk8 site!!!!

SOOOOOOO..do me a solid and like the BambooSk8 Facebook Fan Page!!! Just click the link!!!

BambooSK8

Promote Your Page Too

BAMBOO’N

Saturday, January 21st, 2012

Hey, all you peeps!! My name is Ryan Sandru, and I am stoked to be accepted into BambooSK8′s 12th intern class!! I heard about BambooSK8 a while back and was pleasantly surprised to discover the innovative, superior, and eco-friendly skateboards that the company produces. I was born and raised in North San Diego County and I’ve been skatin’ for a long time. I never seen anything like BambooSK8! I am fortunate to be working with such awesome people at a great company.

In 2003, I left San Diego and moved to Pasadena, CA. I studied Illustration at the Art Center College of Design from 2004 to 2006. I quickly discovered that I couldn’t swing the tuition of $15,000 per semester!! I took some time off and finally finished my degree at Cal State Fullerton. I majored in Graphic Design in 2010, and that was that. I missed San Diego the entire time that I lived in L.A. County! I didn’t want to be an actor or famous musician… I wanted to work in the skate capitol that is San Diego. As soon as I could, I moved back home.

Here I am BambooSK8!! Working for a skate company isn’t as easy as it may seem. It is definitely a professional and task-driven environment. But I wouldn’t have it any other way! After all, you can’t learn anything under any other circumstances.

We are currently wrapping-up the second week, and I can wait for future weeks. Nice to meet you all!!!! SK8 the BAMBOO!!!!

Skate the Bamboo!!!!

Friday, January 20th, 2012

When I found this opportunity at BambooSk8, I had recently graduated from college in San Francisco. I took a couple months after college to relax, get my resume together, take a little trip to Florida, and a cruise to Alaska. Once I got some vaca out of the way, I started to get into the swing of things, sending out endless resumes for all kinds of jobs, getting a response very rarely of a phone interview and no return call. I started to think more and more about what kind of company I really wanted to work for and how I can make it happen.

My first thoughts were that I needed to gain valuable experience no matter what, so I focused a lot on internship opportunities. I realized I’d like to work for a company that is socially responsible, or who has a greater cause. Or I’d like to work with a company related to my interests in skateboarding or plants. BambooSk8 was everything I was looking for in one opportunity.

I really started skateboarding when I was about 11 years old, and like Pringles chips, once I popped I couldn’t stop, hehe. Ever since then I’ve been hooked and have continued to go out and have fun skateboarding, especially being in the bay area hitting up fresh spots I didn’t grow up skating.

My interest in plants came from a project I did for fun for my parents, completely redoing their landscape and irrigation. I turned planters of dirt and rot into tropical succulent lush beautiful planters of life. I planted fruit trees, vegetables, herbs, flowers, ferns, succulents, pretty much everything I could get my hands on. Definitely some bamboo, 4 different varieties!!

When I began the internship, I realized it wasn’t all running through fields of bamboo with wind in my face jumping on my board shredding bamboo half pipes. Although, I did also realize that this is going to be an intense program that has the potential to greatly enhance my professional development and help steer me in the right direction towards finding a career path I can walk down with a smile on my face. Also, that it’s up to me to make the most of this great opportunity.

So far, we have been getting used to some of the tools we are going to be using to promote BambooSk8 and to interact with skateboarders. We’ve also been learning all about BambooSk8 and what makes it a great company. We’ve been working a great deal on our own professional development: learning our weaknesses, our goals, and how we can improve our interviewing skills. We’ve done a lot of collaboration between interns and mentors, contributing ideas and sharing lessons, and started to become acquainted with one another.

M future goals are to take what I learn in this internship and to move on to gaining more experience relative to tasks I excelled in during the internship. I want to narrow down a more specific career path and have more specific goals. Once I have my focused path, I will bust my ass to become the best at what I do. I’m looking at the next 14 weeks with the highest hopes and a hungry, determined spirit. Much thanks to everyone at BambooSk8!!

The video links at the bottom of this post (Berkeley, Bobby longboarding) may be glitchy or take a while to load, especially the longboarding one because it’s longer, and don’t view it full screen, sorry bout that.

Makeshift spot right next to the ocean

The infamous hubba hideout on the verge of destruction

One of my favorite spots

Nothing like shredding a mini in the snow - Tahoe

Video Links:     Berkeley                   Bobby longboarding

 

Hello Bamboo!

Friday, January 20th, 2012

It’s been quite a ride for me to get to where I am with BambooSk8 today. So I guess I’ll begin with where it all started. I was born and raised in a suburb of Connecticut about an hour outside of New York City. I continued on to Penn State University where I had a great college experience. After college, I followed what I thought was the expected path and took the 1st high paying job I was offered without really giving much thought to what I really wanted to do with my life.  After 18 months working back in Connecticut with a well known insurance company spending most of my days in a cubicle managing multiple Excel spreadsheets, I decided I had enough. So I quit my job and moved to South Lake Tahoe, CA in December of 2010. I spent the winter working for Heavenly Mountain Resort and snowboarding just about every day. Life was good, but as spring came and the snow melted I knew it wouldn’t last. But what I did realize was that I wanted to work around something that I was passionate about. For me, that was snowboarding, or really anything in the Action Sports Industry. So when I moved in with some old college buddies in San Diego this past July, I got an awesome internship with an upcoming snowboarding magazine called SBX Magazine. I learned a lot about marketing and worked with some really great people. However, I knew that working in the Action Sports Industry was difficult to break into. I just didn’t have enough connections or experience. So I got a job valet parking to pay the bills here in SD while I refocused on my search for a more traditional career. But I did still frequently peruse Malakye (the job listing site for action sports), which is where I found the opening with BambooSk8. So here I am today, trying to give another shot at following my passions by working with BambooSk8!

 

PS. Attached are a couple photos from my winter in Lake Tahoe, there is one that might give you an idea about how much it dumped last winter!

BambooSK8 on the Brain

Thursday, January 19th, 2012

Hello from Wisconsin!

I am happy to say that I am part of the 12th class of interns and the first class with out-of-state interns! I am currently living in Menomonie, WI and going to school at the University of Wisconsin- Stout. I am majoring in Retail Merchandising and Management with a concentration in Buying and Product Development, a minor in Business Administration and an emphasis in Apparel Design.

I am going to be very busy these next couple months. Along with this wonderful internship, I have a job with the productions club at my school. I am the Special Events Coordinator. This means I am in charge of bringing a bigger name artist to the Stout campus. In the past we have brought Atmosphere, Ingrid Michaelson, and Motion City Soundtrack. I have a passion for music, art, fashion, and the action sport industry.

I am excited to see all the doors that BambooSK8 will open and all that I will achieve. I am so happy to be part of this BambooSK8 team. I have NEVER worked with such driven people and I am already learning so much. I have BambooSK8 on the brain all the time now and it’s great. Menomonie, WI is pretty far from Oceanside, CA (2021.76 miles), but it is amazing how close the Internet can bring us together. I will be taking Wisconsin by storm and looking to get BambooSK8 all over the state!

 

 

Bam-boo! Bam-boo! Bam-boo!

Thursday, January 19th, 2012

I’ve finally started the internship at Bamboosk8 and now I am part of the tribe as well. I gotta admit.. I thought it was going to be an easy start you know??!! Au contraire! We’ve been flooded wit lots of things to do and to set up, which I’m really happy about, because unlike other internships I’m not going around buying coffees for everyone else, but I’m actually working to improve the company results and the tight crew here at Bamboosk8 really welcomed us all with open arms.

I’m working from Australia, which is cool since Bamboosk8 is not known here, so I’m really excited (and the guys in the office are as well) to hopefully expand in the land Down Under.

There’s interns from all over the US and from different walks of life, just stroll around the blog to read their posts as well and see how they’re going and what they think about the internship. It’s awesome to work all along towards achieving our goals in life and on the professional side.

Last Saturday I was lucky enough to go and watch an amateur contest search here on the Gold Coast (Australia), so I took the initiative of taking some footage with my Gopro for you all to see.

http://youtu.be/59RlUmXdChQ

It was great to see so much talent and the vibe was really cool, no barriers or security, so I could actually go and mingle next to the competitors in the contest area and have a prime view of the shredding happening. You know, there might be future flow riders there that haven’t been discovered yet!

Anyway, these two weeks I’ve started learning a lot about myself as a person and how hard it is to actually manage my time between my other job as a lifeguard and the requirements of the internship. From next week things will change again and me and the other interns will start working really hard to get quantifiable results that we can use towards achieving our goals.
My goals for the internship is to learn as much as possible about marketing and the action sport industry, while making leifelong friends and connections along the way.

Keep following my posts every second week to find out what’s happening at Bamboosk8 and how the internship evolves.

Cheers
Gabe

Bamboo WHO?

Wednesday, January 18th, 2012

Hello all! My name is Jessi, and I am very excited about being apart of BambooSk8′s 12th internship class. I grew up in beautiful Encinitas California. I am also fortunate to have spent most of my childhood and summers in Jackson Hole Wyoming. So I have had a lot of diversity when it comes to outdoor activities. I LOVE to fish, camp, snowboard, swim and travel. I actually just spend a week in Cabo San Lucas with some pretty awesome friends…

Anyway…The question of the year seems to be what do you do now that you are out of college? To which I answer, I supplement my surgical consulting job with an internship at Bamboosk8. Then I am usually hit with, “Why an internship?”  Well….let me tell you. Having just graduated from Cal State San Marcos (WOOHOOO) I needed a job! However, if you aren’t aware by now, obtaining a super awesome 9-5 that can pay your bills has seemingly joined the ranks of mythical creatures by being IMPOSSIBLE TO FIND! Even though my resume is pretty solid from years of hard work to put myself through college, it is a bit scattered. This didn’t help my job-hunt. So, I thought that finding a credible internship where I can get actual experience and help fine-tune my resume is just what I needed.

ENTER BAMBOOSK8!!!

I found the internship opportunity online at Malakye. Before I applied I looked over their website and found what I was looking for. I wasn’t going to be filing documents and taking out the trash like normal internships can consist of. I was actually going to be apart of projects! Setting and reaching goals, and creating a track record! And lets face it…being able to track your progress and prove that you did something is just what is needed these days to get you ahead in this 2012 rat race.

So. Once I got the internship I started my orientation week. I felt that I was back in college! There are numerous deadlines that I will be accounted for. Documents due every week, and weekly meetings to make sure I can still keep my head above water. But let me tell you!!! I couldn’t be happier! I’m meeting awesome people, getting awesome life lessons, and living my life post college!

Here are some photo’s of my recent trip to Cabo.

It starts with bamboo…

Wednesday, January 18th, 2012

Hello Friends! My name is Michelle and I am also part of the first class of “out of office” interns. I live in Denver, Colorado and let me tell you, the weather is not as nice as it is in Oceanside right now. It is currently 14 degrees outside and dropping. I grew up in a small town in Southern Colorado and have been snowboarding since I was 14. I moved to Denver for school and will graduate in May with a business degree in marketing and management. BambooSK8 struck my interest because I hope to have a successful career in the action sports industry.

With my future career goals, BambooSK8 was definitely a step in the right direction. I’m really excited to have the opportunity to work with a company that is innovative, environmentally responsible and very organized. It is absolutely incredible what BambooSK8 is doing for the skate community and I assure you that BambooSK8 will continue to grow in the future.

We are currently in week 2 of the internship program and it has not been easy. This internship is not about getting coffee and stopping at the dry cleaners for the boss (thank goodness). There is a ton of information that needs to be learned and getting all the details perfect is the key to success for this internship. Getting into the swing of things has been tough but I am confident that it will get easier once I find a routine. So far, I have only met and worked with Geoff K (owner/president) and Mark (operations manager) who have been incredibly helpful with the whole process so far. You can tell that we are working with professionals and it is a great privilege to do so. As of now, everyone and everything is great and I can’t wait to see what happens in the next few weeks.

Well that’s it for now. I will leave you with a few pictures so you guys can paint a picture of what life in Colorado is like.

Hello there!!

Tuesday, January 17th, 2012

Hi!! My name is Tameka or you can call me Meka. I am part of the first ever “out of state” internship cycle with BambooSK8!!! I’m stoked on it, can you tell? I grew up in San Diego and in Illinois and ride a longboard most every day that I can. (I had a military mom) I will be interning from the great snowy state of Illinois! Wait, I forgot cold, too. First and foremost, I am honored to have been chosen to be a part of such a fantastic company. Before, I ever thought about applying for the internship, I fell in love with the company, its beliefs and goals. There isn’t another company like BambooSK8. They are without a doubt changing the way people look at this industry one bamboo cane at a time. I’m thrilled because I, too, believe in this company.
After I read : “According to the Science Channel (January 2008, Episode 7 – “Invention Nation”), skateboarding has replaced flooring as the #1 contributor to deforestation of maple trees in North America,” I knew I wanted to become involved with BambooSK8, not only, to promote and amazing eco-friendly product but to help educate others on the benefits of bamboo.
This internship marks the beginning of a new year and a new chapter. (How cliché right?) It’s the golden ticket that opens the door to the world of bamboo and the action sports industry. Normally, I am involved with the event coordinating or starting up skateboard ministries. I feel that to become a well rounded intern or employee, I would need to know more about business. I am interested in furthering this knowledge from marketing and/or public relations stand point and learn how a company successfully operates to sustain longevity. My goals during this internship is to become a sponge and soak up everything that I will be taught to gain a better business sense and obtain an event operations or marketing career within the action sports industry. I am looking forward to the next couple months, the people I will meet and the things that I will learn!!
Have a good one,
~Meka

( When its dangerously cold out…too cold to skate or even snowboard, you have to keep yourself busy right?)

New Beginnings

Monday, January 16th, 2012

Hi my name is Jamie I am one of the new interns for the 2012 spring internship, I am super excited to start working with Bamboosk8 and can’t wait to get started. I found Bamboosk8 online and found out they offered an incredible opportunity for a marketing internship. I graduated college around a year ago with a degree in marketing and really had no real life marketing experience; I knew this would be an amazing opportunity for me to get my foot in the door. I currently am a hair stylist down in the South Orange County area; I have been doing hair for around seven years and love what I do! I am just ready to take the next step in my life. This brings me to what brought me to want to work at Bamboosk8. One of the other things that I am passionate about is action sports, I wakeboard, snowboard, and paddle surf and watch many of the others on television. Bamboosk8 seemed like a good fit for me to learn about marketing while working with people who share the same passion as I do. I also love the fact that Bamboosk8 is a green company; working for a company that is trying to make a difference by helping the environment is really inspiring to me.

I have been at Bamboosk8 for almost a week now and have learned a lot about the company, as well as the products they sell. The company as a whole is great! Everyone seems super excited about the company they work for as well as the products they sell. The use of social media has really brought a huge following for the company; I hope I can help to bring in more followers to help expand the company. Learning all of the different social media avenues is really important especially today. Most everyone uses the internet for either personal or business reasons, so learning how to properly use social media to promote a company will diffidently help me along the way with marketing. I also have learned how well the company has grown over the last few years; the company started off as just a manufacture of decks and now has a team of riders as well as a complete brand for the company. Starting to work with a company who is in growth stage will help me to see what it takes to grow a company from the ground up. It will be interesting to learn how all different pieces within the company connect to inevitably create a profitable lasting company.

Now that you know why I am here and what I have learned so far I thought I would share some of my future goals. In the next 16 weeks I hope to have gained more real life knowledge in marketing, especially in social media as well as knowledge about the skateboarding industry.  In the next year or two I plan on switching careers completely, I will give up my hair styling business and hopefully venture out into some type of entry level marketing job, hopefully for an action sports company if I am lucky. In the next five years I plan on having a secure job in marketing with a company that I am not only am passionate about but enjoy working for. Sometime during this period I would also like to have gone back to school and have gotten my MBA in management. And, hopefully in the next 10 years I plan on either managing a team or maybe even owing my own company, so an MBA would definitely help me.

Growth Through The Bamboo Forest

Monday, January 16th, 2012

Hello all, Ryan here!  I have just joined the wonderful Bamboosk8 internship team which I am very thankful to be a part of. As from what I can see this opportunity is going to be just the right, rigorously challenging experience I have been looking forward to take on! At the same time I know it will help me in many ways to grow in the exact direction I am looking for and give me the experience to be successful in the industry I have been interested in since I took my first-step on to that wooden plank with wheels.

I grew up on the west coast of Florida where it is exceptionally boring and skateboarding gave me life. It was not only an outlet from the rough times at home, but also a way to feel connected to something bigger, society. Ever since then my love for boards and action sports grew rapidly. I eventually moved to San Diego to live near family and attend college at San Diego State University where I am currently a student. I have the luxury of living in Ocean Beach where I am close to good surf and the O.B. skate park which gives me ample time to do what I love! It is my ultimate goal to develop my own company some day in the action sports industry, but right now my goals are to increase my marketing and sales wherewithal by working with others to reach maximum output and potential. I now know Bamboosk8 is the perfect place to learn how small businesses survive in this economy and more importantly how they thrive! I look forward to these next few months with excitement!

I leave you with a quote to celebrate the holiday, “A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus, but a molder of consensus.” Martin Luther King Jr.

“Enter the Bamboo”

Friday, January 13th, 2012

My name is Sam Britt, I am one of several interns for the spring class of 2012…

I recently have had the opportunity to join BambooSK8 for their in depth internship.  Just this last Thursday I was invited to Bamboo’s skate facility for our orientation.  As I approached the office, I realized this was uncharted territory for myself simply because I realized I have no skate experience to bring to the table.  I haven’t a lick of information on why their audience likes Bamboo’s decks over standard competitor decks or for that matter what some of the trick moves are that skaters use with these decks.  All of this ran through my mind as I approached the door to the “Intern Cave” where all interns gather for idea crunching and education.  It was there I was exposed to all things skateboard.  Literally!  There were many different style decks posted throughout the room with various graphics.  The boards cover wall to wall.  From what I gather these decks have been designed by previous intern classes and hung in “The Cave.”   One of our mentors Mark Olson, sat and introduced us to Bamboo’s way of life and of course the syllabus we all will be using for the next 4 months.  For those of you who are considering this as an easy internship, let me just say this is not a position where you can walk in and ride your board and think you can literally “skate by” on this internship.  This curriculum was well though out and planned and requires alot of your personal time in order to be successful at BambooSk8.   What I did realize is regardless of the industry, all businesses have a business model they abide by and Bamboo is no different.  The one thing I look to take from this internship is something in the public relations and social media realm.  BambooSk8 is a unique company and requires a unique tactic to grab its audiences attention.  I intend to absorb any information I can with this company and I am looking forward to meeting all the different individuals involved with BambooSk8.

So long for now….