Two college friends with a passion for skateboarding hope to kickstart their dream business and give back to the community, too.
Kramer Ditty and Kyle Zaharias met during their college years in Kentucky, where Ditty began designing and building custom skateboards by hand, often from recycled materials. After a few years Ditty moved down to Miami, and decided to try to turn his hobby into a full-blown business. His buddy Zaharias followed – and they created Miami Fade LLC.
Now they are looking to professionally produce the boards at a facility in California and put them on the market.
Miami Fade’s colorful boards are “LED-lit custom skateboard that will ride like your favorite long board, in custom, compact design, that is fast, and easy to store anywhere,” say the founders.
They hope to raise $10,000 on Kickstarter to fund the costs of professionally producing the boards. Their campaign that closes Sept. 13 (with Kickstarter if they do not make their goal, they do not get funding.) As of Friday, with 21 days to go, they were already 57 percent there.
For Ditty, (at left) skateboarding was such a passion that when he was
age 12 he convinced his family let him
turn his backyard into a skatepark and let all the neighborhood kids use it. Both
founders believe safe skateboarding facilities should be provided to all and
have made that a give-back goal of the company. “We want proceeds from our sales to go
toward repairing local skate parks in order to make it safer for athletes to do
what they love. Eventually we'd like to build new skate parks and host
competitions and other events,” says Zaharias.
Read more about their story and find their campaign here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/miamifade/fader-boards-illuminating-dark-alleys