Today we’d like to introduce you to L.J Salazar and Shan Hernandez. Them and their team share their story with us below:
Last Supper is a quad/rollerskating company that was created for two purposes. 1. spread the stoke and 2. produce quality roller-skate products with roller-skater’s needs in mind. Since park & street rollerskating styles are still fairly new, we realized a lot of roller-skaters are crossing over to skateboarding products to meet their needs. We wanted to reel roller skaters back into quad specific products by creators who have their needs and interests in mind.
Quad skater’s put a lot of hours into their craft non skaters may just see it as a hobby but if you take a moment to pay attention to what the skater is doing then anyone will be able to see the beauty of the sport. Especially being surrounded by skaters & skating along them you start to notice that everyone develops their own unique style. We have a developed a passion to showcase the art of quad street skating by creating edits that will be released on YouTube, which will showcase our Team Skaters, skaters in other communities & show the beauty of every community when we get to travel and film. Our main goal is to get more quad skaters excited about street skating and inspire a nonquad skater to want to buy skates and hit the streets.
There is something so uniquely special about the quad community, this community is mainly dominated by women and nonbinary quad skaters occupying their rightful place in a male-dominated space ( who mainly skateboard/blade/bmx). Throughout life, we both always had a sense of not belonging, being womxn and minorities led to us growing up feeling out of place in most places we occupied. Like many others during covid we were genuinely seeking our life’s passion & little did we know, quad skating seemed to changed everything. The way we used to feel about ourselves & taking up space just changed because this community has shown people being supportive, supporting each others growth and being able to be mixed with others where gender, race, etc. doesn’t define you. A place that unites us all because we all share the same passion for this sport.
In the beginning of Shan’s quad skate journey, she started off park skating, learning how to maneuver bowls and transition skating. As she began to develop as a skater, she started tinkering with other types of skating styles. Turns out street skating is where she felt the most excitement. Street skating forces skaters to become creative with their surroundings in. urban areas, jumping stairs, riding rails, hitting ledges at a building, it really pushes you out of your comfort zone to create art with the architecture that is in front of you. Everyone’s style is different and it is such a rush to see what skaters pull out of their brains.
Quad skating had a revival during covid so L.J would just tag along to watch their friends skate while getting some fresh air during their breaks while working from home, during this time L.J realized skaters were filming themselves to keep track of their skating journeys. In the skate culture, when you frequent a skatepark often they take you into their community & after a while I started having people ask me to film for them since I would just hang around. As I started filming skaters, I quickly developed a love for filming & developed a love for the art of skating. Being behind the camera while focusing on a skater truly opened my eyes in the beauty that is skating, watching how skaters move their bodies, how their minds work out their lines (tricks they do in a run) in their mind is extremely powerful, and their passion speaks volumes through the lens to me. Shan came to L.J about the idea of starting Last Supper and asked them if they could help with filming to try to capture the art of skating. Over the past nine months since I began filming, what has spoken volumes to me is the resilience that skaters haver, I have filmed skaters who will jump 6 step stairs or 4 foot ledges while doing 360’s mid-air & they will continuously slam the ground at full force & they pick themselves up & try again because they believe in themselves. It’s truly an experience and we hope to share skaters journeys because it truly is something else.
Skating is the perfect representation of life, you fall over & over again but you get back up, making you stronger than before.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Starting out a business is never an easy journey nor a linear path & many told us starting a company during covid was a risk, but our passion drives us. We began planning out our company in the summer of 2021, we kept hitting delay after delay because our main product kept being pushed back due to covid & lack of supply in the states. Since we had already planned out our 2022 year for our company with the events we wanted to be apart of, we decided to take a risk & launch our company only with merchandise since Last Supper was already signed up to be a sponsor for Blade Cup/Quad Cup in California, April of 2022. The truth is once we actually launched in Feb 22, 2022, we were feeling a bit of imposter syndrome due to the following reasons; Shan began park staking a little over a year ago and was worried about not being seen as someone who should start a quad company since she doesn’t have years of skating under her belt & L.J films quad skaters so they felt like they shouldn’t be apart of this company since they do not quad skate, but most importantly because our main product hasn’t been released. After venting with each other, we realized we needed to put our worries aside because our passion for this sport and community truly drives us. We believe our products & videos will represent the love we have for the art of skating. As we are barely entering our second month, we are aware LS has a lot of growing to do as a company in this community but we are really stoked to be here & to see where we will be in a year. This first year is fundamental to us, we truly wanna put our roots in this community, we both agree we want our company to be about skating, quality products & our Last Supper Team Skaters. We will be participating in quad skating events, where we will also have some of our team skaters competing & hope to sponsor more events/competitions to come because it is important to grow this sport and support the community as it changes lives in many ways. We want to see more competitions that bring attention to the work these skaters are putting in, there needs to be a platform for these skaters to get more sponsors & to be able to become professionals in what they love. We know it sounds cheesy, but we want to be a part of the growth of this sport there is still a long road ahead for our small company & this sport but we truly hope to have the opportunity to grow with it.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Last Supper?
Quad Skate Company producing quality products made in the USA
What would you say have been one of the most important lessons you’ve learned?
The most important lesson that we’ve learned along our journey is to keep our eyes on our goals, stay true to our vision and to not get distracted by any obstacles that come our way. We are very new so we know we haven’t had a chance to have true taste of lessons learned yet, but we are definitely prepared to take on anything that comes our way.
Contact Info:
- Email: howdy@skatelastsupper.com
- Website: https://skatelastsupper.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/skatelastsupper/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SkateLastSupper/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/skatelastsupper
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2a_IVp2NfTYxx0IGE51-yg
Image Credits
@dylanmakar
