SHRN - Why we are doing this...

The Beginning

SooHotRightNow was actually always a thing on the internet. We started in 2004 as a kind of skateboard & lifestyle website that showed, among other things, skateboarding by the South City Stars, the Dirty South Warriors, the Spot crew, the Euro skate-hall people, and a lot from Munich nightlife too, like Erste Liga and Nage & Sauge and so on. In the pre-blog era this was basically one of the first blogs. Back then news was still typed straight into HTML and uploaded with FTP programs. A ton of work, which is why at some point we just went skating again instead. Still, the whole idea of a site like that is to trade news and show hand-picked, fitting stories and so on. First so everyone in this scene knows what's up, but also so lots of people can get a picture of it. Many people all over Germany and all over the world watched this kind of internet soap. We were regularly surprised how many visitors we had on the site.

The Brick-and-Mortar Shop

After we let www.soohotrightnow.com slide a bit toward the end of the 2000s, at some point we had the idea that a skate shop is really about exactly the things we'd always mirrored on the site: the gossip, the videos, the togetherness, and pure skateboarding! And somehow we'd never found a shop in Munich that had what our skateboard hearts were looking for. The red leather couch to lounge on and watch videos, the deluxe board wall, the good coffee place around the corner, and so on. So we set out and looked for a location that fit us. Since we never only featured skateboarding on the site, and we also like being out at the bar and club in the evening, we brought in the Public Possession guys too, so a piece of the nightlife hangs out with us. At Klenzestraße 16 in Munich we found exactly that location. Very central, not far from Gärtnerplatz and the 14, we now have this little shop that's a labor of love, where we offer carefully chosen brands by all kinds of criteria. And don't worry, we're very picky about our brands. Even big companies like Nike, Adidas and Vans we view with the same caution and reservation as you do with your skateboarder heart. That means we keep a healthy balance and try first and foremost to support brands still run by people who actually skate. Every rep of these brands should be able to skate and show it. So when you shop at SHRN, you can be 100% sure we thought 50 times about whether we even want to sell this company and this product, and above all why. We don't just order by the latest trends; we have our own opinion and years of experience, especially across the whole skateboard business, and we can promise you we use that experience to get you good prices, good goods (usually tested by us or the team) and other benefits. What we miss at some bigger stores, though, is the humor that comes with being skateboard fuckin' core! A "fuck longboards" has to be allowed now and then. That doesn't mean we don't see longboarding as skateboarding in a developmental sense, but we also find the current longboard trend pretty tricky. There used to be times when surfboards and longboards were somehow in the skate shop too, but those times are over. Skateboarding is too big, and we're just skateboarders, and we want a shop for skateboarders! Of course we're well connected in the Munich scene and try to bring you as many cool events as possible, where the odd pro can't be missing. After just three months of being open we already got to present the X-Games to you and party for nights with P-Rod and his crew at the Ruby Bar. This year the Adidas guys around Dennis Busenitz and the Bones Bearings guys around Bobby Worrest were guests again! Germany is noticing that a good scene has formed again in Munich, and through photographers like Conny Mirbach and Leo (Sau-)Preisinger there's more footage again in Monster, Place and so on. People like Markus Mengucci, Juli Sonntag, Alex Pfeffer and Marlon Lange are bringing momentum back to Munich's filming scene too! MUNICH SKATEBOARDING ROCKS!!!

The Online Shop

And that's where we come back from the street to the computer, because that's just how it is. We start skating and get to know the street. But because the streets around us get too small at some point and we know every spot in the neighborhood, we hang out at the shop and go skate with new people, talk about spots and check out the city. The longer you skate, the more people you meet and the more you educate yourself online. You see videos with amazing spots from nearby cities, you see how great it is abroad, and you get more connected online. You go to Barcelona and meet people from London there and stay in touch. All of it via Facebook, WhatsApp, magazine sites and so on. And of course www.soohotrightnow.com can't be missing there. On one hand to show people from other cities what's going on in Munich. But also to keep showing Munich folks cool videos and posts they absolutely have to see. We approach the clips the same way we pick our products. We only put online what refreshes our hearts and what we think is rad. Interestingly, our activity on Tumblr and other online sites lately led to more and more questions about whether we could ship this or that. And so it wouldn't always stay at informative and cool phone calls, where it's not always easy to describe a product properly, we finally bit the bullet and built an online shop. We're sorry for everyone who doesn't have a skate shop in their town, but maybe our online shop can at least cover a few of the needs a skateboarder might have. Online we can't offer everything a skate shop in your city could either, but at least we can feed you cool news and offer you a deluxe selection that we also have in the physical shop. Of course there'll always be a few more treats at the Klenzestraße shop, but we can tell you the stuff in the online shop is genuinely rad. Often even lots of stuff from small companies that don't even get picked up by big online shops, or from companies so beautifully down to skateboarding that you'll find them in few other shops! We hope this little read brought you a bit closer to what we do and why! And now have fun browsing the news or the products! Or just go skate now with a good feeling! Mixen, Daniel, Robinson, Effe, Esel and the whole SHRN team! HELL YEAH!