Severn Goods – Sustained Disintegration

First of all, what does Severn mean?

You have the idea of starting something before you have the name. Then you think about names. Just like: Is that gonna be good? Or does it sound wack? And then we thought about the river Severn. It runs from my hometown all the way down to Bristol. And we kind of just took that name. It linked to everybody who was starting it.

Who’s running Severn?

It’s me, Tom Mangham and Luke Frisby. Just three friends. We all have fulltime-jobs and do it in our spare time.

Why did you start it?

It was Tom who thought about it. He always needs projects and something to do. So we came up with the UK headweare company.

Where are you guys based?

We all live in Bristol. But most of the people involved now are London based. But Bristol and London are only like an hour away.

Where do you sell the caps? Only in UK shops or all over Europe?

They are distributed through Rock Solid. It’s just a UK distributor. So we have a bunch of shops in the UK. And with Sprouters we just got a distribution in Germany. So we’re gonna be in shops in Germany soon.

It seems like you are doing a lot of trips.

We do as many as we can afford. So the whole idea is just to do as many as possible and get people going to as many places and try to afford to take riders there so they don’t have to pay the travel. So yeah, all the money we get goes into it. We’ve done a couple of London ones now. And we brought a few dudes from London to Bristol. And I think we are looking to go somewhere more exotic early next year. Maybe like Marrakesh or something like that. That’s the whole kind of focus behind it, it’s just to go on trips. To live that skateboard lifestyle.

The new clip is also about a trip, right?

It’s kind of a trip. We had new guy who’s from Bristol. We wanted to bring him to London to meet everybody else. We kind of took him to London and got him to meet everybody and it was supposed to be a long weekend of filming. But then the VX got hit by his board which you can see in the end of the clip. And that kind of cut it short a little bit. It dropped off the end of the fisheye and the mount on the end of the camera. So kind of fully focus the fisheye and the VX which sucks. All that stuff is kind of a long weekend cut short.

How do you select the riders for the brand?

Again, it came super naturally. It was just friends pretty much. This is what we started doing. We were just like: Oh we know these guys and then from there one of them maybe was like: „Oh how about so and so? I know them.“ We never approached anybody who we don’t know. It’s just friends and homies vibes. We’re in a lucky position, a lot of our friends kill it on the skateboard.

What do you want the brand to be like? Is there an overall idea?

It’s still kind of evolving all the time. We were inspired by architecture, shapes, forms and photography. So we have this image we kind of came from that but I’m not sure if we stay with it or it’s gonna change a little bit. It’s kind of evolving as we go on. Sirus does the edits. We love them, so we want him to put his spin on all the edits and that turns in a different direction every time he does one, which is really rad. And we just want it to evolve naturally and just see where it goes. This is something quite nice, not knowing exactly where it’s gonna go.

Right now you are doing just hats. Are you planning other stuff as well?

We kind of keeping it headwear for the time. We thought of doing some other things but for now we just gonna keep it headwear. Tom really likes the whole production side of things. And he really likes creating stuff with really good quality. So one of his things is he never wanted to make cheap replica hats or whatever. He gets really stoked on the whole process, like going to manufactures, seeing what they can do, getting things made. He’s really stoked on that moments so I think we’re just kind of focusing on the hats game as good as we can.