Nigel Sylvester On Building a Global BMX Brand Outside the Competition Circuit

Did you find it at all, the path to respect from your peers was ultimately different to gain for you because you weren't competing in the same things they were competing in?

Mm-hmm. The thing about action sports and especially BMX, skateboarding, sports like that is there's kind of two ways to go pro. They eventually all lead to the same route though. Mm-hmm. And I say that to say some guys compete in contests and that's their way to get noticed by brands. And then the brand end up signing you. A lot of guys end up just putting video parts out to get noticed by a brand and brand end up signing you. Right? So a video part, I would compare that to a musician's album, right? Like you'll take 6 to 8 months, sometimes a year, record your best stuff. At the end of it, you boil it down and probably be about a 3, 4-minute part and you put that out and that's how the community judge you on like the work that you put in and how the brands get to really notice you. And that's the way I went. I went the content video part route. Like I didn't really care about competing. My community, they respected me because they seen the work I was putting in on the bike. At the end of the day, it's either you're gonna ride that bike and do your thing and turn up or you're not. You know what I mean? Like whether you're competing in a contest or not, end of the day, did you land a trick? Was it smooth? Was it clean? You know what I mean? That's what it really came down to. And I gained that respect from my peers throughout the industry at a very early age.