Drip Bayless
Superstar
WAFFLESNCREAM
“I knew what I was doing was risky, crazy,” says Jomi Marcus-Bello, of his Nigerian skate label WAFFLESNCREAM. Since its launch back in 2010, the brand has had a rollercoaster of a journey, growing from a fledgling brand that struggled with getting press from many places, including HYPEBEAST.
“I felt funny about it, to be honest,” says Jomi, on being approached to do this interview. “I used to reach out to HYPEBEAST—I had emails upon emails—saying what we're doing is important. Africa is always getting neglected. If any musician drops an album, he'll say he's doing a world tour but never touch Africa. Like we're not worth anything.”
For him, there were parallels between this approach and our initial response to WAFFLESNCREAM. “It's the same kind of feedback I got from HYPEBEAST because no one was responding.” But that response, or lack of, isn’t something we’re looking to replicate anytime soon, as the reader can see from this interview. It becomes clear from speaking to Marcus-Bello that WAFFLESNCREAM is more than just a brand for him; it’s his community—one that’s in the early stages of building the first skatepark in Lagos. Calling things a lifestyle may be clichéd, but it’s a term that truly encapsulates WAFFLESNCREAM.
For Jomi, the brand’s journey began back in 2008, in the unlikeliest of places—north England’s Leeds. It was here that he discovered skateboarding as a sub-culture after his mother bought him a board. During visits to a local park near his school, Marcus-Bello saw a new world.
“I discovered this board is not just for cruising. There were ramps and I saw people doing amazing shyt.” He quickly became obsessed with the sport, spending day and night at the park, eventually failing school as a result. But the bonds he had built in Leeds created a desire to find like-minded people, just when his mother sent him to Lusaka, Zambia, as a result of his scholastic failures.
It wasn’t an easy transition. “I was scared. I was like, where the fukk is Zambia?” he says. “I'm from the west [of Africa] and I'm now in the middle of nowhere, in a boarding school.” But he soon adapted. “I found skateboarders in Zambia, a guy called Elijah Campbell, who just moved from Russia back to Zambia. He was a black guy who was a sick skateboarder. He had the same vision I did, trying to set up skateboarding in Zambia.”
This joint vision led to Bello skating less frequently than in Leeds, but the obsessions never left him. He soon had a new crew of fellow skaters and worked towards creating a skate video, which proved difficult. “Nobody had cameras,” he said. The library of online videos we now take for granted did not yet exist, and the group watched video tapes instead. Bello’s transatlantic connection—he was sent back to England for university—meant that he became the plug for his Zambian crew. “I was the one shipping boards back and forth. No one would bring you supplies, because Zambia is a landlocked country."
Campbell eventually created a skate park in Zambia, and Bello, spurred on by Campbell’s success, wanted to see if he could create his own community. “I met incredible people that became my best friends. I thought to myself ‘I've got to bring this feeling back to Lagos.’”
But the journey of WAFFLESNCREAM in Nigeria doesn’t quite follow a straight line. After finishing university in 2014, Bello came back with plans to start the skate brand. “I announced that I was back in Lagos, but I didn't have anything,” he said. “No shop, no crew, no boards—nothing. So what I said was, ‘I need to bring people together and just celebrate this idea of skateboarding and this alternative culture.’” This took the form of parties and events, run so spontaneously that those who RSVP’ed would receive the address only a day before the event.
Bello eventually ran into some people who would be key to the development of WAFFLESNCREAM. “Slawn hit me up and said, ‘Oh, he's been skateboarding and no one here does,’” Bello said. “So he came to me one night with his portfolio and I was like, ‘Oh my God, dude, you're sick in the streets. Let's do some stuff, let’s do some graphics, let's put them on some t-shirts.” It wasn’t long before he met someone else who’d be a key member of the growing crew, Leonard. Meanwhile, Bello was still the plug. “I had some boards with me, I kept going back, kept traveling. So the same thing I did in Zambia, I was doing in Lagos.”
During his travels, Jomi managed to secure a connection in a way that could happen only in the world of skateboarding. “I just walked into Supreme and asked to see the manager,” he recalls. “I told him, ‘Look, my name is Jomi, and I'm trying to start skateboarding in Africa. I want to start from my own city.’ I showed him some clips of the guys in Zambia that I skated with, and he was like, ‘When you're traveling back, come and meet me.’”
The next time Bello went back, he received a supply of boards from Supreme. “I was really shocked because he was the first person to ever support us, with real support, not some fake shyt. Every time I came back, they would just go to the back and give me more stuff. They just generally tried to help.”
Yet not everyone was so supportive. “Everybody was discouraging me in Nigeria, saying skateboarding would never work.” The push for a more established job is something that’s hung over Bello. “The reason why people want to be doctors and learn to engineer is not because our parents love the job; it's because it's the most secure thing.” And the opposite of job security is the risk involved with Bello’s goals. “In young countries, nobody wants to take risks, and being in the creative scene is very risky.”
Despite this reaction, WAFFLESNCREAM opened its first store with a pleasingly straight-forward aim. "[I thought] let me open a skate shop so we'll all be in there, and then we can go skate," Jomi says. He eventually landed on a space but hadn’t planned further than that.
“It was just a shop with no products,” he said. In order to create something more than an empty shop, WAFFLESNCREAM held an exhibition called “Friends and Family” to raise funds via selling supplies, limited-edition t-shirts and goods. It’s an event that still runs twice a year, despite its last-minute beginnings. The exhibition was also the push WAFFLESNCREAM needed to keep creating. They began to release capsule collections, and then full collections, with the pieces wholly designed by the skate crew. All the goods are produced in-store. They even got a tailor.
For Bello and the crew as a whole, the desire to create was born from a need to tell their own tales. “We wanted to put our stories, our fabrics and our life into it, rather than just doing what the West was doing.” The growth of the brand continued to the point where Slawn and Leonard eventually splintered to create Motherlan, another Nigerian skate label that’s still friendly with the brand they worked for.
The next step for WAFFLESNCREAM is to keep things steady. Bello says, “Investment is nice. You can package it in the nicest words, but we want partnerships. We've been offered investment, but we've declined because we want to still be skater-owned, skater-brand 100% and Naija,” he says. “We would rather do a partnership. Someone help us build a skate park. Someone help us set up a factory to build boards. Someone help us set up production.”
World domination is commonly sold as the goal for all new brands, but that’s not the aim for WAFFLESNCREAM. “I am more concerned about Africa. I love the world, I love the West, but my focus is more on Africa. I want to see more WAFFLESNCREAM stores in Africa than anywhere else.” Yet more than the growth of his brand, he wants the growth of the sport in Nigeria and beyond. “I want more people to skate. The clothes are cool, but the core of it is skating. We're more excited about a good clip than a good design.”
“I knew what I was doing was risky, crazy,” says Jomi Marcus-Bello, of his Nigerian skate label WAFFLESNCREAM. Since its launch back in 2010, the brand has had a rollercoaster of a journey, growing from a fledgling brand that struggled with getting press from many places, including HYPEBEAST.
“I felt funny about it, to be honest,” says Jomi, on being approached to do this interview. “I used to reach out to HYPEBEAST—I had emails upon emails—saying what we're doing is important. Africa is always getting neglected. If any musician drops an album, he'll say he's doing a world tour but never touch Africa. Like we're not worth anything.”
For him, there were parallels between this approach and our initial response to WAFFLESNCREAM. “It's the same kind of feedback I got from HYPEBEAST because no one was responding.” But that response, or lack of, isn’t something we’re looking to replicate anytime soon, as the reader can see from this interview. It becomes clear from speaking to Marcus-Bello that WAFFLESNCREAM is more than just a brand for him; it’s his community—one that’s in the early stages of building the first skatepark in Lagos. Calling things a lifestyle may be clichéd, but it’s a term that truly encapsulates WAFFLESNCREAM.
For Jomi, the brand’s journey began back in 2008, in the unlikeliest of places—north England’s Leeds. It was here that he discovered skateboarding as a sub-culture after his mother bought him a board. During visits to a local park near his school, Marcus-Bello saw a new world.
“I discovered this board is not just for cruising. There were ramps and I saw people doing amazing shyt.” He quickly became obsessed with the sport, spending day and night at the park, eventually failing school as a result. But the bonds he had built in Leeds created a desire to find like-minded people, just when his mother sent him to Lusaka, Zambia, as a result of his scholastic failures.
It wasn’t an easy transition. “I was scared. I was like, where the fukk is Zambia?” he says. “I'm from the west [of Africa] and I'm now in the middle of nowhere, in a boarding school.” But he soon adapted. “I found skateboarders in Zambia, a guy called Elijah Campbell, who just moved from Russia back to Zambia. He was a black guy who was a sick skateboarder. He had the same vision I did, trying to set up skateboarding in Zambia.”
This joint vision led to Bello skating less frequently than in Leeds, but the obsessions never left him. He soon had a new crew of fellow skaters and worked towards creating a skate video, which proved difficult. “Nobody had cameras,” he said. The library of online videos we now take for granted did not yet exist, and the group watched video tapes instead. Bello’s transatlantic connection—he was sent back to England for university—meant that he became the plug for his Zambian crew. “I was the one shipping boards back and forth. No one would bring you supplies, because Zambia is a landlocked country."
Campbell eventually created a skate park in Zambia, and Bello, spurred on by Campbell’s success, wanted to see if he could create his own community. “I met incredible people that became my best friends. I thought to myself ‘I've got to bring this feeling back to Lagos.’”
But the journey of WAFFLESNCREAM in Nigeria doesn’t quite follow a straight line. After finishing university in 2014, Bello came back with plans to start the skate brand. “I announced that I was back in Lagos, but I didn't have anything,” he said. “No shop, no crew, no boards—nothing. So what I said was, ‘I need to bring people together and just celebrate this idea of skateboarding and this alternative culture.’” This took the form of parties and events, run so spontaneously that those who RSVP’ed would receive the address only a day before the event.
Bello eventually ran into some people who would be key to the development of WAFFLESNCREAM. “Slawn hit me up and said, ‘Oh, he's been skateboarding and no one here does,’” Bello said. “So he came to me one night with his portfolio and I was like, ‘Oh my God, dude, you're sick in the streets. Let's do some stuff, let’s do some graphics, let's put them on some t-shirts.” It wasn’t long before he met someone else who’d be a key member of the growing crew, Leonard. Meanwhile, Bello was still the plug. “I had some boards with me, I kept going back, kept traveling. So the same thing I did in Zambia, I was doing in Lagos.”
During his travels, Jomi managed to secure a connection in a way that could happen only in the world of skateboarding. “I just walked into Supreme and asked to see the manager,” he recalls. “I told him, ‘Look, my name is Jomi, and I'm trying to start skateboarding in Africa. I want to start from my own city.’ I showed him some clips of the guys in Zambia that I skated with, and he was like, ‘When you're traveling back, come and meet me.’”
The next time Bello went back, he received a supply of boards from Supreme. “I was really shocked because he was the first person to ever support us, with real support, not some fake shyt. Every time I came back, they would just go to the back and give me more stuff. They just generally tried to help.”
Yet not everyone was so supportive. “Everybody was discouraging me in Nigeria, saying skateboarding would never work.” The push for a more established job is something that’s hung over Bello. “The reason why people want to be doctors and learn to engineer is not because our parents love the job; it's because it's the most secure thing.” And the opposite of job security is the risk involved with Bello’s goals. “In young countries, nobody wants to take risks, and being in the creative scene is very risky.”
Despite this reaction, WAFFLESNCREAM opened its first store with a pleasingly straight-forward aim. "[I thought] let me open a skate shop so we'll all be in there, and then we can go skate," Jomi says. He eventually landed on a space but hadn’t planned further than that.
“It was just a shop with no products,” he said. In order to create something more than an empty shop, WAFFLESNCREAM held an exhibition called “Friends and Family” to raise funds via selling supplies, limited-edition t-shirts and goods. It’s an event that still runs twice a year, despite its last-minute beginnings. The exhibition was also the push WAFFLESNCREAM needed to keep creating. They began to release capsule collections, and then full collections, with the pieces wholly designed by the skate crew. All the goods are produced in-store. They even got a tailor.
For Bello and the crew as a whole, the desire to create was born from a need to tell their own tales. “We wanted to put our stories, our fabrics and our life into it, rather than just doing what the West was doing.” The growth of the brand continued to the point where Slawn and Leonard eventually splintered to create Motherlan, another Nigerian skate label that’s still friendly with the brand they worked for.
The next step for WAFFLESNCREAM is to keep things steady. Bello says, “Investment is nice. You can package it in the nicest words, but we want partnerships. We've been offered investment, but we've declined because we want to still be skater-owned, skater-brand 100% and Naija,” he says. “We would rather do a partnership. Someone help us build a skate park. Someone help us set up a factory to build boards. Someone help us set up production.”
World domination is commonly sold as the goal for all new brands, but that’s not the aim for WAFFLESNCREAM. “I am more concerned about Africa. I love the world, I love the West, but my focus is more on Africa. I want to see more WAFFLESNCREAM stores in Africa than anywhere else.” Yet more than the growth of his brand, he wants the growth of the sport in Nigeria and beyond. “I want more people to skate. The clothes are cool, but the core of it is skating. We're more excited about a good clip than a good design.”
- I can dig it
c00n