Skateboarding has always reinvented itself, driven by creativity, independence and progression. But once sports corporations started dominating the market, the footwear stopped following - skateboarding settled into revisited archive silhouettes. Skaters started

treating skateboarding footwear like sports equipment. Something you take off as soon as you’re done skating. In March 2025, Basile Lapray and fellow skateboarder Bram De Cleen launched Village PM. The idea: bring back creativity and progression to skateboard footwear and keep the decision making away from boardrooms and close to people who actually skate. Lapray, inspired by a stint of developing high-performance footwear for outdoor brands that started at Salomon 10 years earlier, quit his job and started working on the first Village PM prototypes (in his ex-employer’s in-house workshop), laying the base for Village PM’s first model, the 1PM by transferring the precise fit, abrasion protection and other functional elements of climbing footwear to skateboarding. Launched in Paris at The Broken Arm in March 2025, Village PM has since constructed a distribution network including hallmark skateboarding and fashion accounts across Europe, Japan and Canada.