Amsterdam is known around the world for being one of the most bicycle-friendly cities, but thanks to the hard work of Ivo Vegter and his shop This Is Soul, AMS is also a global hub for rollerblading.

As bladers from around the world prepare to descend on Amsterdam on their way to Winterclash 2025, we’re shining a light on this growing blade business and the decisions they’ve made that contribute to their success.

Read on to learn more about how This Is Soul has evolved over the years and what keeps its owner excited for the future.

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Hi Ivo, we’re excited to hear that your business is growing! 
Thank you! It’s been growing steadily ever since we started. 2024 is already surpassing any of the pandemic years for us, so we can’t complain.

Tell us about the current location in Amsterdam. When did you move from your original space, and what inspired the change?
We moved right when the pandemic first hit. We had such a small shop before, up in the north of Amsterdam. You have to take a ferry to get there, so it’s a bit remote, and we just didn’t have any space to grow.

Luckily, the weather was great in the spring of 2020 and 2021, and with all the indoor restrictions, people turned to outdoor sports like inline skating. We had so many people showing up to the store every day, and suddenly, we had tons of web orders. The scary thing was, first, we didn’t have enough time to help everyone, and secondly, we were selling out really fast. Not only were we selling out of skates, but the suppliers also had no inventory left. I saw their stock numbers drop every day, so we started purchasing skates like crazy to keep up with the rising demand.

All that new stock meant the tiny store was suddenly piled up with towers of skates right in the middle. There was hardly room to walk in the store. Luckily, the weather was good, so we could help people outside.

This situation couldn’t last, and it made it clear that we needed a new location.

Where is it in the city? Are there any special features that make it an ideal location for an inline shop?
You want to be in a spot where both skaters are, and loads of regular people walk, drive, or cycle past. If the goal is to spread the love for the sport, we definitely need both of those things.

The shop is located quite centrally on one of the main streets going into the city. Everybody knows this street. Then there’s an alley next to it where tons of cyclists and pedestrians pass through on their way to Vondelpark. This park is a very big, centrally located spot where people run, hang out, walk their dogs, and of course, skate!

Vondelpark also allows us to do rentals and lessons, which makes it the perfect spot. Skaters come to the store, hang out for a bit, grab a coffee, drop off their stuff, and then go for a skate through the city or the park.

How would you say your customer base breaks down these days between aggressive, free skating, pure recreational, or other disciplines?
Actually, these days I don’t differentiate between “pure recreational” and “free skating.” The only difference would be whether it’s a first pair of skates or if the person already has experience. Our goal is that every customer who walks in just wanting a pair of skates starts to see it as something fun, where they can learn tricks and skills. Anybody wanting to go out and skate should at least learn a couple of braking techniques, and the process of learning those is the same as learning a more advanced trick.

The mindset of a beginner should be the same as the mindset of an advanced skater, and the hardware should also be the same.If we break down our sales between skates you can grind on and those you can’t, it’s about 45% aggressive skating vs. 55% freestyle skating.

We don’t sell any other categories of skates. We only sell what we love as a company. So, we often get asked if we sell roller skates, hockey skates, or speed skates.

We see the company growing mostly by strengthening the inline skate culture we’re part of, instead of pushing other categories we have no connection with.

I remember when you used to be an aggressive-only business. As our community’s appetite for increasingly diverse types of skating continues to mature, have your thoughts on the different disciplines of inline evolved over the years? 
That’s a keen observation. I made a life-changing analysis of the aggressive skate sport that made me change course.

The goal is to strengthen our culture, and for the longest time, I thought aggressive skating needed its own identity separate from the other inline skate categories, just like BMX is so different from commuting on a bike.

But around 2014, I realized that most people can tell the difference between a BMX bike and a city bike, but they can’t tell the difference between aggressive skates and freestyle skates.

That made me conclude that to change the public perception of what we’re doing, we need to change the public perception of the entire sport of inline skating.

If you look at inline skating like a hand, where the fingers are the specialized versions (aggressive, speed, hockey, slalom, flow, cross) and the palm represents recreational skaters who don’t know what they’re doing, we have all these specialized fingers fighting for the attention of the recreational skaters (who are the masses in the middle).

There are certain pathways toward the tips of each finger—like flow skating or urban skating, which can lead someone into aggressive skating. The same goes for how a fitness mindset can be a gateway to later start speed skating.

What sets cycling and skating apart at their core is the ease of learning enough skills to navigate the streets. For inline skating, you must learn a bunch of skills to do this. The best way to learn those skills is in a community group and with a playful, adventurous mindset while skating. Keep challenging yourself within your comfort zone, bit by bit, to get better.

This mindset is a necessity for any recreational skater if they want to keep doing it. If you have bad skates and a bad mindset, you’ll quit after a few tries.

A fitness mindset takes away from the playfulness and focuses on lap times and kilometers. This is the “fitness disease” that made our sport ill around the 2000s. If you think you’re just going to buy a pair of skates, not learn anything, and focus only on time and distance, you’re going to have a bad time and quit soon.

The sport was doing best when advertisements showed people having fun on skates in the early ’90s. In a way, aggressive skating pulled the cart of recreational sales back then.

The beautiful opportunity for us in aggressive skating is that if we succeed in pulling that cart again, we can shift the public perception of what we’re doing while also strengthening our own sport.

To do this, we need shops that sell aggressive and freestyle/rec skates in a cultured, cool, community-driven environment. Having rental skates and lessons for total beginners in a space that inspires them to become great skaters.

With the specialized needs of different skating types in mind, what are some of the special things that ThisIsSoul does to set it apart from other retailers? For example, I always thought your jars of bolts and bearings at Winterclash were especially simple and genius. 
It often feels like we’re the one-eyed man in the land of the blind.

• Most shops are not inline skate-only.

• They almost always also sell bad softboot skates.

• We have loads of inline skate clothing in-store.

• We have a skate school in Amsterdam and are connected to the skate school in Berlin, offering a free lesson with every purchase.

• We can boot-fit your skate shell to the shape of your foot.

• All hardware parts are available. On our website, they’re even sorted by skate model.

• We can customize your insoles in-store to the shape of your foot.

• We’re located on a prime spot where you can actually skate, teach, and rent out skates.

• All the left skates are out of the box—no need to ask a salesperson for your size because everything is sorted by size in-store.

• We organize and are involved in night skates.

How about the state of the industry: What’s your take on the current health of the skate market? What companies are doing the most to cultivate new skaters?
This is a tough one, because I could write a few essays about the state of the industry, but I’ll keep it short and focus on what brands are doing to cultivate new skaters.

For aggressive skating, I’d say that brands like Mesmer and Them are doing the most to cultivate new skaters with the content they produce, though unfortunately, they don’t get the sales they deserve.

For freestyle skating, the frame and hardware options that brands like Endless are providing are doing a lot. Content-wise, Wizard Skating is setting the tone with their release of Base Odyssey, a full-length skate video with big wheels for the first time.

Besides the brands, there are so many Instagrammers and YouTubers doing great things, either showing skating or talking about hardware and lessons. It has such a huge impact on skaters nowadays—it’s more personality-driven than brand-driven.

Did you experience any new trends or challenges while the pandemic was happening? Anything that you’ve incorporated into your business?
For us, it was a challenge to give digital advice when the store was closed. We’ve gotten much better at that now! Soon, we’ll be rolling out a complete index on our website of all the content we’ve produced so it’s easily findable. I believe one of the main functions of a skate shop is helping people sort through the overwhelming amount of information out there. That’s why we have tons of product videos on our website, and only knowledgeable skaters working in the stores.

The pandemic brought a lot of late 30s skaters back into the sport. People who used to aggressive skate now wanted a pair of big wheels. A few months later, they’d come back for Endless frames, wheel upgrades, or Intuition liners. Of course, we do our best to inform people of all the possibilities in-store, but often they discover these things on their own, through our YouTube or others.

Getting these people back into the sport has been one of the greatest things to happen to us.

What’s selling well in your store right now, and what does it suggest about the skate retail space at this moment in time?
It’s hard for me to point to something that stands out because, for me, everything feels quite normal.

We sell loads of laces, which always surprises me. Shout out to Laced from Brandon Drummond.

We also sell a lot of our own clothing brand. We made almost €10,000 in revenue in one year. That surprised me! Every time we sell one of our jackets or backpacks, it makes me a bit proud.

In general, the biggest thing we’re selling is the love for skating. That’s what our physical stores, webshop, and skate school are set up to do, and I think we’re doing it well.

Do social media trends and activity influence your customers? Can you give us some examples?
100%. Social media influences customers in a few ways:

• The way they dress and act—this is something we know from old aggressive skating culture, and I think we need more of that.

• The way people skate—this is super important, especially if pro skaters show this on Instagram.

• Lessons—we do tutorials on our socials, and this helps people understand what the first steps should be. We give everybody who walks into the store a flyer with our YouTube channel so they can practice on their own.

• Hardware insights—if you don’t know that cheap softboots make for bad skates, you might fall into that trap. Ten years ago, nobody online was really talking about this, but now there are so many Instagrammers and YouTubers spreading the gospel, which makes our lives in-store a lot easier.


Our own social media works great in this way. We have lots of already-informed customers walking in now.

Similarly, I was at your old Amsterdam Nord location once when an active-duty police officer came in to buy a set of 4×4 wheels. That was wild! How often do you get complete strangers walking in, and what are they most regularly looking for?
Most aggressive skaters are so caught up in their own bubble that they sometimes think they’re the only ones in their area who skate. Just hang out at the shop for a day and you’ll meet so many skaters—most of them I wouldn’t have seen before either! Every day we get new (and returning) skaters in-store, all of them searching for a connection to the sport and the culture.

You think a police officer buying wheels is odd? Last week, we had a 67-year-old, very well-known politician come in and buy a pair of skates. I didn’t recognize him right away, but he recognized me immediately because, in his words, he “spent the whole evening watching our instructional videos.”

Now that you have two physical stores, has the risk of owning a shop changed at all since you started? Are you ever surprised there aren’t more skate shops? 
I see a bigger risk in not having a store than in having one. We started out as a webshop, and people could always come by the warehouse, which quickly turned into a hangout.

If the goal is to strengthen the culture of existing skaters and educate and inspire new ones, then having stores is the only way to do it.

Anything we forgot to ask that you want to cover? If so, let’s dig in. Otherwise, good luck with the stores and get back to work! 
Anyone coming to Amsterdam, reach out to us and let’s skate together. We do city trips and there are aggressive skate sessions, of course. Find out more on our community page: thisissoul.com/pages/do-not-skate-alone

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Photos by Dominik Wagner