Today marks the last day in our good old office in 69A Haji Lane. While there were many pleasant memories here, we still have to move ahead and there is definitely a bigger ladder to climb. Over the years, Haji Lane brings us many pleasant memories. Lunch at the legendary Fish Soup, B Bakery, Nasi Padang etc. Getting our fabrics of Textile Center etc, traveling to the post office and many more. We bid our office farewell.
With one of our staff a.k.a CK whom will be pursuing his own label called Perspective (Look out for it) , We bid you farewell and yes, we have gone through the thick and thin of our office, we have teased, make fun off and had a good times together. You have been a great contribution (The third in our Varsity Bones Series : THE BRMCs ) to our company and we wanna acknowledge you for that. Still your journey has only just begun and so have ours. We will definitely be in contact. You are indeed a master craftsmen.
Prior to that we have two outstanding Interns who came and also have contributed big time to Royalefam during this period. Namely I wanna acknowledge Kenneth for contributing the first in our Varsity Bones Series Prison Blues and the revamping of our personal website. You have been doing an awesome job with it. Tze Ling, codename the Assassin, who have been the lady who have been producing your converse customs under the SBTG umbrella.
All in all, we hope to throw a mini party in our new office once we have finalize everything there. Do hope to see all of you there.
For the latest updates, do check back www.royalefam.com
For those who are wondering, the future of 69A Haji Lane has been taken over by a group of people namely Max, Alvin and Darren, the people who brought in OBEY. All the best and we will definitely drop by to see ya!
What would you do if you have a floor that looks totally depressing? Well, we decided to paint it and damn it looks awesome now. Still its only phase 1 of the many phases. Some Interior decor is still needed. Will keep all updated most def.
Singaporean sneaker customizer SBTG has designed a custom G-Shock to be given away by Royalefam. It’s basically a DW-5600E-1 with gold printing on the bezel and bands. It’s marked as being a 25th Anniversary G-Shock, which is odd since it seems a little late. There’s no word on exactly how many will be produced, but it’s probably not very many.
Update: It looks like only 8 of these G-Shocks are out there. So the odds aren’t very good of getting one of these. For such a small number they might have gone more this route rather than a full production run.
It looks like these custom G-Shocks have been hanging around for a while now. GameBoy2Go posted a scan of an article from a newspaper in Singapore back in September of 2008.
So this article says there was 10 of these produced all together. And this new giveaway says they are giving away one of only eight remaining.
Update 3:
It looks like you can also buy one of these here. For One Thousand Dollars!
Mark Ong was a sneakerhead — that is, one of the thousands of people all over the world who talk and think about sneakers the way that Paul Giamatti’s character in the movie ”Sideways” talks and thinks about wine (only without chemical dependency or pointy-head metaphors about the meaning of life). Then, about a year and a half ago, a Web site called Niketalk held a contest, inviting readers to submit photographs of sneakers they had ”customized” — given new, hand-painted designs. Ong, a graphic designer, reworked a pair of white Air Force 1’s with a safari-print graphic treatment adapted from a different Nike model, and he won. There was no prize, but it was the beginning of a new career. Now known as SBTG (pronounced ‘’sabotage”), Ong sells his customized Nikes for $350 a pair.
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SBTG is not the first sneakerhead to, in effect, go pro. The most famous customizer is probably the Los Angeles-based artist who works under the name Methamphibian, whose shoes (or kicks, as they say) can go for $900 a pair and who is now designing sneakers that are scheduled to be produced by DC Shoes, which makes skateboarding shoes and apparel. But the story of SBTG affords a look at one facet of the sneaker phenomenon — that is, the way that fashion and brand loyalty can come together in what might be considered the folk art of a consumer culture.
Ong works out of his apartment in Singapore, but his projects are transnational. After winning the Niketalk competition, he made a set of 72 pairs of sneakers for a store in Tokyo. He has since released sets with the Hong Kong toymaker adFunture and a London D.J. called Unkle. For Sneaker Freaker magazine, based in Melbourne, Australia, he contributed a step-by-step customizing guide and executed a custom Nike Dunk co-branded with the sponsor Tiger Beer. His shoes are included in the world-traveling sneaker gallery show Sneaker Pimps (sponsored in part by the Finish Line retail chain), and he is starting an apparel line, Royalefam, with Ambush, a Singapore boutique. ”Right up to this day, I still think that it feels kind of surreal,” SBTG told me recently of his transition from fan to brand.
SBTG’s first official U.S. sneaker release last year was at Packer Shoes in Teaneck, N.J. A boutique-style shop that looks as if it belongs in Lower Manhattan, Packer is a spinoff of a family-owned Yonkers store; Michael Packer, who runs the Teaneck store, explained that his father had one of the first Nike accounts in New York. On the night the shoes were released, a couple dozen sneakerheads journeyed to Teaneck and bought most of the 24 pairs of the SBTG X Packer Desert Mayhems.
Sneaker enthusiasm has a long history. Consumers have blurred the lines between athletic gear and stylish streetwear. Sneaker makers have responded by stoking the market for status-giving scarcity by producing limited-edition models that can draw small mobs (although it’s likely that the mobs are mostly sneakerpreneurs who then flip their purchases on eBay for huge markups). Perhaps customizing, the popularity of which is growing, gives consumers more control over what makes a product special.
Maybe the strangest thing about the sneaker subculture is that Nike, a mainstream megabrand, is not shunned like mainstream merlot in ”Sideways” but is at the center of the action. Niketalk.com was not founded by and is not moderated by the company but rather by a handful of dedicated sneaker fanatics who swap news, gossip and opinions about Nike products. Alex Wang, better known in the sneaker community as Retrokid, is an administrator of the site and is another sneaker enthusiast who has gone pro, as the creative director of the magazine Sole Collector. He says Nike is not directly involved in the site, though people at the company read it, and it’s widely believed that some of them post. (Nike declined to comment for this column.) Nevertheless, it’s essentially a community of brand fans, with more than 35,000 registered users. It’s as if a computer-hacker subculture developed around a devotion to Microsoft products. SBTG says he has had only limited contact with Nike, but so far it is the only brand of sneaker he has worked on. ”It’s got nice lines, nice space, it looks right; it sort of motivates me,” he says. ”It’s the perfect canvas.”
There are many stencil artists around the world but there are none as intricate and detailed as Logan Hicks. He has single handedly brought the stencil art game up to the next level with his super detailed and large scale art works. He pain stakingly prepares each stencil by hand taking days to collate the different layers of the art works. Each different color needing a separate stencil that is carefully layered on top of each other and sprayed with paint. Here you can see his latest installation for Nuart 09 in Norway.
Just yesterday, we have shifted most of our belongings to our current office space in Commonwealth. The process was enjoyable as we had the help of Melvin (Royalefam) , Derrick (Singapore DMC First Runner Up), Andy (Bro), Nick ( www.plussixfive.com ) and Seng Chye (Tai Sun) who willingly lend their hand to help us aid our Shifting. We wouldn’t be able to do it without their help. Probably the only thing I can remember from our conversations was when our ever soft spoken Nick from Plus Six Five said the following…
”Hey Be careful, Don’t Hurt Your Back”
Awesome times, awesome help, awesome family. Till we have “CUSTOM” our office… enjoy this blog !
Kevin dropped by a couple days ago and passed us these photoframes with us wearing our skull mask. It is really very nice of him to take the effort to do this. Being a huge fan of morrissey, Kevin has hand printed his own Morrissey tee. Lastly, introducing our newest memeber in the family, a young promising guy by the name of Bryan will be interning with us to help us out with the operations!
BTG Customized Sneakers
