Keep Screaming

In 2013, a skate shop called Keep Screaming opened its doors in Phoenix, Arizona. It was a small shop, built the way a lot of independent shops are built: with a lot of belief, a little money, and a genuine love for the culture that brought people through the door.

There was nothing particularly extraordinary about the size of the place or the amount of inventory on its shelves. What made Keep Screaming matter was the same thing that has always made local shops matter. It was a place where people knew they could walk in and find people like themselves. You could come in looking for a new deck and end up talking about a spot you'd been skating, an artist you had discovered, a band someone was listening to, or whatever else happened to be going on that day. The shop was part retail store and part gathering place. It was part business and part community.

For a couple of years, Keep Screaming was part of the Phoenix skate scene. It was a home for people who cared about skateboarding and the culture surrounding it, and like so many independent shops, it was built on relationships more than resources. The people behind it didn't have the financial firepower of the companies they were competing against. They had something else instead: a connection to the people who walked through the door.

For a while, that was enough.

But independent shops have always had a difficult road, and over time the road became steeper. The cost of doing business continued to rise. Competition became more aggressive. Large retailers had greater purchasing power, greater reach, and increasingly large marketing budgets. Corporate money continued to find its way deeper into an industry that had been built by independent shops, independent brands, and people who participated in the culture because they genuinely loved it.

The difference was simple. A local shop had to make every dollar count. A much larger company could spend money simply to gain ground.

Keep Screaming couldn't keep fighting that battle forever.

In 2015, after two years in Phoenix, the shop closed its doors.

There was no single moment that brought everything down. No one thing that could be pointed to and blamed. It was the accumulation of the same pressures that have forced countless independent shops to make the same decision before and since. The numbers eventually stopped making sense, and when they did, passion couldn't change the math.

So Keep Screaming ended.

At least, that's what it looked like from the outside.

The doors closed. The inventory was gone. The shop was no longer a place people could walk into. Eventually, time moved on and the name became a memory for the people who had been there.

But businesses like Keep Screaming leave something behind that is much harder to close down.

They leave relationships. They leave stories. They leave friendships and experiences and the feeling of having been part of something that belonged to your community. They leave an idea behind.

And sometimes, an idea takes longer to figure out what it wants to become.

Years after Keep Screaming closed, the same question that had been sitting underneath its story began to take shape in a different way: What if independent shops didn't have to fight alone?

It was an important question because the problem had never really been that local shops didn't know how to build communities. They were exceptionally good at it. That was their greatest strength. The problem was that they were being asked to compete in an environment where size, capital, advertising dollars, purchasing power, and corporate reach could overwhelm everything else.

A local shop could have the better relationship with its customers and still lose.

It could have more authenticity and still lose.

It could be more connected to its community and still lose.

What if the answer wasn't for every independent shop to somehow become bigger? What if the answer was for independent shops to become more connected to one another?

That question became one of the ideas behind Trace Society.

Trace was not created simply to put another brand into the marketplace. It was created around a belief that the people who create local culture should have a way to benefit from being part of something larger without having to give up what made them independent in the first place.

A shop in Phoenix doesn't need to become a national corporation to matter. A shop in another city doesn't need to become one either. An artist doesn't need millions of followers to have influence. A rider doesn't need a corporate sponsorship to contribute something meaningful. A local business doesn't have to become enormous before its community recognizes its value.

What they need is connection.

That is the foundation Trace is being built on.

The idea is not to erase the individuality of local shops or turn them into identical pieces of a larger machine. It is the opposite. Trace is about bringing independent people together while allowing them to remain exactly what they are. A collection of different shops, creators, artists, riders, makers, and communities can have far more collective strength than any one of them could have on its own.

Keep Screaming is where that idea became personal.

It is easy to look back at a closed business and see it as something that failed. The sign comes down, the doors close, and eventually the world moves on. But that's not how we see Keep Screaming.

Keep Screaming proved that the shop could exist. It proved that people would show up. It proved that a local business could create something meaningful for the people around it. What it couldn't do was overcome an economic environment that made it increasingly difficult for independent shops to survive on their own.

That distinction matters. Keep Screaming didn't disappear because the idea was wrong.

The idea simply needed somewhere else to go.

Today, Keep Screaming is part of Trace Society. The name, the history, and everything that came with those years in Phoenix have become part of the foundation we're building. The shop may have closed its doors in 2015, but the reason it existed in the first place is still very much alive.

And that's what we want to say to the people who remember it.

If you were there, if you walked through those doors, if you bought a board from us, spent an afternoon in the shop, met a friend there, or simply remember what Keep Screaming meant to Phoenix at the time, you are part of this story. Trace isn't an attempt to recreate what existed twelve years ago. It's an attempt to take what was good about it and give it another chance to grow.

The same goes for the people who have built independent shops of their own.

Some are still open. Some aren't. Some are fighting every day to keep the doors open, while others made the difficult decision years ago to walk away. Different circumstances may have led them there, but many know the same feeling: watching something you built with your own hands become harder and harder to sustain because you simply don't have the resources to compete with companies operating on a completely different scale.

We know that feeling because we've lived it.

Keep Screaming was one of those shops. That's why Trace exists.

We believe there is another way forward for independent culture. Not by trying to outspend the biggest companies, and not by pretending the challenges don't exist, but by creating stronger connections between the people who are already doing the work.

The local shop still matters. The local artist still matters. The independent creator still matters. The people who choose to build something themselves still matter.

And maybe the next generation of those businesses doesn't have to stand alone.

Keep Screaming closed in 2015.

But the story didn't end there.

It became the beginning of something else.

Keep Screaming is alive and well. And it's part of Trace.