Cool Hunting

Canadian-based skateboarding blog Club Mumble and custom furniture designer Furni recently teamed up for some awesome ventures, including Contributor, a skateboarding charity for underprivileged youth, and the newly released (today) Furnigraph Mumbletronic Digital Watch. We had a chance to chat with the founder of Club Mumble, Bob Kronbauer (pictured right), and learn a little more about these projects.

Let’s start simple, what kind of message or culture does Club Mumble play around with?
As a designer and a documentarian, I come from a skateboarding background, and almost all of the contributors to the blog come from the creative side of skateboarding, so I guess you could say we're focused on stuff that revolves around that.

What inspired you to pull this together? How has your vision changed as the project matures?
Mumble started off as a blog that I was updating by myself, reporting on what my peers were doing and trying to bring attention to a bunch of different projects they might be interested in. As time went on I realized a couple of things, one being that I didn't have time to sift through the insane amounts of awesome stuff that people were putting out and two being that it didn't need a one-man filter deciding what was worthy of posting and what wasn't. I decided it would be more fun if I invited people I respected and admired to come on board to talk about what they're doing themselves as opposed to me telling those stories for them, so I turned it into "Club Mumble". I guess you could say it kinda went web 2.0., the content is more organic than it was in the beginning and right now we've got 135 people on board as members (contributors)...all friends of friends of friends.

We’ve heard about your skateboard charity Contributor, what’s it about?
I wish I could claim that Contributor was my own project but it's actually the brainchild of Annie Lam and Mike Giles. The goal is to raise money and get donations to provide at-risk youth with skateboards. So far they've got a lot of support for it, I think because it really resonates with people who work in skateboarding; so many people that I know (including myself) might have gone down a different path in life if they hadn't found skateboarding. Annie and Mike are trying to provide that point of discovery for kids.

I co-curated their upcoming fundraiser art show, "Smile On Your Brother", and we're teaming up to help promote all of their projects through Mumble just because it's such an awesome thing that they're doing.

Mumble recently teamed up with Furni to design a new watch. Any comments on your part in the design?
Yeah! The Furnigraph Mumbletronic is basically a take on the watch that you guys did with Furni a couple years back, only with a different face design and a couple of tweaks here and there.

My favorite contribution to it is the gold accents. Talking to Mike while we were designing this thing, I came to the realization that I wasn't even going to be able to wear it because I'm allergic to pretty much all metals except for gold. Mike was like "we could just make the accents gold!" and it was a done deal.

One last thing, any insider tips on up-and-coming skaters? Any personal favorites?
There's this Canadian dude named Torey Goodall that I've been really stoked on for awhile now, if you search his name on YouTube you'll find some awesome stuff.

The Furnigraph Mumbletronic is available for $24 through Furnigraph Mumbletronic.