Mini
Spring 2018
My Role
Web design, art direction, copy, packaging design, lighting and grip.
Spring 2018. Boosted dropped four new products, two of them the Boosted Mini S and Mini X. This was Boosted’s first crack at a smaller board and the most accessible price point in the lineup. The creative team took it from there branding, visual language, website, and a launch campaign built to hit hard and hit fast.
Research
A Boosted launch is controlled chaos. Tight timelines. Tiny budgets. Big questions. Small team. Lots to solve. That’s startup life, everyone wearing five hats and doing twice the work in half the time.
The Problem
Boosted was a one-product brand. One electric longboard. We needed a lower price point and a new form factor to bring more riders in.
The Solution
Enter the Boosted Mini. A whole new form factor that delivered the same thrill as the rest of the lineup, just smaller, cheaper, and packed with energy. We paired it with a refreshed identity built to scale, setting Boosted up for a growing family of products.
What Changed
Updated design system
Multi-product structure
Full product storytelling
Homepage refresh
Social, ads, and email collateral
A new design system
First thing up: build the system. We created new web styles from scratch. Grid. Type. Spacing. Hierarchy. Then we ran it hard across everything, homepage to product page. The goal was clear. Be bold when it mattered and get out of the way when the photography needed to shine. All of it had to be locked in within four months, ready for the move to Contentful with our new partner, Underbelly.
Since its Kickstarter days in 2012, Boosted was known for two things: orange wheels and a bamboo deck, neither of which were actually made by Boosted. In 2018, that changed. It was the first full refresh of the product lineup, and the brand needed to grow up with it. We had to build a branding system that could support four new products while giving the creative team room to clearly separate and define each one.
Boosted Logo
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Retooling the website
One of the hairiest parts of this launch was the website. Limited time. Limited budget. Brand-new CMS. Brand-new dev team. And a site held together by a small WordPress crew with consistency issues baked in. Lots to fix, fast.
The Real Challenge
Boosted isn’t cheap, and it’s not something you can just try on the shelf. The site had to do more explaining without losing people halfway down the page. One of my main responsibilities was shaping that product story and making it stick.
I rebuilt the Boosted Mini product narrative into a modular card system. Cleaner. Faster to scan. More engaging. And it cut the page length by more than half while keeping the story intact.
Navigation
With a growing lineup of boards and an expanding accessories catalog, Boosted’s homepage had to do more work. It needed to flex, rotate content, and scale with the brand. That meant rethinking navigation. We introduced a dropdown Mega Menu to give riders fast access to every product and surface more information above the fold. Less hunting. More riding.
Who is the mini for?
Boosted Mini rides differently. The kicktail brings tight turns and sharp pivots, which opens the door to a whole new crowd. From traditional skateboarders to surfers and snowboarders, the Mini hits a broader spectrum. Our first job was to define the audience and build a launch platform around them.
1. Urban Explorer
Your alarm goes off and you’ve got places to be. Commuting is the daily grind and none of the options feel right. Traffic is unpredictable. Buses run late. App rides get expensive fast. You need something dependable that gets you where you’re going, on your schedule.
2. Core Carver
You live for the carve. Skate, surf, snow. Speed and turns are everything. But sometimes it’s flat, the snow isn’t falling, or the day just doesn’t line up. That doesn’t mean the fun stops. You’re wired for motion, always chasing the next hit of adrenaline, always ready to try something new.
3. Rad Dad
Age isn’t slowing you down. You still ride like you did at 13, just a little smarter. You thrive on spontaneity and letting the day pull you somewhere unexpected. Traffic and overpriced rides kill the vibe. You want a way to explore that keeps you moving, curious, and connected to the world around you.
Product positioning
What we learned from earlier launches and target research was clear. Mini S and Mini X needed to stand apart. The Mini S was lighter, cheaper, and built with the standard range battery. Half the range of the Mini X and a different rider in mind, it earned its own look and feel.
Mini S
Bright, energetic, and loud. Bold wheel colors. Punchy backgrounds. Lifestyle photography leaned into blues and oranges, showing movement and everyday rides through suburbs and campus paths.
Mini X
Pushed in the opposite direction. Premium, darker, and more intentional. Softer light. Deeper shadows. Less about the rider’s reaction and more about the environment, the pavement, and the feel of moving fast through an urban landscape.
Packaging
The internal packaging for Boosted Mini followed the same construction as the previous generation, but everything you touched and saw needed a reset. New printed materials. New outer sleeve. By this point Boosted was in 400-plus retail locations, so the box had to pull its weight. It needed to feel premium and clearly say small, portable, and full of energy.
We locked in a single hero image and built the rest of the box around it. That image, shown large below, started as a loose studio idea between Kyson and me and quickly became the favorite. The board feels like it is launching out of an ollie or sitting right at the peak of a manual. All motion. All energy. Exactly what we wanted leading the story.
From there it was tuning type, dialing image scale, and getting everything production-ready before sending it off to the printers.
Conclusion
Boosted isn’t just a great company to work for, it’s a product I genuinely believe in. I’ve been riding my Boosted Mini since early 2018 and just hit 1,000 miles on the little beast. It was an honor to work with such a talented, scrappy team and build so much with limited resources. The whole project ran just over eight months and stands as some of the work I’m most proud of. Huge credit to the team below who made it all happen.
Design
Kyson Dana
Hayden Shaum
Taylor Suchy
Sasha Netchaev
Marketing
Noriko Morimoto
Kerry Cecere
Jakub Lukaszcyk
Sara Loewel
Development
Matt Lebel
Riley Bracken
Underbelly
Product design
Jukka Rautiainen
Levi Price
Photography
Michael David Rose
Kyson Dana
Video
Brian Chu
Terry Berenstein
Werehaus Crew
Dan Darling
