Steve Pilkinton is an entrepreneur who grew up in northeast El Paso during the mid 90’s. After a small stint living in Albuquerque, he made a life changing decision to pursue art school in San Francisco. The move to the bay area paid off, as he found himself living amongst like minded people who helped ignite his creative abilities. Steve currently runs a successful online business selling custom painted Kendama toys—Kendama’s are similar to the Mexican Balero toy. When it comes to designing and painting Kendama’s, he’s the number one “go-to” guy for all major U.S. toy companies. We had the opportunity to speak with Steve about his success and how he discovered the world of Kendama.
You’re originally from El Paso, currently living in San Francisco, what drew you towards the west coast?
I had heard about San Francisco through a friend sometime in high school. Then I did some research on what San Francisco was like; I had no idea it was a city like a New York or Chicago. It sounded right, so when the opportunity arose, I took it. There’s a few commercial art schools out here that make it easy to rack up a serious amount of debt. So needless to say I told my parents this is what I’m going to do and they were cool. Prior to this they were trying to get me to go to the Air Force, having recruiters call me and stuff.
How did the concept of Mr. SourMash come about?
It was just SourMash back then; it still kind of is I guess. By putting Mr. in front usually allows me to have the user name as is. The original concept for SourMash was a story I wrote for a writing class. Sourmash was a space trucker who owned his own rig and had a robot assistant named CB-150. The ship was also a character, but they just refereed to her as Ship, or Mrs. Ship. It was a fairly clever epic with some pretty good detail, you know. Some save the galaxy while meeting the hot chic stuff—classic.
What were you doing before Kendama?
I’ve been doing freelance film work since after college—directing, editing, shooting, and producing. I also worked at a temp agency to fill in the blank; its seriously hard work being poor. Those days were pretty rough. These days aren’t the shining example of success, but I’m grateful I don’t have to worry about covering rent. I also make collage art paintings in my spare time. I’ve shown them at a few places in the city over the past few years.
How did you get into Kendama?
My homie Matt Rice (creator of dealwithitsf.com) was into it, and he got Jake into it, and then Jake got everyone into it. Jake Wiens (founder of thekengarden.com and Kendama USA pro team member) are two major sources of addiction. You hang out with either one for any amount of time and you’re now into whatever Jake’s been showing you, or getting really happy you caught a cup or spike and will not put this thing down for the next few months or years, or ever.
You own MrSourMash.com, a business where you design, paint and sell Kendamas. How did that happen?
Well, again through Jake these things got sparked and I stoked the fire and ignited a custom creating fire. I painted a few for the Kengarden, then we started promoting the fact that these are custom painted Kendama’s by San Francisco artist SourMash!
What makes your Kendama’s so unique?
Pretty much it’s the age old saying: hard work and detection is true in this case. That being said, some things need to remain secret, because I mean a lot of it is trial and error, a lot of error, and what kind of asshole would I be if I were to just tell people and deprive them of all the beautiful suffering that will hopefully make a better artist or person? Something good always grows from shit.
What has been your formula for success?
It’s probably the same as you think it would be. At the time when I started, no one was really doing custom Kendama’s. The demand was always there and increasing. I was talking to Matt about stuff (at the time he was a Kendamaco pro) and he said they had a bunch of people hit them up for custom work. I was getting a little known at the time so I put an outline together and hit him up with a proposal, which ended up turning into painting wholesale orders for them. Just like in anything, you find a pattern that works and you repeat it with slight variations and that’s how I got in Kendama Co, Kendama USA and Sweets Kendama. I eventually created my own boutique store MrSourMash.com where I offer my own brand of custom Kendama’s directly to customers.
Tell me about your online presence?
Online presence is more than 95% of my business, I use Instagram connected to Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr. With my set up like this, it allows one person to exist in several different online community platforms and not have to do separate posts for each one. There are two main things for running most online biz: you run a blog and it connects to your store. Like a TV channel that only sells your brand.
Where can people find you and your product?
www.MrSourMash.com is where you can find my product directly from me. Most of the U.S. online stores have SourMash product and a few toy stores carry them too.
One of your goals is to travel on freight ships?
I’m always in search of some new adventure, something creative where you’re forced to learn new skills and bond with strangers. These are the ideas that appeal to me, as well as bringing new products and ideas to the market place. I came across the idea of traveling by freight ship, so I googled it, and low and behold a whole community club popped up. They give you a map of all the ports they stop at to do business so you can get an idea of where you want to go based off of that. I mean, before airports there were just ports, so I want to hit some of the oldest city ports known to still exist—wandering the cities, make deals in foreign currency and broken languages. I was thinking of hitting a few ports then getting off in a country making my way thru a few more countries ‘til eventually you make it back to a ship or take a flight. That’s the general plan so far, I’m going to keep an online log of postings as the journey takes place.
www.mrsourmash.com |@mrsourmash
