DUNK (2020)
Speedy and I surveying the first ever run of Dunks, late March 2020. RIP Speedy.
Release Date: April 1, 2020
Specs: D: 54.30 mm W: 45 mm 64.1 grams
6061 Aluminum
C-size bearing, 19mm pads
OEM: Magic Yo-Yo
Pieces produced: ~600
First Run ~300 pieces
Second Run ~300 pieces
Prototypes: 5 pieces Green with Snow Tire size pads, 5 pieces in Red same as production release
Design began in 2019. The design was inspired by 3 of my favorite yoyos at the time: the Gully by Good Life, the Qubit by Core Co. and the Tourney by Duncan. The outer rim of the Dunk is more or less an identical curve to the Qubit’s rim. The inner bump was inspired by the bubbles of the Gully. I’m not sure what inspiration I drew from the Tourney other than it being a powerful and stable 5A yoyo, my favorite at the time for that style. I wanted a comfortable, very stable, modern organic shaped yo-yo that excelled at 5A and also felt good for 1A. First prototype was Green and featured Snow Tire size pads. I thought these would provide the grippier response I wanted, and while they did work pretty well, they ended up being too difficult to source for a full run. We ran a second prototype in Red, but with 19mm pads. I wanted the yo-yo to be as cheap as possible. These were priced at $45. They were packaged in the standard Dunk Chinese food container, I believe the first run was white boxes and the second run may have been red or black. The packaging featured hand drawn art by me, something I at first planned to be a limited edition thing. I’ve been drawing all of my yoyo packaging ever since. The Chinese food containers were stolen from Doc Pop, who packaged his signature edition Buzz-On Element X in a Chinese food container back in the day. They are also the cheapest possible boxes I can find that fit a yo-yo. I have no shame in saving money on packaging, my belief was that it gets thrown in the trash 99% of the time anyway. This mindset carries over to yo-yo strings, which I believe I did actually include with the first run of Dunks, but I soon stopped after realizing that quality yoyo string is expensive, and at least in my own experience, I will never use the string that comes stock with a new yoyo, because I have very specific string preferences. It has bit me in the ass maybe 4 times total since launching Dunk, with folks reaching out asking where’s the string (I always mail them a couple strings in an envelope) but overall people really don’t seem to care. Funnily enough, hand decorating these cheap boxes have made them more desirable for a lot of people and folks often tell me they keep and display all their Dunk boxes alongside their yoyo collections. The first run sold out in 10 days.
PROTOTYPES
Prototype 1. Green with Snow Tire pads. I believe there are 5 of these but I’d have to dig around and check. As far as I know CJ has 1, I have 3 and a collector in Japan has 1. One or two might be missing honestly. Below you can see the first Green prototype compared to the second Red prototype. The Green is a shade lighter than the first run Green.
Prototype 2. Red with 19mm pads. The rims were rounded a tiny bit (people still consider the Dunk to be a little sharp but I like it) and the gap was adjusted a hair to account for the 19mm pads. Same as production run. There were 5 of these and I believe CJ and I own all of them. The Red is the same shade as production run which confuses things a good bit.
First Run colors: Red, Dark Green, Black, Silver, Orange, Purple, Brown, Pink, Black/Silver half fade, Raw. 9 Colors plus Raws. I did sell a handful of Raws through the website, maybe 10 pieces? The rest went to be copper plated and powdercoated. There were 25 pieces each of the 9 basic colors, 50 fades and 50 raws. These are the numbers I ordered, but in reality they are estimates, the true numbers have been lost to time. I am sure there are anywhere from 10-30 more Dunks out there from this run, and from basically every run of yoyos I’ve ever made.
First official drop
The first official drop of Dunks was April 1st, 2020 at Midnight EST. The first drop colors were Dark Green, Purple, Brown and Silver. $45
FIRST RUN Half swap official DROPS
Anti-Yo Fluchs inspired Pink/Black swap dropped on my website April 3, 2020. I believe solid Pink and Black were also available to purchase.
Hspin Pyro inspired Red/Orange swap dropped on my website April 7, 2020. I believe solid Red and Orange were also available to purchase.
Eetsit (brown/silver), Ninja Turtle (green/brown), and other unnofficial swaps are definitely out there as I sold a good amount of Dunks directly through DMs and honored most requests.
SECOND RUN
Second Run colors: Light Blue, Light Green, Dark Brown, Dark Blue, Dark Red, Gold. 50 pieces of each color, 300 pieces total. The first run of Dunks sold out so quickly that I immediately ordered 300 more. In hindsight this was insane, but 2020 was a different time, and this Dunk had the hype of being my first ever yoyo behind it, as well as an insanely low price. Kudos to Magic YoYo who turned around 300 more Dunks in like 2-3 weeks. It was crazy. The first drop was April 1st and this second drop was May 4th. I wonder if I was the only guy ordering yoyos at the time due to Covid, maybe that’s why they were able to knock them out so quickly.
SECOND RUN FIRst drop
May 4, 2020 6PM EST. Colors in the first official drop were Aqueous Blue (dark blue), Ponyboy Gold (gold), Vino Red (dark red), Hershey Brown (dark brown) and Paul Han Winston inspired half swap (Dark Blue/Gold). $45
I believe I posted some Dark Red/Gold halfswaps in honor of the Kutztown Golden Bears on my website but it may have only been direct sales, I can’t find a record.
bapezilla swap
Dropped May 22, 2020 at 6PM EST. $55
After the first run sold out people were requesting a Bapezilla inspired colorway like crazy. The blue and green were ordered to match the Bape. It has since become a bit of a tradition to do some kind of Bape inspired colorway for every Dunk release.
The Bapezilla editions were priced higher at $55 because they included a special custom printed bobber counterweight designed by Chris Deemie. Chris has since passed away and I miss him a lot, he was a truly kind person and he was really fun to work with on this project. I am unsure how many bape colored DUNK bobber cw’s exist but I imagine a couple hundred. A lot of them broke over time.
Glow in the dark
3 ever made, powdercoated by the talented Wesley Cheng (yoyospirit on instagram). It’s a plain white glossy powdercoat that glows green in the dark.
One was auctioned off on the YoYo BST facebook group. 100% of the money went to a charity or charities of the winner’s choosing. This was in the midst of the Black Lives Matter protests in June of 2020. If I recall correctly the winner chose some local bail out funds and the donations were made. I don’t recall who won it or how much it sold for but I think it was around $300.
EGGSHELL POWDERCOAT
I believe 2 of these were made, powdercoated by the talented Wesley Cheng. It’s just a plain white powdercoat with an eggshell finish.
One was auctioned off via the Scales Collective Fundraiser for Racial Justice, all proceeds were donated.
Pictured also are all the original Dunks I had powdercoated. These were for me personally and were never meant to be released, but the GITD and Eggshell ended up being auctioned for a good cause. I still own all the rest, as far as I can remember. They include: 3 glossy white GITD, 5 eggshell white, 1 creamsicle orange yoyo white hub, 1 white yoyo gold hub, 2 white yoyo polished hub, 1 full polished yoyo.
COPPER DUNK
Dropped December 13, 2020 6 PM EST
6 pieces released, $145. Included a custom chainmail counterweight with copper chainmail rings hand crafted by Dustin Gunter.
A copper plated yoyo of my own was a long time dream. Unfortunately this first batch was pretty rough. There were a lot of unsellable pieces with chipping and adherence issues. I am unsure to this day if it was due to the quality of the aluminum itself, a lack of proper cleaning, or just botched by the plating factory. I managed to come up with 6 sellable pieces for the website and commissioned Dustin Gunter to create some custom counterweights to go with them. According to the paperwork I created to go along with these, there are 30 total. I honestly don’t remember where they all went. I assume I must own a handful, CJ probably got one, and I probably sold a good amount of A grades and B grades direct before they could make it to my website. These were $145 which felt insane coming off a $45 debut yo-yo so I went all out with the packaging, hand drawing a Care Sheet and one of a kind trading cards to go along with each yo-yo sold.
If you were ever wondering why your early Dunks arrived smelling so good, it’s because they were all packaged in a soap store. I moved packing to my house after the Slim Dunk so now you just get Bearold hair instead of nice smells.
SLIM DUNK
Released: August 17, 2020
Specs: D: 54mm W: 38.3mm 63 grams
6061 Aluminum
C-size bearing, 19mm pads
OEM: Magic Yo-Yo
Pieces produced: ~600 pieces
Quantities: Roughly 50 pieces of each solid colorway, 25 pieces each of the Fade and three Nature Series colorways, 50 pieces Raw
Prototypes: baby blue 5 pieces, no changes from production model
This is a fun one to look back on. It was kinda like being a band coming off a surprise hit debut album. I had zero plans for a second yoyo, and I had zero expectations of ever selling out my first yoyo, much less two full runs. I was enjoying spring the way I like to enjoy spring, by fly fishing for trout. I was on the toilet one morning in a cabin in northern Pennsylvania chatting with one of my oldest yoyo buds Drew Tetz. I had sent him a Dunk and he liked it, but suggested I cut out the inner bump and “chop shop” it to make it the width of a Duncan Freehand. I obviously loved the idea and texted CJ immediately, from the same toilet, mid poop. He said no problem and I believe suggested the name Slim Dunk immediately. Being a stupid idiot it would take me a few weeks to recognize that “slim” was a play on “slam” but I loved the name regardless. I had learned from my 2 run sellout so I ordered 1 giant run of 600 pieces, to this day the most yoyos I’ve ever ordered at once.
Prototype
The prototype arrived at my house on June 30, 2020. It was an amazing tiffany blue and as far as CJ and I remember it was perfect and no changes were made for production. I really wish we had run this colorway for production but at the time I felt like it was important to keep the prototypes identifiable, which was stupid of me and ended up not being important at all. There are 5 of these, I own at least one, CJ has one, I believe a collector in Japan has one, and maybe I sent one to Drew Tetz?
FIRST DROP
Dropped August 17, 2020 at 6:15PM (why 15?) EST on this website. $45
9 Solid Colors: Light Purple, Light Blue, Light Green, Black, Silver, Orange, Red, Pink, Brown
10 Half Swap Colors: Bape (Light Green/Light Blue), Halloween (Black/Orange), Ninja Turtle (Light Green/Brown), Light Purple/Pink, Light Blue/Orange, Light Green/Orange, Fluch (Pink/Black), Eetsit (Brown/Silver), Redbull (Light Blue, Silver), Pyro (Red/Orange)
1 Fade: Blue/Green fade. This was meant to be Bape-esque but didn’t really come out how I envisioned. It’s still beautiful.
So one giant drop with 20 distinct colorways available. It was insane in hindsight. And it gets weirder: at the time I was reeling from the amount of packaging and waste required to sell yo-yos. It was new to me and it was kind of a shock. Spending all this money on cardboard shipping boxes and tape and chinese food containers that would just end up in people’s trashcans. I decided I would ship the Slim Dunk in an entirely new way. I bought a bunch of small bubble mailers made entirely from recycled (and recyclable) material. Mikhaila my loving partner in life and business and I disassembled every Slim Dunk, removed the axle, and tucked everything separately wrapped into these mailers. The yo-yos were more or less shipped “flat”. The yo-yo itself had no packaging of any kind, it was just an envelope with a disassembled yoyo inside. It saved me and the customer zero money as the shipping price is decided by weight, and it took an enormous amount of extra time to ship the yoyos. My heart was in the right place but it was a foolish venture. By the time 500 recycled bubble mailers were FLOWN and TRUCKED all over the world, my efforts had a net zero positive environmental impact. It’s funny to look back on though!
NATURE SERIES
Dropped October 3rd, 2020 at 12PM EST on this website. $45
These could not have gone less as planned. My original intentions were:
An orangey reddish copper over black acid wash inspired by the iconic tortoiseshell anodization on old Tom Kuhn Tomcats and Silver Bullets.
A swirly dark blue and greyish silver acid wash for CJ’s signature edition, inspired by his wrestling persona “The Whisper”.
A tightly masked traditional camoflauge pattern in green, black and brown. No whitewall to keep with the camo theme.
I really overestimated the capabilities of the factory and they delivered 3 rather basic two-color splashed yoyos instead.
I reassessed my approach and decided to release these together as a Nature inspired series: Earth (green/black), Water (blue/silver) and Fire (red/black). It worked out I think, and they were the first (and last) splash anodized Dunks ever released to the public.
THE WHISPER EDITION
The Whisper is CJ Atkinson’s professional wrestling name. To celebrate his 4 year anniversary in the wrestling game, we wanted to do a special edition Slim Dunk for him to sell through his website. The blue/silver acid wash we ordered didn’t come out as planned (see Nature Series above) so we went back to the drawing board. I sent a handful of raw aluminum Slim Dunks out to an anodize shop in the USA. They blasted the yoyos and anodized them a very cool dark blue and gunmetal gray. We had them laser engraved with some amazing artwork. The blast on these is super heavy and unique feeling. I believe there were 20 total made, and 15 made it to public sale. Definitely one of the more unique and rare Dunk editions. These dropped February 4th, 2021 at 8PM EST on CJ’s website. I do not recall the price.
NICKY SLIM (NICKEL PLATED)
Released over the course of a few days, starting February 13, 2022, on my website. Roughly 15 made it to public release. Maybe 20 or so total made? This was a lowkey release that came quite awhile after the Slim Dunk initially dropped. I had realized I had some extra raw Slims and sent them to the nickel plate shop, probably along with the Slappa’s I was getting done at the time. I believe these retailed at $100. I don’t even have a good photo, all this stuff got lost somehow.