Our story

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How Grounded Nation Started Off…
Grounded Nation Started Off As A Little Hobby Believe It Or Not …
I went to a show a couple years ago and started taking some photo’s of cars with my phone, I think it was a Blackberry back then. Afterwards I would send these photo’s to the owners and get awesome replies. I kept doing this and got more replies saying “take this further, you have great talent!” , “do you have a page?” and “where do I find more pictures?”. I always ignored it as it was a small hobby. Until one day a friend said I can post the pictures on his Facebook page and do the Motorsport side of his photography – which I called ‘Digital Images Motorsport’. Eventually I started enjoying it more and more so I wanted to start my own page! That is when I created the name ‘Grounded Nation’, designed the logo with the anchor and started up our page.

At this stage, I still didn’t have a nice camera. I’ll never forget, I was using bright pink Samsung camera that I used at work to take photo’s of the sites, yes, construction sites LOL! And so I carried on enjoying this hobby and was trying hard to get my page out there. My fiance, Jade, and I were going around to shows and spinning events and taking photo’s while having a good time. We travelled all over! All the way to Richard’s Bay, back down the South-coast to Dezzi Raceway, then inland to Ladysmith, just because we loved it and were driven by passion! We met some amazing people along the way and created memories that will never be forgotten.

We started getting more and more fans following and supporting us! We got inspirational messages encouraging us to keep on doing what we doing. With the brand growing, we got our name out there slowly but surely. We ended up doing a few shoots for Gas Magazine and this was really epic to see our work in magazine. People were asking us for stickers, for shirts and to start hosting events. This was a big jump for us. We had never hosted an event and G-Nation was growing faster than we had dreamed of. But anyway, we decided to go for it! We hosted a park-off in Pietermaritzburg and we had a turnout like we could not believe! The response we received after the event was amazing and felt like we actually bringing people together like we had planned. We printed stickers and started giving them out at shows to our fans to say thank you. More and more cars had stickers and more people wanted! We were seeing G-Nation stickers on so many cars! We would get family messaging us saying “I just saw a car with your sticker on it!” and this would make us feel proud. After being hounded by the public to start selling merchandise, we finally got around to it and printed some G-Nation shirts (Check out our store for items)

We thought why not, lets host our first car show event in PMB. We did it and it was a success! We got amazing feedback and huge support so we decided that we needed to host an annual event that was going to bring KZN together, not just car guys, but the whole family. This was when ‘Stance Fest’ was created. 2016 was the first year and we tried to bring something different to the scene. We made our own trophies for a few categories, which consisted of actual car parts/accessories as trophies. Another idea was to get more children involved. So we started a category called ‘Best Toy’, which was for all the ride-on toys to get some credit. This was quite a hit and has taken off quite well. Some of you reading will know SA’s Stance Prince, Dredin Naidoo, who currently has two stanced ride-on toys; a bagged VW Kombi and a static VW G7 GTi. 2016 was a great success!!

We also started doing the ‘Show n Shine’ sector for quite a few companies, Gas Magazine events being some of the more frequent events. As much as we love shows, we also love the ‘no competition, no politics’ vibes of park-offs and runs. We hosted a breakfast run that went to Blue Lagoon where we had a massive park-off followed by a sunset photo-shoot with a few friends! The vibes were really incredible and laid-back! We wanted to give back somehow so we did a few charity runs which were really amazing, especially to see the joy of the people and animals we were helping!

A big opportunity was presented to us in 2017, so we went for it! We teamed up with Dublyf Car Crew and put together ‘First Fridays’ – KZN’s largest park-off! This park-off is a huge car meet (well over 500 cars) where guys come from all over KZN to chill and show off their awesome rides while having a good time – this is where the First Fridays’ slogan came from, “great vibes and killer rides”. First Fridays merchandise (stickers and tee’s) will be released to the public in 2018 sometime, hopefully by March – watch this space!

Grounded Nation would be nowhere today if it wasn’t for our loyal fans, our amazing event’s crew, our G-Nation car crew and all the sponsors involved in all of our events! A huge thanks goes out to every single one of you that has supported and helped us in any way possible! Big ups to you guys! We look forward to the years to come and look forward to meeting new people.

Once again thanks to our loyal supporters,

you guys are amazing!