Tommy Fachiri
DAS SPEZIAL’s mission extends beyond the music into all forms of creative expression. Counter culture thrives amongst independent thinkers with unique skills, and we’re committed to experimenting with form and format wherever we can find kindred spirits who want to create something beautiful. As the first wave of our collaborations launches, in this feature series we’re shining a light on the people making the goods.
First up, we’re buzzed to introduce Tommy Fachiri of Back & Forth, a Bournemouth-based screen printer who specialises in skate decks. He’s put his talents to the SPEZIAL X Acrylic Minds skate deck - a limited edition of 10 available now from the SPEZIAL shop.
Fachiri has serious skin in the game - he first came across the time-honoured craft of screen printing at the age of 14 and was instantly hooked. In the mean time he’s been a life-long skateboarder, following in the footsteps (wheel tracks?) of his skater mum and growing up around the South Coast’s thriving scene. Visuals go hand in hand with skate decks, and as Fachiri explains screen printing was how decks were printed before heat transfers came along in the early 00s.
Naturally he followed his dual passions towards the work he does today, landing major gigs along the way such as printing all the legendary Clown skateboard decks, including completing a run by one of the most infamous living artists in the world.
“Banksy designed three decks for Clown back in the 2000s called the Test Press but they only ended up initially printing 20 despite having an agreement for 100,” Fachiri explains. “I got the opportunity to continue that original agreement and finish the sets - that was pretty cool!”
For the hook up with SPEZIAL, Fachiri took an exacting approach which required some fine-tuning along the way. Screen printing by its nature is an imperfect practice but his preference is to make the end results as crisp as possible. The all-over graphic in the background proved a challenge and resulted in the ink smudging and bleeding under the stencil on some of the test runs, but with a few tweaks to the screens a slicker finish was achieved, not least thanks to the green fluoro ink of the SPEZIAL logo.
Luckily it wasn’t as brutal a challenge as the run of classic Cheech & Chong designs by Tom Penny he printed for Flip, which took two weeks and 24 passes to get right - a prestige job given the designs were last printed in ’96 and aren’t likely to ever be run again. It’s those specialist levels Fachiri is working at with his deep-rooted craft, and we’re stoked to have him in the extended SPEZIAL family.
Interview By Oli Warkwick for SPEZIAL Artist Series
Tommy making the SPEZIAL Board