Every skating coach I know has done this.
A parent at the rink asks what boots they should buy. You tell them. They buy the boots, often that week. You never hear about it again.
A young skater asks what blade would suit them. You explain the options, tell them which one makes sense for their level. They buy it. The store makes the sale. The manufacturer makes the margin. You, the person who actually influenced the purchase, make nothing.
Multiply that across every coach, at every rink, across every year of a career.
The amount of equipment revenue in skating that is directly driven by coaches, and for which coaches are paid nothing, is enormous.
This post is about why that is, and what we are building at ONE Blades to change it.
Quick answer
Coaches drive most equipment purchases in skating but are almost never paid for the influence they carry. ONE Blades pays coaches 10 to 25 percent commission on every EDGE sale they refer, with permanent customer attribution that does not expire. Tiers never reset. The program is open to any coach who buys EDGE, uses it, and decides it belongs in their skaters' hands.
In this guide
What coaches actually do in skating
The skating industry tends to talk about coaches as if they are separate from the commercial side of the sport. Coaches teach. Retailers sell. Manufacturers make. Three separate worlds.
That is not how it works in reality.
Coaches drive almost every significant purchase a skater makes. Boots. Blades. Tights. Training bags. Off-ice training tools. Competition dresses. Travel to test sessions. Summer camps. Private coaching with specialist coaches the main coach recommended. The list is long, and the skater and their family rely heavily on the coach's judgment for every item on it.
A parent buying their first pair of figure skating boots is not reading reviews. They are asking the coach. Because they trust the coach. Because the coach has seen their child skate, knows their foot, knows what level they are at, and knows which boot will support the skating they are trying to do.
That trust is worth money to the manufacturer. It is worth money to the retailer. It is worth money to everyone in the industry except the coach who generated it.
Why this has never been addressed
The skating industry has never built a good structure for paying coaches for the commercial influence they carry. A few reasons for that.
The margins were structured for retail. Traditional skate retail is built on distributor-to-retailer-to-skater margin stacking. By the time a pair of boots reaches the skater, the margin has been sliced between three or four parties already. There is no room left to pay the coach who actually drove the sale, without reducing one of the other parties' cuts. Nobody wants to be the first to give up margin.
Coaches are independent, plural, and small. A manufacturer trying to pay coaches commission on every boot they recommend faces a logistical problem. There are thousands of coaches worldwide. Tracking which coach drove which sale, at scale, through multiple retailers, is almost impossible under a traditional retail model.
The industry has assumed coaches are paid enough through lessons. This is the quietest assumption, and it is the weakest. Most coaches are not paid enough through lessons. Coaching rates in most countries have not tracked with the cost of living. Coaches coaching 30 hours a week are earning less in real terms than coaches coaching 30 hours a week were earning 20 years ago. Meanwhile the equipment they recommend has continued to appreciate in price.
The result. The person who carries the trust, who influences the purchase, who has spent a career building a reputation in a local community, gets nothing when that reputation converts into a sale.
It is not that the existing structure is immoral. It is that it is outdated.
That is the structure I am trying to change.
What ONE Blades is
For context if you are reading this without knowing the company.
ONE Blades is a direct-to-consumer inline figure skating company. We produce EDGE, a four-wheel inline figure skating frame designed for ice figure skaters. $399.99 complete system. Frame, wheels, picks, tools, packaging. Sold directly from our website. No distributors. No retailers. No middlemen.
That structure matters because of what it makes possible. When you cut out the distributor layer and the retailer layer, the margin that would normally be split between them is available to be redirected.
We redirect it to coaches and other creators in the skating community who recommend the system.
How the Creator Program works for coaches specifically
The Creator Program is open to any skater who buys EDGE and registers as a creator. That includes coaches. This section describes how it works from a coach's specific point of view. The full structural breakdown of the program is here if you want the broader version.
Commission starts at 10% and scales to 25%
When a skater you recommend buys EDGE through your referral link or code, you earn 10% commission on the sale. As your lifetime referred sales grow, your commission tier increases. At $1,500 in lifetime referred sales, you move to 12.5%. At $7,500, 15%. At $15,000, 17.5%. At $30,000, 20%. At $60,000, 25%.
The tiers do not reset. Your progress is permanent. If you move up to 15% this year, you are on 15% for the rest of your coaching career. That is how a referral system should work.
Your customers are attributed to you permanently
When a skater clicks your referral link and buys, they are tied to you. Permanently. Not for 30 days. Not for 90 days. Forever. If they come back to buy replacement wheels in three years, you earn commission on that. If they buy a second frame when they size up, you earn commission on that. The attribution does not expire.
This is the opposite of how most affiliate programs work. In most programs, the skater clicks once, gets a 30-day cookie, and then disappears back to the company. We built this to work the way a real coaching relationship works. The coach is involved in the skater's progression for years. The commission structure reflects that.
You are not a salesperson
This matters. The program is not designed to turn coaches into salespeople. It is designed to compensate coaches for recommending a product they genuinely believe in, to skaters they already coach.
If you do not think EDGE is right for a particular skater, do not recommend it. If you do not use it yourself, you cannot register as a creator. The program only works if recommendations are real. That is how it was designed.
Untracked sales
Some of your influence will not be traceable. A parent mentions inline training to another parent. A skater tells a friend about EDGE. The friend searches for ONE Blades directly and buys without clicking anyone's link. That sale is not attributed to any creator and carries no commission.
The practical takeaway is simple. If your recommendation is the reason a skater is buying, give them your link. That is the only way the system can count the work as yours, and it is what ties that skater to you permanently.
No retroactive changes
The terms we publish today are the terms you operate under. If we evolve the program in the future, existing creators keep their existing rights. Tiers do not reset. Commission does not reduce. Attribution does not shorten. What you build with this program is yours.
This is written into the program deliberately because most affiliate programs do change the rules retroactively, usually in ways that reduce what existing participants earn. We are not going to do that.
What this looks like for a working coach
A coach with a roster of 20 to 30 students, some of whom will need inline training over the course of a year, is looking at this kind of picture.
Five skaters in your roster buy EDGE in a year. At 10% commission on $399.99, that is $199.99. At 15%, it is $299.99. At 25%, it is $499.99.
Add a few parents who buy for their children's siblings. Add summer skaters who buy when you mention it during the off-season discussion. Add that none of this requires you to change how you coach. You recommend EDGE because you believe it is the right tool for off-ice training for ice figure skaters. The money follows the recommendation.
Now extend this across a coaching career. You coach for another 15 years. Skaters come and go. Some families have multiple children who skate. Some skaters continue using EDGE through their whole progression. The attribution stays with you. The compounding happens automatically.
This is not get-rich money. It is not replacement-for-coaching money. It is meaningful additional income for doing work you already do, that used to flow past you to people who had nothing to do with the recommendation.
Why I built it this way
Because I know how skating works. I have been a coach. I have watched other coaches drive enormous commercial value for the industry and receive nothing in return. I have watched manufacturers and retailers take margin that existed in the system because of trust a coach had built, and then discard the coach's involvement entirely in how that margin got allocated.
It is not that the existing structure is immoral. It is that it is outdated. It was built when retail had to be done through physical shops and national distributors. That constraint is gone. The structure can evolve.
ONE Blades is my version of what the structure should look like now. Direct to consumer, to cut the margin layers. Creator-powered distribution, to compensate the people who actually influence sales. Permanent attribution, to reward long-term relationships rather than 30-day cookies. Transparent economics, so the people doing the work can plan around them.
The whole thing is designed to return value to skaters, coaches, and the community that makes skating what it is, rather than to middlemen.
What I am asking of coaches
Nothing complicated. Three things.
First. If you are an ice figure skating coach and you have skaters who could benefit from off-ice training on a well designed inline frame, try EDGE yourself. Use it. Form your own view. Do not recommend it unless you believe it belongs in your skaters' hands.
Second. If, after using it, you do believe it belongs in your skaters' hands, register for the Creator Program. The link is in your email once you purchase. Your creator code and attribution are activated immediately.
Third. Tell other coaches. The coaches who come into this program in the first year, who build attribution early, will compound the longest. I would rather see the ceiling of that compounding hit by working coaches in the skating community than by anyone else.
Getting EDGE
The store is live at oneblades.one with inventory available for immediate purchase. Creator registration is open.
If you are a coach interested in the Creator Program, you can register as a creator once you have purchased EDGE and confirmed it is a product you want to recommend.
Learn more about EDGE or register as a creator.
A final word
I am not trying to position ONE Blades as the answer to every problem in skating. The sport has structural issues that will take years to unwind, and a small inline frame company is not going to solve most of them.
But compensating the coaches who build the industry's trust is something we can do. The economics allow it. The structure supports it. The only question was whether anyone would actually do it.
That is what this is.
If you coach, I hope this post made the offer clear. If you do not, but you know coaches who might find it useful, pass it to them.
Either way, thank you for reading.
Adam Jukes
Founder, ONE Blades
Last updated: June 10th