If you’ve driven past our corner at Steele Indian School Park lately, you may have noticed something a little different about the person spinning our sign: he’s got a phone propped on a tripod, a speaker blasting, and thousands of people watching him do it live.
Meet Charles “OG Spins” Kundelius, sign spinner, backflip enthusiast, and now the subject of a feature story from Cronkite News, republished by PinalCentral.com. The headline says it all: “Phoenix sign spinner finds unexpected fame on social media.”
From part-time gig to full-blown craft
Charles found Arrow Sign Spinners on a job listing two and a half years ago. He was trained by his manager, and about a year later he was promoted to general manager. Now he runs his own training sessions at Steele Indian School Park for the next generation of AArrow spinners.
Somewhere along the way, sign spinning stopped being just a job and became a genuine art form. He’s out there up to six hours a day, in Arizona summer heat, working in backflips, cartwheels, and freestyle tricks between spins, all while streaming the whole thing live on TikTok.
The secret ingredient: authenticity
We’re obviously biased, but the experts quoted in the article back us up. A marketing professor at ASU’s W.P. Carey School of Business explained that sign spinning sits at a rare crossroads between the physical and the digital. It’s a break from the “oversaturated” scroll of the internet, pulling passersby out of their phones and into a real moment happening in front of them.
A journalism professor at the Walter Cronkite School added that authenticity is exactly why it resonates. In an age where so much online content is generated or filtered, people respond to someone who’s genuinely being themselves.
That’s Charles in a nutshell. As he put it in the article, he simply loves sign spinning, and the freedom of setting his own schedule is a nice bonus on top.
More than a following, a community
What’s grown around Charles is bigger than views and likes. His mom, Lea, started her own TikTok to cheer him on and has watched the whole journey up close, including, she says, being part of something genuinely good for him.
Fans have driven hours just to attend his training sessions in person. It’s turned into a community built on encouragement rather than judgment.
And it’s working exactly the way sign spinning is supposed to: catching attention, building goodwill, and yes, bringing customers to the businesses he spins for.
Shariff “OG Strategy” Jones, left, performs a backflip as Charles “OG Spins” Kundelius spins a sign at Steele Indian School Park on June 2 in Phoenix.
Want the full write-up, straight from Cronkite News? Check it out here: Phoenix sign spinner finds unexpected fame on social media
Next time you’re near Steele Indian School Park, stop and watch. You might just catch a backflip. And if you do, tag us. Charles reads every comment.
Story by Eleri Mosier, Cronkite News. Republished by PinalCentral.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDeriv
This article first appeared on Cronkite News and is republished here under AArrow Sign Spinners.
