The Anaheim Storefront That Became Vans On opening day at 704 East Broadway in Anaheim, the shoe boxes were stocked and color-coded — blue for men, orange for boys, red for kids, green for women — but the cash register held nothing at all. The owners had forgotten to put money in it. When customers arrived, they picked …

A Company That Called Itself the Bastard Children of Surf Culture "I positioned Mambo as an alternative to the big guys — I think we described ourselves as the bastard children of surf culture." That's Dare Jennings, years later, describing the company he started in 1984, and the line is a useful way into the whole …

Two Torquay Surfers, One Shaping Bay, and the Start of Rip Curl Gilbert Street in Torquay doesn't look like much today, but in March 1969 it was the site of a chance run-in between two surfing friends that turned into one of Australia's defining surf companies. Doug "Claw" Warbrick had just finished a summer shaping …

Two Surf Companies, Two Different Skate Bets Two Australian surf companies spent the 1980s building global businesses on boardshorts and wetsuits, and when skateboarding's late-80s boom made a skate identity look worth having, only one of them tried to build that identity from scratch. Billabong launched Bad Billy's in …

Thrasher's Founding and the Media Infrastructure It Built By 1981, skateboarding in America had no dedicated publication built by skaters, for skaters, at the volume the culture actually operated at — and that gap is what Thrasher was built to fill. The magazine launched that year, published out of San Francisco by …

A Disembodied Hand That Defined a Decade A disembodied hand — five fingers splayed wide, a mouth opened mid-scream across the palm — arrived in skateboarding in 1985 and has never really left. Jim Phillips drew that image for Santa Cruz Skateboards, and the Screaming Hand became one of the most reproduced graphics in …

The Bicycle That Sat in the Background of Every Beach Photo Look at almost any photograph of a Southern California beach town between the late 1970s and the late 1980s and a particular bicycle keeps turning up at the edge of the frame: wide tires, a heavy curved frame, fenders, no gears worth mentioning, usually …

The Rider Was the Product In the 1980s skate industry, the deck under a kid's feet was rarely the thing being sold first. The thing being sold was a person — a pro skater whose name was on the board, whose graphic was the graphic, and whose style in a magazine sequence or a video part told the buyer what the brand …

A Format Nobody Expected to Sell When Powell Peralta released The Bones Brigade Video Show in 1984, the company expected to sell about 300 copies on VHS. It sold 30,000. That gap — two orders of magnitude between the forecast and the result — is the whole story of how skate video became the dominant marketing medium of …

The Boom Was Built on a Bust The popular image of 1980s skateboarding — vert ramps, backyard halfpipes, street skaters grinding curbs in the suburbs — looks like a culture that chose the margins on purpose. In a sense it did, but the choice was forced. The reason skating moved out of purpose-built commercial parks and …