Santa Cruz Skateboards hits its 50th anniversary as a crucial component in the history of skateboarding
Quick Take
This year, NHS Inc. — the Seabright-based parent company of Santa Cruz Skateboards — marks its half-century anniversary in the skateboard business. In the immense but imaginary skatepark of today’s skateboarding industry, Santa Cruz Skateboards is that legendary skater that all the other kids stop to watch. It has shaped what the industry looks like today. And it has built a brand that has spilled out beyond the world of skateboarding, becoming a touchstone in the world of commercial art.
If you’re looking for a pretty good illustration of what the skateboarding industry has been like the past 50 years, all you have to do is pop over on a Saturday morning to a local skate park — Mike Fox Park near the San Lorenzo River maybe, or the Monte Family Park next to the freeway in Capitola — and zero in on all the determined-to-have-fun 12-year-old skaters. There are a lot of dramatic ups and downs. Sometimes they wipe out. But sometimes, if they’re persistent enough and smart enough to fine-tune their approach, they’ll defy gravity … they’ll fly.
In the immense but imaginary skatepark of today’s skateboarding industry, Santa Cruz Skateboards is that legendary skater that all the other kids stop to watch. This year, NHS Inc. — the Seabright-based parent company of Santa Cruz Skateboards — marks its half-century anniversary in the skateboard business. Lasting 50 years is a moment of triumph for any company. But considering the volatile nature of this particular business, it’s almost miraculous that a company could endure that long when so many others have come and gone.
Yet Santa Cruz Skateboards hasn’t just hung on. It has shaped what the industry looks like today. And it has built a brand that has spilled out beyond the world of skateboarding, becoming a touchstone in the more countercultural realms in the world of commercial art.
To celebrate its 50th anniversary, the company is bringing in the great 1990s indie band Dinosaur Jr. for a free outdoor show at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, on Saturday, Sept. 23.
You might not see too many skateboards on the beach that day, but you will no doubt notice a sea of Santa Cruz Skateboards iconography, including the omnipresent “classic dot” Santa Cruz logo with its signature font, the iconic Screaming Blue Hand, and a thousand variations and riffs on both, all from the original vision of beloved Santa Cruz artist Jim Phillips described by NHS historian and archivist Mark Widmann as “the Walt Disney of skateboard art.”
The branding’s popularity is an indication of the company’s standing in the skateboard world, characterized by one of skateboarding’s all-time greats, Tony Alva, as “first and foremost, internationally.”
Alva was part of the legendary Z-Boys, who in the 1970s innovated vertical skateboarding in the empty swimming pools of Southern California. He’s known about Santa Cruz Skateboards for essentially the company’s entire history. “I found out basically from competing against guys that were sponsored by Santa Cruz [Skateboards] back in the day, that these guys are formidable, they’ve got a different attitude towards what they’re doing, and they were serious about what they were doing.”
Hall of Fame legacy
SCS skateboards and apparel are, of course, absurdly popular and common with Santa Cruzans, as well as with visiting skateboarding fans who travel as tourists to the namesake homeland of the brand. But Santa Cruz Skateboards is more than a local phenomenon. In the world of skateboarding, SCS is a hall-of-fame company … literally.
Yes, there is a Skateboarding Hall of Fame, and it exists in Simi Valley, just west of the San Fernando Valley in Ventura County. On an electronic billboard advertising the Skateboarding Hall of Fame on the Ronald Reagan freeway is what SHoF director Todd Huber thinks of as a universal symbol of cool skateboard stuff: the Screaming Hand.
Phillips and NHS are each separately inducted members of the Hall of Fame. “In the cyclical business of skateboarding, it’s very hard to be resilient, when the chips are down and the kids aren’t skating,” said Huber, who also owns a skateboard shop nearby. “And to be able to do what they’ve done — for 50 years! — I mean, you can’t suck. You have to be rad. And they are really, really good at what they do. They have a good aura about them, and people just like them.”
Santa Cruz Skateboards — which employs about 150 people and manages its own skateboarding museum at its colorful Eastside headquarters — became one of the most famous skateboarding brands in the world, not only by producing good skateboards, but by cultivating an ever-churning market of young skaters and intuiting exactly what those skaters wanted in terms of image.
In the early days, it was enough to produce a good skateboard with cutting-edge technology, but as the inevitable ups and downs came, SCS reinvented itself through art, turning the skateboard deck into a canvas for Jim Phillips and recognizing that a great skateboard not only had to perform when you were riding it, but had to turn heads and attract attention when you weren’t. It had to be a reflection of the skater’s distinct personality.
The beginnings of NHS
The NHS story began in 1969 when three Santa Cruz surfing friends — Richard Novak, Doug Haut and Jay Shuirman — teamed up to try to make a living in the surf industry. Soon, they started a company, and called it an acronym of their last names.
“They were distributing raw materials for surfboards,” said the company’s former CEO, Bob Denike, who now serves as executive chairman of NHS. “Then, a friend from Hawaii, Jimmy Hoffman, said, ‘Do you know anyone who can make us some skateboards?’ They had never made a skateboard in their lives.”
At the time, skateboarding was largely seen as surfing’s poor cousin — it was sometimes called “sidewalk surfing” — and the technology of skateboards was shockingly primitive, at least compared to today’s boards. The decks resembled mini surfboards and were often made of solid wood, and the wheels were smaller and usually made of clay or steel, often repurposed from roller skates. NHS founded Santa Cruz Skateboards in 1973, just as the tech of skateboards was changing. In fact, it was right about the same time that the urethane wheel, the industry’s real revolutionary pivot point, was introduced. SCS innovated the new wheel further by doing away with its loose ball bearings, calling it the Road Rider.
“We put a precision bearing in a urethane wheel,” said Denike, “and it kinda turned skateboarding on its head overnight. We sold about 18 million wheels in a couple of years. It makes skateboarding smoother, softer, safer, more fun.”
Tony Alva credits Road Riders with many of his competitive successes early in his career. “They were the best, by far. It was like having a super-good set of tires on your car.”
To be able to do what they’ve done — for 50 years! — I mean, you can’t suck. You have to be rad.
— Skateboarding Hall of Fame director Todd Huber, on NHS Inc.
Skateboarding historian and photographer Bryce Kanights said that the SCS innovation of precision ball bearings was a “game changer.”
“In my mind,” said Kanights, “Santa Cruz has really always been at the forefront of technology and R&D and just improving skateboarding.”
SCS broke down the skateboard into its three component parts — the deck, the wheels, and the trucks, the board’s flexible axles — and developed distinct brands in each, Santa Cruz Skateboards, Road Rider wheels and Independent trucks. Times were good. With the new urethane wheels and new designs in fiberglass boards from SCS and other companies, skateboarding exploded in popularity.
But anyone who lived through the period can tell you that the 1970s were particularly prone to pop-culture fads — remember the Pet Rock? And, as 1980 loomed, skateboarding was increasingly looked at as a fad, and the industry experienced a dramatic downturn. Skateboarding’s only magazine went belly-up. Many companies went bankrupt. Revenue at NHS went from about $20 million in 1979 to about $400,000 soon after. On top of that, tragedy struck the company when co-founder, and source of much of the company’s marketing creativity, Jay Shuirman died of leukemia. (Haut had already left the company to establish his successful namesake surfboard company, and Novak guided the company through the decades since and, as the company’s owner, still maintains an office at the company’s headquarters.)
The graphic arts revolution
Eventually, skateboarding began the climb back to relevance, and SCS played a role in that climb by helping to innovate skateboarding graphics. Phillips, steeped in the exaggerated underground-comic style that grew out of the counterculture 1960s, was the company’s art director at the time. He began experimenting with developing compelling graphics and logos, and applying those images on SCS products in new ways. The result was a kind of graphics revolution in the skateboarding game, and especially at SCS, where Phillips demonstrated an innate grasp of what pre-teen and young teen boys thought was cool.
Mark Widmann, the in-house archivist and historian at NHS, said he was 12 in the mid-1980s, riding BMX bikes, when the Phillips aesthetic at Santa Cruz Skateboards caught his eye: “The graphics and colors were what really got me into it. I mean, it was insane, ‘I gotta have one of those. It’s so cool.’ You wanted it so bad. Your mom hates it and you love it.”
Quick Take
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Fueled by stronger brand identities and better products, skateboarding took off again in the ’80s. But it didn’t last. Just as it did a decade earlier, the industry slumped dramatically when the generation who bought skateboards as kids moved on to other interests, and NHS was feeling the pinch.
“We were doing whatever we could to keep the doors open,” said Bob Denike, who estimated he’s experienced four boom-and-bust cycles in the industry since he joined NHS in 1987.
In more recent decades, the company has found a solid footing in its popular apparel line, with Santa Cruz Skateboards-branded logos selling on clothing and other goods in 86 countries around the world. In his late 70s, Jim Phillips is long retired and is, in fact, the subject of a new documentary on his life and art expected to be released in 2024.
Because it is marketing to ever-renewing generations of kids in an activity that still enjoys a bit of rebellious street cachet, the SCS brand has broad latitude to push the edges of the kind of art it can put on its boards. And the Phillips style embraces a distinct look you might call Cartoon Grotesque. How else would you explain a screaming, dismembered, electric-blue hand with a mouth in its palm? “It is one of the most open and freeing brands to work for,” said the company’s current art director, Tyler Emanuel. “It’s not all just fun and colorful. We can do stuff that’s a little darker.”
All of it is filtered through an aesthetic still informed by what Phillips created 40 years ago, said Emanuel. “‘What Would Jim Do?’ That phrase actually comes up a lot.”
Tony Alva tends to view Santa Cruz Skateboards through the eyes of a competitive skateboarder and through the teams that NHS has sponsored over the years. “They just always had an eye for talent. And they’re all really good guys,” he said. “I was not officially one of their team guys. But you know what? Deep down in my heart, when I go to Santa Cruz, and especially when I see Rich Novak or Bob Denike or any of the guys that run NHS, I feel like I’m part of their family. I really do.”
Denike said that the company is looking to survive long past its 50th year, largely by concentrating on bringing younger people into the company. He said that NHS began setting up a succession plan a decade ago with a new executive team to move the company forward beyond Novak and himself. “It might sound a little fairy-tale or naive,” he said, “but [this company] could be here 50 years from now.”
If the past is any indication, those next 50 years are likely to have as many dips and turns as a skateboard park. Surviving the downturns, said Denike, has given the company a perspective crucial to its survival: “Our whole idea is just to hang on, because we’re always confident it’s going to come back.”
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