Alien Workshop

Alien Workshop is the brand that decided a skate company didn’t have to be Californian. Chris Carter, Mike Hill and Neil Blender started it in October 1990 in Dayton, Ohio, in a unit with plywood walls and a plastic-sheeting ceiling. Everybody told them they were crazy. Thirty-five years later, half the industry is still copying — knowingly or not — what was built there.

History

Carter and Hill worked at G&S in California and were homesick. They decided to go back to Ohio and do it themselves, and talked it through with Blender and Rob Dyrdek at a Denny’s halfway between Orange County and North County. The name came from a conspiracy-obsessed friend of Carter’s who told him the Stealth bomber had been built in “alien workshops” using alien technology; the irony being that Dayton is home to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Hill cut the logo out of amberlith, drawing on the Denny’s and Marathon gas station signs. The first ad showed no skating at all: it was a photo of a papier-mâché doll Blender had made.

Memory Screen came out in August 1991, edited in two weeks on a rented deck. Then came Timecode (1997) and Photosynthesis (2000), which Quartersnacks still calls “the finest skateboard production of the 2000s.” That era produced DNA Distribution, the parent house that also ran Habitat (Joe Castrucci’s brand) and Reflex bearings, and which they called the Sovereign Sect. Mind Field (2009), directed by Greg Hunt, closes the big chapter.

Then the corporate mess started: Burton bought DNA in 2008, Rob Dyrdek took control in 2012 and in 2013 it passed to Pacific Vector. In December 2013 Jason Dill and Anthony Van Engelen left to found Fucking Awesome with Kevin Terpening; Grant Taylor left too, and in May 2014 the whole thing shut down. In 2015 Tum Yeto rescued the brand and Bunker Down came out; in June 2016 Dyrdek handed 90% to Hill and 10% to Carter, Reflex to Carter and Habitat to Castrucci, and the Workshop went home to Ohio. Hill has run it since from an abandoned nuclear bunker in the Mound complex, a former Atomic Energy Commission site now regulated by the EPA, with a single employee.

The family tree is enormous: Habitat and Fucking Awesome come straight out of it; Kalis left in 2009 to ride for DGK; and Quasi was founded in 2015 by Chad Bowers, Alien Workshop’s team manager, with Gilbert Crockett, Tyler Bledsoe and Jake Johnson — also out of Dayton.

The team

The current team is Yaje Popson and Joey Guevara (pro since February 2017), Joey O’Brien, Sammy Montano, Kevin Liedtke and Johnny Purcell. Past riders include Rob Dyrdek, Duane Pitre, Bo Turner, Josh Kalis, Fred Gall, Jason Dill, Anthony Van Engelen, Anthony Pappalardo, Brian Wenning, Heath Kirchart, Arto Saari, Grant Taylor, Dylan Rieder, Omar Salazar, Tyler Bledsoe, Jake Johnson and Gilbert Crockett.

The boards

7-ply maple in widths from 7.75” to 8.625”, with pro models and house graphics that count as heritage by now: the OG Logo, Abduction, Believe, Spectrum, Scanners and Owliad. Hill does the art — he set the tone with papier-mâché dioramas and collage — while Don Pendleton supplied the other half of the 90s visual identity. They also make wheels (Clone, Triad), grip and apparel, and in 2016 released a Supreme collaboration drawn by Hill.

Who it’s for

If you treat a deck as a graphic object and want a brand with real history that’s owned by its founders, Alien Workshop is one of very few that delivers both. If you want the most visible street team of the moment or guaranteed stock in every shop, it isn’t: this is a small Ohio operation. Line it up against the rest in the deck catalog.