Dogtown

Dogtown is the brand that turned Venice iconography into wood. The Dogtown Cross, drawn by C.R. Stecyk III, first appeared in the pages of Skateboarder Magazine in 1976, and soon after Wes Humpston and Jim Muir started applying it to boards with their own art and paint jobs. That gesture became a company that still makes decks out of Los Angeles today, under a motto that says it all: “Our only crime is being original.”

History

Jim “Red Dog” Muir came out of the Zephyr Competition Team — the Z-Boys of the shop Jeff Ho, Skip Engblom and Craig Stecyk ran in Santa Monica. Dogtown grew out of that scene and celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2016. In Thrasher’s issue archive, Dog Town ads run continuously from the February 1984 issue onward, and through the decade they carry the names of Aaron “Fingers” Murray, Eric Dressen, Scott Oster, Micke Alba and Ben Schroeder, alongside series like “Born Again” (November 1985) and Stonefish (1986). In the ’90s the brand moved its warehouse to San Francisco.

In 1981 Mike Muir moved in with his brother Jim in Venice and shortly afterwards formed Suicidal Tendencies. The two brands went their separate ways until 2014, when the Muir brothers brought them back together under the Dogtown X Suicidal umbrella — which is how the company runs today: a family business, skater owned and operated.

The team

The current roster is short and clear: Shota Kubo and Mickey O’Keefe, both in Los Angeles, and Gabriel Cortez, out of San Jose. All three have footage published on Thrasher — Kubo’s “Stung” in 2022, O’Keefe’s Dogtown part in 2024 — and Derek “Ghost” Burdette came through before them.

The decks

Dogtown’s catalog is essentially old-school wood: wide shapes, ’70s and ’80s noses and tails, and reissues of the historic graphics — Eric Dressen Hands, Aaron Murray Fingers, Scott Oster, Stonefish, Born Again, JJ Rogers, Wade Speyer, Bryce Kanights Flower Guy — next to the Suicidal graphics (Punk Skull, Possessed to Skate). Widths reaching Europe run from 8.0 up to 9.75. The company also makes K-9 wheels and has done collabs with Diamond Supply Co. (2017) and Vans.

Who it’s for

Dogtown suits anyone after pools, bowls, transition or cruising on a wide board with real history behind the graphic. If you want a narrow popsicle for modern technical street, this isn’t it: most of the catalog is reissued old-school shapes, and that’s worth knowing before you buy. Line it up against the rest in the deck catalog.