Frog

Frog Skateboards is what happens when a joke between friends turns into an actual company. Chris “Mango” Milic started it with Jesse Alba, and its home-video look — low-def, 4:3, filmed on whatever was lying around — has shaped half a decade of American street skating. The brand now runs out of Los Angeles, where it has its own store at 1952 Riverside Dr., open Thursday to Sunday.

History

The origin is literally one night of laughing. Milic told Quartersnacks in 2023 that he, Jesse Alba, Diego Meek and Aaron Gore got so hyped on how stupid the name “Frog” sounded that three or four months later they quit Welcome. They assumed 917, Alex Olson’s company, would pick them up; when it became clear there wasn’t room for both, someone told them to just do Frog for real. Milic ran it out of a Chinatown apartment the size of a queen bed, starting with shirts and, once he could afford them, a first run of around 200 boards. He shipped every order himself for three and a half to four years, first from New York — with a tiny Frog office near McCarren Park — until he could move into a warehouse. Thrasher premiered Bossa Nova in February 2019, and that same year the brand relocated to L.A. The founding year depends on who you ask: Monster Children wrote in 2021 that Milic started Frog in 2017, but that same interview has him saying “we just hit five years of Frog”, and Quartersnacks put it at seven years in March 2023 — both of which point to 2016.

The team

The pro team is short and instantly recognisable: Chris Milic, Jesse Alba, Nick Michel, Pat Gallaher, Frankie Decker and Dustin Henry, all with their own models in the catalogue. Pat Gallaher turned pro in July 2018, and Nick Michel in September 2021, ambushed with his first pro board at a surprise party in a Los Angeles bar. The brand has also pulled in plenty of outsiders: the 2019 Nike SB collaboration meant ten days in Atlanta with Antonio Durao, Nolan Benfield and Daniel Kim, and in 2022 Nick Michel and Evan Wasser carried the joint Thunder Trucks edit, filmed by Milic himself and Daniel Dent.

The decks

Frog decks ship with a sheet of Jessup griptape included, which almost nobody else does. The regular widths run from 8.0” to 8.5”, at 31.98” long with a 14.25” wheelbase on the smaller sizes and 32.35” with a 14.5” wheelbase on the 8.5”. The graphics are half the product: hand-drawn artwork, odd lettering and in-jokes that change every season. On the collaboration side, Frog has worked with Nike SB (2019), New York label Noah (2020, including a Hawaii trip), Vans — in 2021, alongside a Patrick O’Dell-directed mini-doc on the brand and Nick Michel — and Thunder Trucks (2022).

Who it’s for

Frog suits anyone who wants a deck with a personality and doesn’t mind the company doing its own thing: small runs, graphics that look like nothing else, and videos that feel filmed on whatever camera was around. If you want published construction specs, pop guarantees or the widest catalogue on the market, more conventional brands exist. To see how it sits next to everything else, compare it in the deck catalogue.