Hoddle

Hoddle comes from Melbourne — Naarm — and the name comes from the city plan itself: the grid surveyor Robert Hoddle laid out there. The brand started in 2016 under Keegan Walker and Dale Van Lersel, and before there were any boards it was “Hoddle Grid,” a zine-and-stickers side project that eventually turned into a real company. A decade on, it’s one of the brands that best explains the Australian scene: heavy on street, heavy on art, no marketing.

History

Before there was a single deck, Keegan was already orbiting PassPort. In 2015 he tagged along on the first PassPort trip to Tokyo, having only just started his own board brand. The first promo dropped in April 2016, and Lost in the Grid followed in December 2017, introducing Jack Kirk. Keegan died in 2019 and the project nearly ended there: as designer Gabriel Cole told to Be Magazine, a small group of collaborators talked it through with the Walker family and with PassPort’s Trent Evans and decided to keep it going. Hoddle has been PassPort’s sister brand ever since.

2021 brought Heavy Mayo, eighteen minutes filmed by Jonathan “Fiddy” Fitzgerald that Jenkem called “top shelf,” singling out the camera work as much as the tricks. In 2022 Simon Zuzic and Digby Luxton turned pro. Still in the Grid landed in 2024, and in May 2025 UK magazine Vague ran the team’s Tokyo trip in issue 44 — the trip Keegan had always wanted to make. In December 2025 they marked ten years with an art and archive show in Melbourne, and in 2026 they filmed in New Caledonia as part of a joint Pass~Port, Vans, Hoddle and Build Up project.

The team

Simon Zuzic, Caeylen Fenelon-Norris, Dean Johnston, Jack Kirk, Raphael Langslow, Jimmy Roche, Digby Luxton, Shaun Paul, Noah Smith and Reef Condon. Shaun Paul premiered his part on Jenkem in 2021, and Langslow is the most recent to get a pro model.

The decks

Few products, and very specific ones. Widths run only from 8.0” to 8.5” (8.0 × 31.6 with a 13.97 wheelbase; 8.25 and 8.375 × 31.8 with 14.17; 8.5 × 32.2 with 14.37) — no oversized shapes, no cruisers. Some models come with wheel wells, and the official store ships them with Jessup grip. What sets them apart is the artwork: every deck is a collaboration with an artist. Nadia Hernandez did the original designs, and Clare Wigney, Julian Hocking, Mathew Ware and Gab Cole have all contributed since; Keegan Walker’s own drawings still get reissued. They’ve also made a deck with the Gertrude Contemporary gallery (2025) and ran a full day of events at the MPavilion with the National Gallery of Victoria in 2022.

Who it’s for

For anyone who wants a normal street deck with a graphic identity that looks like nothing else. If you’re after a 9” for transition or a cruiser, look elsewhere: Hoddle stops at 8.5”. If you’re unsure about width, start with the deck size guide, then compare in the deck catalog.