Madness

Madness isn’t a street brand and never tried to be. It launched in 2018 under Dwindle Distribution, put together by Bill Weiss, a longtime vert and pool pro, with Bod Boyle credited on the brand and team side. From day one the focus was transition: pool, vert, bowl and big terrain, wide shapes and decks built for people who spend their time on concrete rather than ledges. The unofficial pitch, “big toys for big boys,” tells you most of what you need to know.

The boards

Madness leans hard into wide pool and bowl shapes with details that aren’t decoration: wheel wells matched to the concave depth, textured and embossed graphics, swirl inlays worked into the wood. The reference construction is Resin-7 (R7) on the shaped bowl and vert models. What made the brand instantly recognizable, though, is the lenticular and holographic graphics, with the “Clown Smear” lenticular shaped deck (9.125”) as the signature piece. It’s a collectible-deck brand as much as a skate-it-hard brand, and often both at once.

History

Madness arrived with a bang in 2018 and leaned on video from the start, putting out a couple of full-length transition videos in its first two seasons that put the team’s pool-and-vert firepower on display. The hard turn came in January 2023: Dwindle’s private-equity ownership fired Bill Weiss after roughly twenty years with the company, and the team walked out in solidarity (Kreiner, Perelson, Trey Wood, Jeff Rasp among them). It was a near-total exit, unusual in this industry. Weiss then co-founded Sidewalk Distribution (with Louie Barletta, Bod Boyle and Steve Douglas) and started Opera Skateboards, where most of the team followed him. In February 2026, according to a single source (shredder.news), Weiss reportedly reacquired the Madness name, now run under Sidewalk. It’s a recent development and not yet widely corroborated.

The team, then and now

The 2018-2023 roster was one of the strongest lineups in modern transition skating: Clay Kreiner, Alex Perelson, Sam Beckett, Jack Fardell, Trey Wood and Jeff Rasp, with Chris Russell, Toby Ryan and Mark Scott showing up in the debut video. By all accounts they were a tight crew that lived, skated and filmed together. One caveat: the current (2026) team after the reacquisition isn’t confirmed by any reliable source, so the names above are the historic squad, not necessarily today’s.

Who it’s for

If you skate ramp, bowl or pool and want a wide shape with a graphic that grabs attention, Madness fits. Line it up against the rest in the deck catalog.