Orbs

Orbs doesn’t make decks: it makes wheels, and nothing else. It’s a small Californian brand with a short catalogue, a ghosts-and-apparitions theme, and a team that overlaps almost entirely with Welcome Skateboards. If you came here looking for a board, there isn’t one.

History

The brand was already running in early 2017: the first solid dated trace we could find is “Ghost Stories Chapter 1”, Ryan Connors’ part that Thrasher posted that April, introducing it as a video part “from Orbs wheels”. The exact founding year isn’t documented anywhere, and we’d rather not invent one.

The Welcome connection is worth stating precisely, because it gets repeated a lot and sourced rarely. Neither website mentions the other. What can be checked: the entire wheels section of Welcome’s own store is Orbs — the Ghost Lites model, listed with “Orbs” as the product brand — and half of the Orbs team (Ryan Lay, Will Blaty, Jason Salillas, Aaron Goure) rides for Welcome. Goure also directs and edits the Orbs videos. That the two share a house is obvious; that Orbs is owned by Welcome, we could not confirm from any source.

The team

The official site lists six names: Ryan Lay, Aaron Goure, Shawn Hale, Will Blaty, Jason Salillas and Zach Taverrite. Corey Duffel joined in January 2021 after a lifetime on Pig, and that summer’s video “Scorched Orbs” — shot in the spillways and streets of Las Vegas, directed by Goure — added Jon Pierce, Travis Harrison, Mitch Haight, Kevin Pierre-Louis and Laird Brunson.

The wheels

The range is deliberately short and built around the house formula, Plasmathane, which Thrasher showed off in February 2018 with a Shawn Hale test.

• Specters: full conical shape, 99A, uncored. The brand sells them as the more slidable option, especially in the street.
• Apparitions: same formula and durometer, but a full round shape. More contact patch, more grip.
• Ghost Lites: the cored version, 102A, conical side-cut shape, 15% lighter than a comparable uncored wheel. Made in the USA.

Diameters run 52 to 56 mm, the classic street range. All of them carry the same printed promise: “no flatspots, guaranteed”.

Who it’s for

If you skate street on decent ground and want a hard, slidable wheel for ledges and manuals, Orbs’ 99A does exactly that. The cored 102A is for anyone chasing speed and less weight in the bigger sizes. It isn’t for skating rough ground on soft 78As — they don’t make them — and it isn’t for anyone who needs to find a replacement set in any shop: this is a small brand, and right now its own store is sold out across the whole catalogue.

If you’re stuck between durometers and diameters, the skateboard wheels guide breaks it down.