Real

Real Skateboards started in 1991, when Tommy Guerrero and Jim Thiebaud left Powell-Peralta and set up their own company in San Francisco, backed by Fausto Vitello and Eric Swenson, the founders of Thrasher and Independent. The operation began as four people sitting on the floor Xeroxing their own graphics and pressing about 300 boards per design. It’s now the oldest board brand in the Deluxe (DLX) family and one of the most respected deck brands anywhere.

History

Guerrero co-founded Real partly because, after six years on Powell-Peralta, he sensed he was about to get replaced by the next big thing, so he built his own brand before it could happen. Telling detail: despite founding the company, he and Thiebaud describe themselves as small shareholders in Deluxe rather than owners.

The most important graphic in Real’s history came almost immediately. Jim Thiebaud’s “Hanging Klansman” (1990, redrawn in 1993), drawn by Natas Kaupas and refined by Kevin Ancell, was born after Thiebaud and a racially diverse demo crew were confronted by hostile locals in the Deep South. It was one of skateboarding’s first openly political board graphics, and the deck now sits in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

Real also built one of the deepest video legacies in skateboarding, a run of full-length team videos that cemented the brand for good through the late ’90s and 2000s. In 2002, Mark Gonzales left to start Krooked under the same Deluxe umbrella. 2011 kicked off a relaunch-caliber team era: Ishod Wair turned pro that year and won Thrasher’s Skater of the Year in 2013. In 2025 Real dropped its first full team video in years, premiered through a US skateshop tour and on the Thrasher site.

Today’s team

Three riders on the current roster are Thrasher SOTY winners: Ishod Wair, Kyle Walker and Mason Silva. Add Momiji Nishiya, Olympic street gold medalist, one of the brand’s headline recent signings. The rest of the team runs Zion Wright, Chima Ferguson, Harry Lintell, Hermann Stene, Hayley Wilson, Dan Mancina, Patrick Praman and Toby Ryan, with Jimmy Wilkins and Nicole Hause covering the transition side and Dennis Busenitz as the brand’s long-time pro. Historic alumni include Mark Gonzales, Keith Hufnagel, Natas Kaupas and Max Schaaf.

R1 construction and collector boards

Decks are pressed through Deluxe’s DLX woodshop program, where Real markets its proprietary R1 construction, built for stronger boards with pop that lasts longer. Beyond the classic Oval logo boards, Real carries serious weight with collectors: artist series with Kaws, Pushead and Shepard Fairey, the “Re-Vision” series where Gonz reworks his vintage Vision-era graphics, and the limited Actions REALized benefit decks supporting causes like the Ben Raemers Foundation, the Harold Hunter Foundation and adaptive skateboarding programs.

If you want a street deck from a core brand with genuine history behind it, Real is a hard pick to get wrong. You can see how it stacks up against other brands in the deck section.