Ricta

Ricta makes wheels, and only wheels — it is not a deck brand. It comes out of Santa Cruz, California, and belongs to NHS, Inc., the same house as Santa Cruz Skateboards, Independent, Creature and OJ Wheels. The name that made it known everywhere is Clouds, its soft wheel family, which has spent years as one of the default answers for skating bad tarmac and for filming.

History

The oldest ads the brand keeps in its own archive are from March 2000, and as late as 2002 its website was still a holding page carrying the line “Ricta Wheel Dynamics”. From there the brand grew inside NHS: the official site in 2007 already carried the ”© 2007 NHS, Inc” copyright. In 2017 the British magazine Sidewalk described it as a mainstay of the wheel market for well over a decade, manufactured and distributed through NHS, with a deliberately broad range of sizes and compounds.

The team

The current team, according to the brand’s own site, is Tom Asta, Maurio McCoy, Jereme Knibbs, Stevie Culhane, Sean Parker, Brian Reid, Alexander Risvad, Daniel Ledermann, Francisco Javier Rios and Will Mazzari. Asta joined in February 2014, announced by Thrasher with a street clip.

It is worth looking back, because Ricta’s roster has always been deeper than people remember: in 2007 the site listed Tom Penny, Geoff Rowley, Arto Saari, Bob Burnquist, Rune Glifberg, Mark Appleyard, Kareem Campbell, Jerry Hsu, Ed Templeton, Cairo Foster, Ronnie Creager and Javier Sarmiento; by 2016 it still had Nyjah Huston, Greg Lutzka, Curren Caples, Louie Lopez, Brandon Westgate, David Gonzalez, Jimmy Carlin and Daryl Angel.

The wheels

The catalogue splits into four families:

• Clouds: the soft range, 52 to 60 mm in three durometers — 78a, 86a and 92a. The brand pitches them as the most diverse soft wheel family in skateboarding, built for wrecked street and transition: crusty driveways, old cement ditches and rough car parks.
• Naturals: the house’s balanced formula, aimed at speed and a smooth roll.
• Cores: cored wheels, to cut rolling resistance and hold their shape on landings.
• Speedrings: a core design that keeps urethane around the bearing bore, “less rattle, more roll”, so you get the feel of an uncored wheel with the benefits of a cored one.

In 2022, in a video posted by Thrasher, Maurio McCoy, Weston Sparks and Josh White ran the full Clouds line over crusty terrain. And when Sidewalk reviewed the 56 mm 78a Crystal Clouds, it singled out the inner nylon core and the reason they became a filmer staple: they roll smoothly enough to stabilise follow filming, and stay small enough to fit a regular deck without huge risers.

Who it’s for

If you skate the city, film, or your local ground is all cracks, the 78a Clouds are the direct answer; the 92a lets you do tricks without giving up sliding entirely, and the 86a sits in between. For pure street and smooth park, the other families — Naturals, Cores and Speedrings — are the way. Who it’s not for: if you want a cult street brand or the hardest urethane on the market, Ricta doesn’t play that game. And remember that above 55 mm you need mid or high trucks, or risers.

The full breakdown of durometers and diameters is in the skateboard wheels guide.