Welcome

Welcome is the brand that made weird shapes normal. Its whole identity is hand-drawn art with a supernatural, occult-leaning bent, printed on decks in shapes you hadn’t seen anywhere else — and that look started as a workaround by a founder who couldn’t afford anything else.

History

Jason Celaya started Welcome in 2010 out of his house in Southern California with $2,000 on a credit card and zero industry connections. He’d never turned pro, he was working a subsea cable job, and his only formal art training was a high-school drawing class. He drew the first graphics himself with a Sharpie on his floor because he couldn’t afford an artist, and that constraint became the identity. The growth was slow and stubborn: back in 2016 the brand was pressing only 150-200 boards a month, and it was still outselling traditional brands in some states through core shops. The Fetish and Séance era through the late 2010s built the team and the catalog into what they are today, and the brand has kept a steady run of full-length videos going ever since.

The shapes are the whole point

What broke Welcome out wasn’t standard popsicles, it was the opposite. By 2016 the brand offered around 38 proprietary shapes, and the key detail is they weren’t retro for novelty’s sake. Celaya obsessed over wheelbase and drilling placement so the things actually skated. Named models like the Bunyip and Big Bunyip, or the Nibiru and Yung Nibiru, still sell today on the strength of their outline. Jenkem summed the aesthetic up as “messy griptape, loose trucks, rails, and weird shapes,” which is about as accurate as a one-liner gets.

The team

Nora Vasconcellos is the name most people know. She turned pro for Welcome and adidas in 2017, was the first female skater adidas ever signed, and she’s still on the team (she’s in 2026’s “Sugar High”). The current roster fills out with Ryan Townley, Jakob Beaver, Nick Garcia (welcomed in 2024), Ryan Reyes, Nathan Ko and Laird Brunson. On the historic side, vert legend Chris Miller appeared in “Séance” (2019), and Ryan Lay was a longtime fixture through “Fetish,” “Séance” and “American Goure Story.” The core of the Fetish/Séance era ran through Aaron Goure, Will Blaty, Daniel Vargas, Jason Salillas and Jordan Sanchez, with Evan Mock showing up in “Séance” too. One detail that explains the brand: several of the friends Celaya originally skated with became the actual pro team (Nora, Daniel Vargas) or staff, like creative director Shane Cox.

Boards and collabs

Industry woodshop directories peg the decks as pressed by PS Stix, Paul “Professor” Schmitt’s shop, though the brand doesn’t say so itself. Celaya did tell Jenkem they “spend more time and energy on our boards than any other known brand.” The part few skate companies can match is the collab range: adidas Skateboarding, Nine Inch Nails, Slipknot, Bauhaus, Britney Spears, Elden Ring and Talking Heads. The same company put out both a Slipknot deck and a Britney Spears deck, which tells you everything. If you want an off-shape to skate or a limited collector edition, line it up against the rest in the deck catalog.