Tony Alva and the First Skater-Owned Skate Company

Turning Down the Big Companies: 1977

At nineteen, Tony Alva had already done enough to skate for whichever company he wanted. Instead, in 1977, he walked away from the sport's established brands and started his own. Alva Skates became, in the words of the Los Angeles Times' 2007 profile of Alva, the vehicle that made him "the first skater to own and run his own brand, and one of the pioneers in what would become today's multibillion-dollar skate industry." The Skateboarding Hall of Fame, which later inducted Alva into its first class, credits the same year with a cluster of firsts: Alva was voted Skateboarder of the Year in Skateboarder Magazine's reader poll, and Guinness World Records recognized his barrel jump as the highest on record.

The company wasn't a name license bolted onto someone else's factory. It was, in its own right, the first company run and owned by a skateboarder, and one of the earliest to build decks from layered Canadian maple plywood — a construction choice that shaped how skateboard decks were built across the industry in the years that followed.

From Zephyr to Independent

Alva's path to that decision started years earlier, on the streets and in the empty pools around Santa Monica and Venice. He grew up surfing and skating the stretch of coastline locals called Dogtown, and by the mid-1970s was riding for the Zephyr Competition Skateboarding Team — the Z-Boys — alongside Jay Adams and Stacy Peralta, out of Jeff Ho Surfboards and Zephyr Productions, the Venice surf shop that served as the team's home base. According to skate-history site Skateboard Stash, the team's April 1975 appearance at the Del Mar Nationals reset expectations for what competitive skateboarding could look like: while the rest of the field skated the upright, technical freestyle routines standard at the time, the Z-Boys skated low and aggressive, carrying their surfing instincts directly onto the contest course.

The 1976 Southern California drought, which forced homeowners to drain their backyard pools, gave Alva and the rest of the Z-Boys a new canvas. Skateboard Stash's account describes Alva treating the empty pools "like a wave," carving the walls and pushing higher until, by 1977, he was among the first skaters documented landing a frontside aerial — riding above the pool's coping rather than staying inside it. That progression from pool-carving to going airborne is one of the developments most closely tied to the emergence of vertical skateboarding as its own discipline, and it's the résumé Alva brought with him when he decided, that same year, to bet on his own name instead of someone else's.

Building Alva Skates From the Ground Up

The 77 Deck and the Alva Flame

The first product out of the new company was a deck collectors still recognize on sight. Alva Skates' own account of its founding describes the 1977 board — nicknamed the "Alva Flame" — as featuring Alva's logo die-cut into glittering griptape over a gradient of yellow-and-orange paint, a design the company still calls "the quintessential 70s deck and one of the most recognizable and iconic skateboards ever produced." Beyond the graphics, Alva's decks were built from layered Canadian maple plywood, a construction method his company was among the first to apply to skateboards, well before it became close to an industry standard.

Alva also used the new company as a platform to develop his own hardware rather than just license his name to someone else's. He's credited with pioneering Rip Grip, a material that could be applied to the underside of a deck to make it easier for a rider to keep footing — a functional product line running alongside the decks themselves.

Surviving 1980 and Building the Alva Posse

Owning the company outright also meant owning its risk. Skateboarding's commercial boom of the late 1970s collapsed hard in 1980, and Skateboard Stash's account of the period is blunt about the toll: "most companies folded and skateboarding went underground." Alva Skates did not fold. Skateboard Stash frames the survival as a deliberate choice — Alva kept the company running "when the commercial logic said not to" — one of the details separating Alva Skates from other brands of the same era whose names didn't make it to the other side of the crash.

The company that emerged from the downturn built its own team culture around Alva himself. By the Skateboarding Hall of Fame's account, Alva assembled what became known as the "Alva Posse" during the 1980s, sponsoring a roster that included Christian Hosoi, Ray Barbee, Mark Gonzales, Dave Duncan, Eddie Reategui, Chris Cook, John Thomas, Jeff Hartsel, Craig Johnson, John Gibson, Bill Danforth, Fred Smith III, and Jim Murphy — several of whom went on to shape skateboarding well past the label they rode for as teenagers.

Hall of Fame Recognition and the Collector Market Today

Alva's relationship with Vans ran alongside the growth of his own company rather than against it. He began working with Vans in 1974, helping shape what became the brand's original skate shoe, and the relationship outlasted decades of skate-industry turnover — Alva signed a three-year deal with Vans that produced his own pro-model high-top, released in 2006. That same period brought a wider set of individual honors: Tony Hawk presented Alva with the X Games Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999, and TransWorld Skateboarding gave him its Legend Award the following year, per the Skateboarding Hall of Fame's biography. In 2009, Alva was inducted into the Skateboarding Hall of Fame's first induction class.

The Dogtown story that put Alva there was also told twice on screen, and both tellings fed the collector market's interest in his early product. Stacy Peralta's 2001 documentary on the Z-Boys era, which Skateboard Stash notes won both the Audience Award and the Director's Award at Sundance, introduced the founding history to a generation of skaters who hadn't lived through it. The 2005 dramatization that followed cast Victor Rasuk as Alva, according to the same account — a fictionalized retelling, but one that kept the Alva Skates origin story circulating well past the skate press that had covered it in 1977 and 1978.

The retail side of Alva Skates expanded through this same period. In December 2005, Alva opened two stores in Southern California — one in Oceanside, near San Diego, and one on Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles — and the Los Angeles Times' 2007 profile found him still working behind the counter at either location between surf sessions. The company marked its 45th anniversary in July 2022 with limited-edition reissues of the original 1977 deck alongside collaborations with Vans, Independent Trucks, and Road Rider Wheels, according to Alva Skates' own announcement of the anniversary.

For collectors, that founding history is exactly what makes original late-1970s Alva product worth tracking down. Skateboard Stash's assessment of the early boards is direct: "Boards from those early Alva runs don't come up often, and when they do, they go fast, because people understand what they're holding." Founded the same year Alva was named Skateboarder of the Year and set a Guinness barrel-jump record, Alva Skates remains one of the few skateboard companies from the sport's first commercial wave still operating under its founder's name — a continuity rarer in skate-brand history than the number of surviving 1977 decks would suggest.

References

• Tony Alva — Skateboarding Hall of Fame and Museum
• Godfather of skate — Los Angeles Times, Rose Apodaca, September 2007
• Tony Alva: Godfather of Skateboarding — Skateboard Stash