The longboard industry has many players trying to grab a piece of the golden stoke but not many do it as well as Loaded Longboards out of Culver City, California. We talked with Kyle Chin, on how loaded continues to dominate.
shipping team in a cut throat game of jenga
Tell us about your personal background with longboarding and how Loaded Boards came to life.
Most of us are really big on surfing and snowboarding; the early days of Loaded were spent chopping up old snowboards and converting them into longboards.
Loaded continues to be an industry leader when it comes to longboards – what do you feel separates you guys from other brands?
As a company, we are focused on developing products that we are excited to ride. Our design motivation is driven by our own passions, and I think it’s fantastic that the same can be said for many other brands out there. Beyond product design, we continue our commitment to helping grow the longboarding community (both locally and globally) in positive and exciting directions.
Tell us about how Orangatang Wheels became so closely involved with Loaded.
We created Orangatang Wheels as a sister company in 2008, giving us an opportunity to explore wheel design. Loaded and Orangatang are essentially two companies that share the same roof, and all our in-house employees work for both companies.
shipping team hard at work
Anything new and exciting that you guys are working on that you would like to share with our readers?
We just released our new flange head hardware and are very happy to say that it is only a small peek at a pretty hefty queue of new products that we will be launching shortly. Keep your eyes peeled!
The longboard industry has been growing like crazy, where do you see it headed from here?
We’re stoked to see so many people excited to get into longboarding, whether through the industry or just getting on a board and riding. There are a lot of great new ideas emerging in product design, and these advances in technology are really pushing us as an industry to keep on our toes and continue to bring new ideas to the table. As more high performance products are created, they inspire and enable skaters to push the level of riding, which in turn inspires the development of new ideas back on the design side. It’s an ongoing, iterative process that we’re excited to be part of.