We are a longboard family. Gritz Longboards was born from the 80’s pintail longboard culture. When I moved from a rural town in TX to Northern CA in the 80’s I was amazed at the skateboard culture. Living close to Santa Cruz Boardwalk I saw my first pintail longboards, ridden by youngsters, stoners, and bikini girls alike. It was its own genre of skateboard cruising/carving. Fast forward 15 years later after moving back to TX I found longboarding was thriving in the Houston suburbs. Not just pintails, but drop decks, kick tails, everything. Getting a longboard became a right of passage for kids wanting bicycles, rollerblades, and scooters. My Artist Mom Sunny was an art teacher for decades and tho retired, she still painted art projects daily to teach privately or as gifts to friends and family. I asked her to paint a 40-inch pintail board for me, and the partnership took off from there. It’s a joy to plan, discuss and build these together. We started to get requests from friends to paint longboard decks only as stand-alone art pieces. We also started getting requests to build boards with specific art and colors of logos, trucks, and wheels. Our artboard concept got some wheels. I ride some of my own personal art boards, clean the wheels and hang them back up on my office wall. Gritz Longboards is named after my youngest daughter; ‘Grits’ was her nickname when she was a little girl – she loved her commercial pintail but was the driving motivation behind our artboards, and one of our first builds was a beach scene that is still on her wall. My oldest daughter Skye would visit from Hawaii and wanted to take us longboarding every day – so we started building our own custom inventory of different longboards for us all to ride and test. We want to create something beautiful to be ridden or enjoyed as art on a wall, in an office, in a dorm, in a bar. All art on the bottom of the deck is original and will never be duplicated. We have interest from other artists and hope to collarborate in the future. Artist Mom Sunny will sometimes take special requests, but we have an inventory of longboards ready to ship. We can also update and refurb old longboards, they are still very valuable and we can make them beautiful again.
