Jay Shuirman died in 1979 of leukemia, meaning he didn't get to see the brand flourish and grow and become the multinational conglomerate that it is today. Independent Truck was a huge hit within the skateboarding community.Īs a result, NHS and Santa Cruz had built a significant market share of decks, wheels, and trucks.
In 1978, the alliance between NHS and Ermico Enterprises led to the creation of "The Independent," an innovative truck model initially available in 88mm and 109mm. The company kept innovating and created graphite-loaded slalom boards and one of the first five-ply board models. NHS made so much money off their newest product that they invested a lot of that money into the brand, making Santa Cruz a huge and prominent brand in skateboarding. One year later, the firm sold six million Road Riders. Road Rider Wheels were so popular that when they came out that by the end of 1975, they sold over a million sets worldwide. "With Quality Products heading up production and NHS handling the marketing and sales, the Road Rider precision skateboard wheel was born." Holding a sealed precision bearing in his hand, Tony wondered if there was an application for skateboard wheels." "Tony was from a Rhode Island company called Quality Products. After this incident, a man named Anthony Roderick walked into the shop." "By accident, Jay spilled a wooden cask of nearly 100,000 individual loose ball bearings. "One day, while Richard and Jay were assembling loose ball bearing wheels onto trucks, something happened that wound up changing the entire skateboard industry," writes Michael Brooke in "The Concrete Wave." Up until that point, every wheel, including the Cadillac Wheels, just had loose ball bearings in the wheels for them to spin.īut the birth of the Road Riders was unorthodox. Urethane is still what we make our wheels out of today, but the reason Road Rider was so well-received was that it had the very first precision ball bearings. In 1974, Santa Cruz answered with their very own Road Rider Wheels. They were called Cadillac Wheels and revolutionized all the tricks that you could do on a skateboard. In the early 1970s, the very first urethane wheel hit the market. The industry then moved on and introduced clay wheels which would wear out and break apart over time. In the early days of skateboarding, wheels were made of metal and mounted directly to the axle. It ended up being so successful that he was later inducted into the International Surfboard Builders Hall of Fame. The first Santa Cruz ad was run in Skateboarder Magazine, Volume 2, Issue 3.ĭoug Haut later sold his shares in Santa Cruz and started his own surfing company under his name. The batch of 500 skateboards sold quickly, and so the newly created skate brand immediately got another order of 500.įrom that moment on, the company became a symbol of skateboard culture.
The first-ever Santa Cruz skateboard was produced in 1973. NHS had a surplus of fiberglass lying around and barely any customers, so they decided to use the stocked materials to fulfill the order. In the beginning, their surfboard brand business was struggling to stay afloat because the margins were low.īut all of a sudden, a friend from a Hawaiian company challenged NHS to make 500 skateboards. The acronym NHS comes from their surname initials - Novak, Haut, and Sherman. In 1973, Richard Novak, Doug Haut, and Jay Shuirman, three surfer friends from Santa Cruz, California, teamed up to start NHS Inc. Santa Cruz Skateboard is the oldest continuous skateboard company in the world.
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