LADERA LONGBOARDS

Ladera Longboards was founded in 2001 by Ryan Roberts. It all started when Ryan was a sophomore at Menlo-Atherton High School and a student in BIA Woods (Basic Industrial Arts). A free choice project was assigned towards the end of the year. As an avid longboarder, making a board in shop seemed more than appropriate. After weeks of work, the first board was finished and an interest arose from friends as well as classmates. Soon there were so many orders for Ryan to hand-make that it was difficult to keep up. In order to fill these custom orders, Ryan teamed up with fellow skater and wood-worker Parker Weiss

After designing a logo and verbally agreeing to become business partners, Ladera Longboards was officially born. Ryan’s room became the headquarters while his garage became the workshop. Everyday after school, as well as entire weekends, were dedicated to hand-making boards while trying to get the word out about the company. Ryan and Parker’s next move was to create some clothing to advertise the company. Since funding was low, only about 12 sweatshirts and 24 shirts were printed. This only provided enough garments for friends and associates of the company. After everyone started to wear the Ladera Longboards gear to their schools, things began to rapidly pick-up.

Instead of making 2-3 boards by hand per week they quickly began to outsource the shaping to a precision laser cutting company. Even though this cut the workload, about 100 boards still needed to be routed, sanded, screened, finished, gripped and assembled by hand. This forced the production of the boards to move from the garage to Ladera’s first shop, which was an addition added to Ryan’s house. As graduating seniors in high school this was a lot to handle going into college, but handled nonetheless.

Given that the founders are full-time college students at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo and UC Santa Cruz, Ladera Longboards now outsources all board manufacturing to a skateboard distribution company in San Diego which frees up time to study and go to class while in the meantime marketing and selling their boards. Since Ryan and Parker have been in college, they have picked up 7 retailers as far north as San Francisco and as far south as Santa Barbara and have sold over 350 complete boards and 300 screened garments.