Santa Monica Airlines has a new website called factory kustom that not only slings the rarest of the rare SMA decks, it busts out knowledge like the fact that the Nike Air Jordan 1 got its start in skateboarding in Venice Beach.
Skip Engblom holds an SMA/ Dean Edwards exotic wood – mother of pearl inlay longboard.
From factorykustom.com:
The Culture of Skateboarding evolved in the late seventies and early eighties near the fertile sands of Santa Monica and Venice Beach. Led Zeppelin was giving way to Black Flag … Hang Ten and OP clothing were out … Dickies and Pendletons were in. The kindred culture of Hip Hop with its radical new musical forms and illicitly applied art was moving west … fast.
The derelict Venice Pavilion and adjacent Breakwater became the ‘place to be and be seen’ for Surfers, Skaters, Musicians and Artists from all these vital new sub-cultures. Each form of expression complimented the next like an extreme version of Paris in the 1920’s. People from all over the globe came to Venice to be inspired .. to be transformed ..and most importantly to absorb the seething culture growing out of control in this pre-internet idyllic past.
Skip Engblom’s Santa Monica Airlines was one of the original three local skateboard companies active at that time, with Jim Muir’s Dogtown and ALVA being the other two. FactoryKustom is a new website launched by Santa Monica Airlines designed to offer visitors an opportunity to explore this amazing culture and every esoteric tangent that radiates from it. Its a .COM … so that means business. FactoryKustom will be offering rare and previously unavailable product of all kinds as they become available.
Visit Often..and click around … you never know what you’ll find.
(The website will now be linked to on the front page of this website sponsor ad for SMA. – easy to find!)
