Is Skateboarding Getting Older?

Is skateboarding getting older? Let's see. Top-selling products are being marketed as 'easier on your joints.' Welp, so much for the deep dive; AARP collabs coming soon. 

But for real, though, who has the data? I'm serious; anyone out there? These numbers would be very beneficial to my career.

Is the average buyer and skateboard demographic leaving the 12-24 age group in the dust and creeping towards the thirty-plus, or is this another case of my own recency bias? I'm getting old, so I notice old people stuff. Probably the latter, but if you're still reading, you're semi-interested in some armchair analysis of skateboarding, so let's dive in. 

A quick scan of the 'tastemaker' shops—god, I hate that word, but you know what I mean—shows that a good portion of them are hovering around their 20th anniversary or more. Let's say the average shop owner started in their early twenties; add twenty, and most are probably in their forties—solidly in the middle-aged bracket.

Okay, what about the people making the product? Some major brands are celebrating their 50th anniversaries, with other larger competing brands not too far behind. Let's shoot for the middle again. Founders start in their late twenties, add thirty or so years, and you're pushing towards sixty. Okay, old, but founders aside, what about the employees?

I'll let you in on a little insider secret: we're no spring chickens. Unlike pros, who have a small window in which their bodies and skills can maintain peak performance, there's no limit to mashing a keyboard, pushing pixels, or driving a van. Much like the desire to hold onto our youth through wooden toys, we tend to hold onto our industry jobs with the same insecure fervor. Trust me, I tried to quit once; it didn't stick. 

Through this scientific reasoning, it's safe to say the buyers and brands in skateboarding are currently on the older side. So, what? Plenty of industries are run by older, experienced folks. It doesn't matter as long as they follow the current trends and continually create excitement to bring new participants in, right? 

Easy, fire up TikTok or Instagram, and enlist the millions of youthful influencers to direct trends and future product development. Nope, middle-aged product review vloggers, that's the ticket. Feels way more comfortable here; after all, we need to stick together in this whole getting old thing.

So where are all the kids? Read enough Thrasher interviews over the past several decades, and you'll find three or four major instigators for starting skating: older siblings/neighborhood kids' influence or mass cultural moments that spark whole generations to pick up a board. The eighties had Marty McFly in Back to The Future and the Police Academy movies, the late 90s and early 2000s had the Tony Hawk video games, and still a bit early to tell, but future pros might be sighting the pandemic as their first excuse to pick up a board. 

Blockbuster movies and widely successful mainstream video games are cool and all, but little Jimmy or Jill, have you heard about the intricacies of wheelbase mathematics and their magical effects on slappy grinds? Let me tell you, kid, we've got some really exciting shit going on in skateboarding right now. It's going to change your life. 

Don't worry. There's irony in all this sarcasm and nonsensical analysis. Trying to push against what's happening in skateboarding is similar to getting old; the more you fight it or try to hold onto the way it was, the worse it looks. Skateboarding has a history of saving itself from itself. The youth will swoop in when we least expect it and rescue us from our wheelbase wallowing. Until then, I heard there's a new red curb at the retirement home, and they've got an early bird special.