Hook-Ups Skateboards

Hook-Ups started as t-shirts, not skateboards, in the summer of 1993. Jeremy Klein, already a pro skater who'd come up through World Industries and then Birdhouse under Tony Hawk, launched it under the Birdhouse Distributions umbrella alongside Flip. Printing shirts was simply easier and cheaper than producing decks, so that's where the brand actually began before the boards followed.

The anime graphics weren't a gimmick tacked on later, they were the entire point. Klein built the brand specifically to merge skate culture with his own fandom for Japanese animation, using stills and characters from anime series, often deliberately provocative ones, at a time when almost no other skate company was pulling from that well. Longtime Birdhouse artist Sean Cliver did a huge amount of the graphic work that made Hook-Ups instantly recognizable on a shelf full of other brands.

The best-selling Hook-Ups deck of all time, according to Klein himself, was the Alice in Wonderland graphic. And one of the wildest true stories from the brand's history: at the Japanese premiere of the Hook-Ups video The End, Klein and teammate Heath set themselves on fire as part of the promotion, which reportedly got the entire premiere shut down early.

Klein was pushed out of Birdhouse in 2008 during an ownership change, unrelated to Hook-Ups itself, and has run Hook-Ups independently and on a much smaller scale ever since. It's harder to find on shelves today, which is exactly why the 90s and early 2000s pieces are worth digging for.

Dig through what's in stock: Vintage T-Shirts