Alien Workshop — the strangest brand in skateboarding, and why it worked

In 1990, in Dayton, Ohio — a city known for factories and highway overpasses, not exactly a skate mecca — two guys launched a board company with extraterrestrials printed on it. Chris Carter and Mike Hill had no studio budget and no marketing plan. What they had was a photocopier, an obsession with cheap sci-fi, and the instinct that skateboarding was missing real art. Alien Workshop was born.

If you grew up on a board between 1995 and 2005, you definitely crossed paths with an Alien Workshop grip tape at a friend's house, or spotted a copy of Photosynthesis - 2000 sitting on a shelf next to worn-out tapes. It was never the best-selling brand. It was the strangest one. And that's exactly why it mattered.

Pulling an Alien Workshop deck out of its plastic bag at the shop was always a small shock. No loud logo, no aggressive typography like World Industries. Just a green creature with enormous eyes, or a saucer beaming light onto a burning city. You'd stare at it for a while before even thinking about riding it — like the board deserved to hang on a wall before it got scraped on a curb.

Chris Carter and Neil Blender: two artists who refused to make normal skateboarding

Neil Blender wasn't a designer hired to make things look nice. He was already a cult rider, pro since 1981, the inventor of tricks with his own name attached to them (the Wooly Mammoth), and one of the very first skaters to draw his own board graphics. His vision, combined with Chris Carter's — the co-founder who pushed the extraterrestrial and psychedelic imagery all the way, without ever compromising — produced something no other brand dared to do: treat the grip tape like a canvas, not ad space.

At a time when World Industries was betting on cheap jokes and easy provocation to sell boards, Alien Workshop bet on the opposite: mystery, silence, imagery that never explained itself. No punchline, no wink. Just a flying saucer over a desert, and you had to make sense of it yourself.

They treated the grip tape like a canvas. Nobody else dared do that in 1990. — What Carter and Blender changed

Photosynthesis - 2000: the video that launched Dill and AVE, set to Radiohead

Photosynthesis - 2000 doesn't look like a normal skate video. The editing drags, the transitions are abstract, and the camera lingers on textures — smoke, filtered light — instead of the tricks themselves. This is the video where two names that would define the following decade first appeared under the Alien Workshop banner: Jason Dill and Anthony Van Engelen. Danny Way, Anthony Pappalardo and Brian Wenning also skate in it, each with a part that doesn't resemble anything else released that year.

The closing part, Dill's, ends on Radiohead's "Polyethylene." Not a hip-hop beat, not an angry punk track like Welcome to Hell used four years earlier. An almost out-of-place musical choice for skateboarding in 2000 — and that mismatch is exactly what stuck with everyone who saw it. You never knew what to expect from this brand, and that was the whole point.

You rewound that tape not to see a specific trick again, but to chase that strange feeling — somewhere between blur and fascination — the whole video left you with. No other skate part of the era gave you the sense you were watching something running alongside skateboarding, not just inside it.

DNA Distribution, Habitat, and the art that ended up buying out the brand itself

Alien Workshop was never a standalone brand. It sat under DNA Distribution, the parent company that spun off Habitat Skateboards — a natural extension of the same idea: let rider-artists design their own boards, with no marketing filter between the idea and the finished shape. Where most brands of the era started from a logo and built an identity around it, Alien Workshop and its team started from an artwork and let the brand form around it.

That artistic bet came at a cost. In 2008, Burton Snowboards acquired DNA Distribution; in 2012, Rob Dyrdek took over Alien Workshop. A year later, Dill and AVE walked out. The brand closed in 2014. That kind of arc — art that seduces before getting swallowed by a bigger structure — isn't unique to Alien Workshop. You'll find nearly the same story at Plan B, which Danny Way — already spotted in Photosynthesis — relaunched after his own years in the wilderness.

The weirdest brand in skateboarding never tried to please everyone. That's exactly why it lasted. — The Alien Workshop bet

What it left behind: brands that still treat grip tape as a piece of art

Alien Workshop closed in 2014, then relaunched in 2015 with a new video project. It never got back the aura of its golden years. But the same year it closed, Dill and AVE — the two guys revealed by Photosynthesis - 2000 — founded Fucking Awesome, a brand built on the exact same logic: the graphic comes first, the business comes after. The same lesson you find with Mark Gonzales, who was painting his own boards long before that was the norm.

Maybe that's the real lesson of this weird brand: you don't need to be understood right away to define an entire decade. All it takes is for someone, somewhere, to rewind your tape because they didn't get it the first time — and to actually want to understand it.

Did you ever own an Alien Workshop board, or just the Photosynthesis tape that circulated at a friend's place? Say it in the comments ↓