About Orangatang
Wheels with attitude, made for people who want to roll.
We make longboard wheels and bushings in California. We've been pouring urethane since 2008, and the wheels have been getting more voluptuous ever since.
Hatched, not founded.
A brief and mostly accurate history
Orangatang Wheels was hatched in Southern California in 2008 as a means of advocating for the civil liberties of the region's indigenous river capybaras. The capybaras, to their credit, never asked for our help. We also gained international praise in 2009 for a brief and completely unrelated foray into exotic animal jerky manufacturing and wholesale.
Somewhere in there we started pouring urethane, and it turned out we were good at it. The capybaras are doing fine. The wheels are doing better.
We don't talk about the jerky much anymore. (Our chief urethane scientist maintains it was the finest year in company history. She maintains a lot of things.)
- 2008Hatched in Southern California. Capybara advocacy begins.
- 2009The jerky year. Internationally praised, never repeated.
- TodayWheels, bushings, and one small building in California that smells faintly of warm urethane.
Fresh out of the mold.
Some of our technologies
Every Orangatang wheel and bushing is poured in California, in a building that smells faintly of urethane and strongly of Adam's leftover Durian. Despite the lack of oxygen, our Chief Urethane Scientist has developed things we're proud of, and we gave each of them a name.
For wheels
Happy Thane
Our wheel formula. Rolls fast, feels plush, grips when you lean and lets go gracefully when you don't. Poured into everything from the pocket-sized Skiff to the 105mm Dad Bod.
For bushings
Randy Thane
Our high-rebound bushing formula. A polite but firm shove out of every turn. Lives inside the Nipples and the Knuckles. Cousin to Happy Thane, not a twin. Please don't mix them up; they get touchy.
For the very large
TrypoCore
Our high-strength, heat-resistant urethane core. Currently keeping the Dad Bod shockingly light for something its size, which is exactly what a dad would want you to say about him.
We pour what we want to ride. The small mammals have relocated.
The devil's in the details. So are we.
How a wheel gets made around here
Every wheel starts with a question somebody on the crew won't stop asking: what would this feel like under my feet? A small, project-specific team chases the answer through sketches, molds, test pours, and an unreasonable number of driveway laps. Then the whole in-house crew and a handful of ambassadors weigh in, and the wheel gets argued over until it's right.
We're fussy about materials, serious about designing and producing things responsibly, and devoted to the idea that a wheel's job is to work beautifully first and look beautiful second (it usually manages both). Egos get checked at the door. Assumptions get tested on pavement. What comes out is a wheel that does exactly what it says, and a crew that's a little wiser than it was last pour.
- Sketch
- Pour
- Ride
- Argue
- Repeat
Small building, large personalities.
It all comes down to people
As with everything, it comes down to people. We've built a tight crew of unusual individuals who share a passion for getting weird and a suspicious amount of overlapping talents. That extends to our vendors, who are like-minded and, we believe, the best in the world at what they do.
We try to put a coherent ideology out into the world, and we find the people who get it are drawn to it and become part of the conversation. That goes double for our shops and distributors, our partners in irreverence in every corner of the map. If your local shop stocks Orangatangs, it's because somebody there gets it.
We share the building, the coffee, and most of the people with Loaded Boards. Same hands, same standards, different creature. Loaded builds the boards; we make what they roll on. (We also make what plenty of other boards roll on. We're not exclusive like that.)
Keep it weird.
Keep it rolling.
Questions, compliments, capybara sightings: taco@orangatangwheels.com
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