For twenty five years Lakai was the answer to a simple question, what does it look like when skaters own the company. It was the footwear arm of the Girl Skateboards family, run by two of the most respected skaters alive, and it made one of the greatest skate videos ever filmed. Then in 2024 the people who built it were forced out of it, and Lakai became a harder, more complicated story about what skater-owned even means once the skaters are gone.
By skaters, for skaters
Lakai was founded in 1999 by Mike Carroll and Rick Howard, who also ran Girl Skateboards and the wider Crailtap world. The idea was to own the shoe brand rather than just be paid to wear someone else’s, and the name came from Carroll’s favorite character in the horror movie Children of the Corn, not from anything as tidy as the legends suggest. For a generation of skaters Lakai was the standard, a brand with no corporate parent, run by people who actually skated, with a team, the Crailtap family, that was about as cool as skateboarding got.
Fully Flared
The high point was a video. In 2007 Lakai released Fully Flared, directed by Ty Evans and Spike Jonze, and it opened with a sequence of skaters rolling away from real, practical explosions in slow motion, set to M83, that is still one of the most replayed minutes in skate history. It won video of the year, it brought Guy Mariano back to skating, and it cemented Lakai as the brand with the deepest credibility in the building. You did not get more core than Lakai.
The break
Which is what makes the recent chapter so hard. By the early 2020s Lakai was reportedly losing around a million dollars a year and close to shutting down. In late 2024 a new owner stepped in, and almost immediately Carroll and Howard were let go from the company they founded, by Carroll’s telling because they refused to cut the team. The Crailtap connection, the founders, the original roster, twenty five years of being the genuine article, ended more or less overnight.
What happened next is the strange part. Rather than die, Lakai got rebuilt by a new skater-owner, the YouTube skater Luis Mora, who pitched a return to the same by-skaters-for-skaters idea the founders had invented, signed a new team including Chris Joslin, and kept the lights on. As of 2026 Lakai is still here, still making shoes, still calling itself skater-owned, just by different skaters than the ones who made the name mean something.
Lakai is the most honest test case in this whole industry of what a brand actually is. Is it the people who built it, or is it the name, the logo, the idea that outlives them? The Lakai that made Fully Flared is gone. A Lakai still exists, run by someone who grew up loving the first one and trying to be worthy of it. Whether that counts as the same brand is a question skating is still arguing about, and there is no clean answer. The flare got passed to a stranger. Now everyone gets to watch what he does with it.