It Started on a Napkin.
Greensboro, North Carolina. 2012.
The Shadow
Every story has a beginning. Ours has two people.
Me, and my nephew, Austin Sparks.
Everyone called him my little shadow. Wherever I went, Austin was right behind me.
He wasn’t just my nephew. He was my buddy.
The Table
In 2012, we sat down at a Mellow Mushroom in Greensboro.
I was falling in love with entrepreneurship, design, and building brands. And I wanted Austin to feel that same fire.
I wanted a 15-year-old kid to be able to say something most adults never get to say:
“I have my own company.”
The Name
We started throwing out names.
Then Austin had it.
His last name was Sparks. He took the S off the end and replaced it with an X.
The name was his.
It always will be.
The Napkin
Here’s the part most people don’t know.
SPARX didn’t start with skateboards. I was into furniture design back then, so the first sketches on that napkin were furniture.
But furniture wasn’t Austin.
Skateboarding was.
We had skated together for years. It was ours. And I had a woodworking shop with everything we needed to build something real.
So we built boards.
The First Boards
We went home and got to work.
We made templates.
We cut different longboard shapes.
We built them with our own hands.
Then Austin started selling them to his friends.
It wasn’t big.
It wasn’t a factory.
Sales were small.
But it was real.
Real boards, made by hand, in the hands of real skaters.
A 15-year-old with his own skateboard brand.
That’s exactly what I hoped he would have.
Sparks Longboards
It started as sparkslongboards.com.
But the name only fit longboards, and our vision was getting bigger. We wanted to make traditional popsicle skateboards too.
So Sparks Longboards became SPARX Board Co.
Austin
Sparks
December 12, 1996–October 7, 2021
SPARX was never meant to be a memorial. It was something we built together, nine years before we lost him.
Losing Austin gave SPARX a deeper meaning. But it didn’t change what it is.
It’s a skateboard brand a 15-year-old named, and his uncle helped him build.
Still Rolling
Today, SPARX carries the same name Austin gave it, and the same things that started it all:
Skateboarding.
Creativity.
Family.
The drive to make something that’s yours.
