About Airwalk Skate Shoes

February 20, 2024

Airwalk, the iconic skate shoe brand, began its journey in 1986, when it was founded by George Yohn (founder of Blair Co.) and Bill Mann (a former art student with experience as a buyer in the athletic sneakers sector) with the aim of producing skate shoes like no other, with strong construction and modern for the time styles.

Airwalk Skate shoes were highly popular during their peak years and included the Airwalk Disaster, Airwalk Velocity, Airwalk Enigma, and Airwalk Prototype Skate shoe models.

Airwalk also sponsored many of the top pro skaters from that time, including Tony Hawk, Christian Hosoi, Lester Kasai, Tony Magnusson, and Mike McGill

Airwalk's main target was vert skating; therefore, when vert skating was on the decline in the early 90s, Airwalk changed its target audience to street skating. This led to a completely different style of skate shoe—no longer the beefy hi-top style skate shoes, but the more simple style skate shoes—that were also similar to their competitors, including Etnies models. Airwalk carried on supporting pro skaters, this time the biggest pro street skaters, including Eric Koston, Andrew Reynolds, Jason 'My Name is Earl' Lee, Geoff Rowley, Steve Berra, Pat Duffy, and Jeremy Klein, along with more underground guys such as Ricky Oyola, Jesse Paez, Matt Pailes, Wade Speyer, and the 80s/90s Tom Knox pro skater.

Airwalk released 2 skate video promos in the mid-90s, which were called "Skateboard Video '95" and "Skateboard Video '96.". These were short videos filmed by Jamie Mosberg, who later went on to film the seminal Birdhouse video "The End.".

There were two Airwalk Pro model shoes. They were the "Tony Hawk" and "Jason Lee" models. These were simple, well-designed skate shoes, and they were later followed by a model from Andy Macdonald in 2001.

While Airwalk is no longer what it was, we must remember how much of a rad brand Airwalk was back in the day.

Airwalk Skateboard Videos include:

Airwalk Skateboard Video 1995