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Girl Skateboards, the inaugural brand of the company, originated in 1993 after a selection of team riders from World Industries - notably Mike Carroll and Rick Howard - decided to found their own brand.

Howard explained in a 2000 interview:

Part of the reason we started Girl was so pro skateboarders would have a future. Take Royal, for instance. When Guy Mariano and Rudy Johnson's legs don't work anymore, at least what they've done for skateboarding and their ideas can continue with something they can fall back on. All the Girl Distribution companies are based around people who have helped Girl get to where it is today.

Howard and Carroll revealed in 2013 as part of the company's 20-year anniversary commemoration that the majority of the skateboard industry at the time was acrimonious towards the new enterprise. Carroll stated that a particular woodshop was threatened by another company and consequently severed ties with Girl, but that industry figure, Fausto Vitello, assisted Girl in numerous ways. Carroll explained that Vitello "...he always just, kinda, let us know that he had our back."

In addition to Howard and Carroll, the original Girl team consisted of Jovontae Turner, Eric Koston, Guy Mariano, Rudy Johnson, Tim Gavin, Tony Ferguson, Sean Sheffey, and Jeron Wilson.^[4] The company has evolved into a distribution company that distributes skateboard hard goods, skateboard videos and films, and soft goods. The Girl logo is similar to the symbol on women's bathrooms and was designed by Girl's in-house artist Andy Jenkins, who left the company^[5] to join Element Skateboards in October 2017.^[4][6] Named the "Art Dump," the design department of Girl was overseen by Jenkins and included contributions from artists such as Geoff McFetridge, Kevin Lyons, and Hershel Baltrotsky.

In the period leading up to the year 2000, Carroll and Howard were filming for the TransWorld SKATEboarding video Modus Operandi and their filmer, Ty Evans, invited a young unknown skateboarder named Brandon Biebel to accompany them on filming/skateboarding sessions. Biebel had moved from Chicago to California, US and had met Evans previously in Southern California. At the 2000 premiere of the video, Carroll asked Biebel to join the Lakai skate shoe team, followed by an offer to join Girl several months afterwards. Biebel was assigned professional status in 2002 and stated in a 2012 interview: "Girl, Lakai — that's a dream come true. I ain't never leaving that shit."

During the mid-2000s, Girl recruited new amateur riders Mike Mo Capaldi, Sean Malto, and Alex Olson, and established amateur Jereme Rogers was assigned professional status with the company in 2005. Rogers left the company in 2007 due to his dissatisfaction with his royalty payments, while Capaldi, Malto, and Olson were assigned professional status the following year.