Geoff Rowley

 ( 1976 Births ) 

In a 2013 interview, Rowley provided further insight into his adolescence, explaining that skateboarding culture was not accepted during his time in Liverpool and it was during the 1980s that the culture became prominent in the city. However, even following the rise in prominence, skateboarding products were difficult to purchase:

The only place that actually sold skateboards in Liverpool at that time was a record shop. It was called Probe Records. When I went in there for the first time they had two boards on the wall, a Skull Skates "Dead Guys" and a Toxic team model. I think they had two sets of wheels and two sets of trucks. They had no griptape and one set of bolts. That was my first memory of going into a skateshop laughs. I rode my first complete with no griptape for a month or so until Probe got some grip back in stock.

Technical, burly, stylish, quiet, punker, street urchin: these are the descriptions that neatly fit young Geoff Rowley ... He doesn't care about music or anything outside of skateboarding. Although Geoff is from Liverpool (home of the Beatles, by the way) and looks like a rough kid, he is actually one of the least attitude-infested skaters out there today. Geoff is starting to send out 'waves' across Europe, and when Deathbox ships him over to the US, these waves will certainly come over with him.

In 1994, Rowley moved to Huntington Beach, California, United States with fellow Flip team riders, Tom Penny, Rune Glifberg and Andy Scott. In 2012, Rowley reflected upon the company's move to the US:

We were a totally new company moving to a foreign country, and, ah, I don't we kind of expected it to go "boom", and just fly right in. We had no expectations; we didn't really know that many people, and we actually just wanted to skate, really. Because we grew up dreaming of living in California and getting to wake up every day and go out and skate without it raining. Ah, and I think that was something that, like, all of the guys, when we first moved here, you know, Rune Glifberg and Tom Penny, that was something that, you couldn't hold us back in that respect. I'd just turned eighteen, Tom was seventeen, ah, neither of us had lived away from home, you know. We'd moved to a foreign country where we didn't know anybody. Nobody. Ah, we had no money, we didn't have any cars, ah, alls we had was the board that we had; we couldn't go breaking those. we couldn't afford to, at the time, starting a company, we couldn't afford to run through ten boards a month ... Like myself, personally, I skated a lot with Ed Templeton, like, every day, because he lived, like, right across the road from me.

After two weeks in California, Rowley was featured on the cover of TransWorld Skateboard magazine—he subsequently decided to relocate to the American state. In regards to his first TransWorld cover, Rowley explained in 2012:

I'd been in the States for, like, two weeks, and I was at TransWorld—we'd been to visit TransWorld for the first time. And Swift just wanted to go shoot—he needed to shoot a Gullwing truck. He said, "You ride for Gullwing, right?" I'm like, "Yeah, I think so ... I got free trucks through the distributor in Britain ... I mean, do I ride for them? I don't, I don't know." "Do you wanna go skate?" And I went skating with them, and then they put it on the cover of the mag. It didn't make any sense to me ... like, at all. It still doesn't make any sense to me; I just went skating with them and then it's on the cover of the mag. I remember gettin' it and thinking, "What just happened? What? That's weird."

Rowley later explained the full extent of Templeton's influence during his early years in the US and stated, "I'll be forever in debt to him" due to Templeton's openness towards Rowley, as the two discovered that they shared the same interests. Rowley explained: "I got on really well with him straight away. As soon as we started talking it was really obvious we'd be good friends. We were into similar music and were from a similar generation."

In an August 2013 interview for Tony Hawk's RIDE YouTube channel, Rowley revealed that he was arrested during the filming for the 2009 Flip video Extremely Sorry. At the time of the incident, Rowley successfully executed a trick between two rooftops while accompanied by a friend and the owners of the property chose to press charges. Rowley spent around nine hours in jail and paid approximately US$20,000 bail for his friend's release—although the video footage of the rooftop trick was confiscated by the police, the trick remains a part of the video that was publicly released (Rowley did not explain how Flip managed to retain the footage for the final edit in either the RIDE channel interview or any other interviews).

Rowley was revealed as an announcer for the Street League Skateboarding (SLS) Super Crown World Championship event on 22 August 2013. The championship event was held in New Jersey, US on 25 August 2013 and featured the competitors who had qualified during the 2013 SLS season. Rowley received an invitation to compete in the series when it was launched in 2010, but he eventually declined the offer due to a competing offer by the Maloof Company responsible for the Maloof Money Cup events—Nyjah Huston replaced Rowley's position. In his pre-championship interview, Rowley predicted that Paul Rodriguez, Chris Cole, Huston, or Luan Oliveira would emerge from the event victorious.

In October 2015 Geoff Rowley left Flip.

At the time when Geoff hit Staples no one was skating low-cut, thin vulc shoes. No one had felt their board in nearly half a decade. Shoes at the time were so disgusting and bulky we try not to think about them. But when Geoff shot that ad, doing the gnarliest trick on the biggest hubba, showing people it wasn't about creating a bulletproof space shoe for the year 3000 that would last for six months but rather the priority is and always should be about board-feel everyone took a long, hard look at their feet and wondered, 'What the f@#k are we wearing?' History was rewritten that day, by this man.

As of 2012, Rowley was working on a video project for Vans and he explained in an August 2013 interview that the video will represent a team of grateful Vans riders returning the support provided by the shoe brand thus far. In November 2013, an updated version of Rowley's signature shoe model, called the "Rowley Pro Lite", was released along with a video advertisement containing the tagline "The Original ... Only Lighter" – a reference to the original model that was released in 1999.