Team Lowbrow
History of Lowbrow Customs
How did Lowbrow Customs come together? Tyler Malinky tells how his Sportster empire came together.
By Tyler Malinky
Back in the early 2000’s I was riding my 1970 Triumph, my first motorcycle, and learning to work on it. I rebuilt the top end of the engine, and later rebuilt the entire engine and customized the bike. Through all of this I was trying to find parts and information on vintage motorcycles and choppers with limited success.
Tyler’s Harley-Davidson Panhead chopper outside of Lowbrow Customs HQ in 2017
I often would finally order parts and not be happy with what I received, if it ever showed up. I decided that I could do a better job of it and registered the lowbrowcustoms.com domain name and drew the logo. Fast forward a year later and I still hadn’t actually done anything with it, but in 2004 I started off by making a simple website which I coded page-by-page in HTML, with Paypal ‘add to cart’ buttons.
At the time I was a self-employed sign maker, doing graphic design for customers, simple web design, screen printing and lettering work vans, shop windows, making banners and anything else with lettering on it. I used my sign-making equipment and skills to make various motorcycle and counter-culture stickers and a few t-shirts, in addition to finding some of the various chopper underground magazines, like DiCE Magazine.
I started carrying DiCE Magazine around issue #3, and early Lowbrow ads can be seen starting around issue #5 or so. This all happened out of a spare bedroom of a duplex in Parma, Ohio. It then expanded to also take up part of my basement. Back in the early and mid-2000’s there weren’t many motorcycle shows to speak of.
Not of the vintage chopper variety at least, and not around northeast Ohio. I would load up my 1965 Econoline van (that I had painted flat black with a roller and a gallon of Rustoleum) with a small folding table, a Lowbrow banner and my wares and would head out to small hot rod shows around the Midwest.
