How Suburbios Skate built a scalable brand for Mexico’s skate community

“More than boards, more than a store, we’re a movement pushing for accessible skateboarding for everyone.” That’s the slogan Ángel, Luis, and Mario use to describe Suburbios, a skateboarding shop created for the communities on the outskirts of Mexico City.

They started online and grew quickly enough to open their first physical store. But growth brought a new challenge: finding the right balance between the speed of digital sales and the experience of an in-store community.

Discover how Hostinger helped Suburbios Skate roll with style, security, and support.

How it all started

Suburbios Skate began in 2020 when three skaters from Mexico City felt the need to translate their love of skateboarding into a community value. While established skate shops served wealthy neighborhoods in the city, the communities on the outskirts had limited access to quality skateboarding gear. Suburbios would fill that gap, offering boards, trucks, wheels, and apparel to kids in the suburbs of the Valley of Mexico.

Their goal wasn’t to compete with big names already dominating the Mexican market. They wanted to build something rooted in the community.

“Initially, we started offering our products to friends and acquaintances. From there, we expanded to bazaars, and after the pandemic, we decided to take it to online markets,” says Mario.

Mario brought 15 years of ecommerce experience from major brands like Adidas and Swatch, which shaped their approach. Rather than relying only on third-party marketplaces, he led the team to build their own online store – a space they could fully control.

They began learning fast, from customer demand to the tools they needed to keep up. Like many early-stage businesses, they started with what was accessible at the time, but as Suburbios grew and needed more flexibility, they moved to a second hosting option and later realized they would need something even more reliable to scale.

Although the project grew quickly in the first months, the uncertainty of a limited budget – all too common for early-stage ventures – along with the departure of one of the original partners, created a challenging moment for Suburbios.

“We went through a difficult phase: the budget was tight, and we had to ask ourselves whether we should keep going or pause. As the partner who handled design and visuals left the project, we had to reorganize everything. Digital sales helped cover part of the gap and gave us some room to breathe. With that foundation, we redefined our roles and moved forward,” Mario shares.

Growing demand, bigger challenges

By September 2021, Suburbios Skate was operating both a physical shop and their online store. In addition, they complemented direct sales with profiles on popular platforms such as Mercado Libre, Rappi, and, more recently, TikTok Shop.

But their hosting provider couldn’t keep up. Their initial website setup quickly reached its limits. They’d migrated to a second provider hoping for better performance and reliability, but problems persisted: slow load times, limited support hours, and a lack of capacity to handle their order volume.

“The lack of support limited us to the office hours of our previous host, on top of the resource capacity issues. There came a point, in November last year, right before the start of Buen Fin (Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the holiday season), when the website went down for approximately 18 to 24 consecutive hours, with intermittent problems in the days leading up to it,” Mario explains.

This outage naturally led to significant frustration within Suburbios.

After more than two years of hard work, losing access to one of the most important sales periods of the year was disheartening. Their brand was at risk and they experienced losses of between 18,000 and 27,000 MXN (1,000 to 1,500 USD). This forced them to make radical decisions.

“Fortunately, thanks to my experience, I was able to react quickly. I identified that we needed a more robust host, so I explored new options and started the migration process to get back online as soon as possible,” Mario says.

Hostinger as their hosting choice

After the November outage, Suburbios needed to act fast. Mario researched options and Hostinger stood out by offering exactly the kind of stability, control, and support they’d been missing. 

The migration took less than 48 hours. Hostinger’s technical team helped transfer their entire WooCommerce database – customers, orders, and products – without any data loss. The difference was immediate. Within the first week, their site’s loading speed returned to normal, and they processed orders without interruptions.”

“With our previous host, uptime dropped to nearly 90% during critical periods,” Mario says. “With Hostinger, we’re seeing close to 99.9% uptime. That stability has been crucial – we’ve grown sales by 121% in 2025.”

For Mario, two words sum up the experience with Hostinger: security and support.

“The hosting performance and response have been perfect. I haven’t had to escalate any technical issues since moving to Hostinger. It’s been pretty good,” he says of his Cloud Startup plan.

Their WordPress + WooCommerce site offers over a thousand products and includes an interactive skateboard builder powered by the WooCommerce Composite Products Pro plugin. 

Customers get to select each component – deck, trucks, wheels, grip tape – and see the price calculated in real time. The system tracks inventory for each individual part and updates stock automatically when orders come through.

The main goal of the configurator was to simplify custom orders and prevent inventory issues, helping reduce errors and make online sales easier to scale. For skaters, it makes building a skateboard simpler and more intuitive, even for first-time buyers.

Finally, they highlight the good support for managing the point-of-sale plugin, which synchronizes the physical store’s inventory with the website. This integration is critical: without their online store, Suburbios estimates they’d lose about 50% of their sales. 

Pride and community

Despite the online success the pandemic brought to their business, Luis points to the opening of their first physical store as a defining moment for Suburbios.

“It might seem strange, right? We started in the context of the pandemic, and today we know that it helped online sales a lot, the whole ecommerce business. It was a turning point. But customers kept asking if we had a physical location, a store, or a place where they could see more things,” says Luis.

The decision to open a physical store came from practical necessity as much as customer demand.

“We took a risk for two reasons. The first and main reason is that we were working from home. Then came a point where we had to dedicate more time to packaging and shipping. We saw this as a secondary task, but it became predominant and we realized we could no longer do it from home.”

He continues, “So we decided to kill two birds with one stone: we opened a physical store and operated our online sales from there. What surprised us was that physical sales in the store exceeded our online sales,” concludes Luis.

Being a driving force for talent is another source of pride for Suburbios Skate. They have collaborated with creative artists to produce series on their boards, as well as contests for participants to express their ideas on a board and then choose the most creative to create custom designs together.

As a skateboarding shop, skaters are an essential part of their team. They currently have four active skaters representing the brand’s values and spirit.

Last but not least, the store introduced a “skateboarding school” with a free lesson included with every skateboard purchased, a way to motivate their customers to keep practicing the sport.

Suburbios also prides itself on business growth and long-term success.

Over nearly three years of operation, Suburbios Skate has generated close to 3 million MXN in total accumulated revenue (approximately 165,000 USD).

In 2025 alone, their online store has generated 285,280 MXN (approximately 16,000 USD), representing a +121% year-over-year increase in online sales compared to 2024.

Today, sales are distributed across both channels, with the physical store accounting for roughly 60% of total revenue and the online store contributing the remaining 40%. This mix reflects the interactive nature of the product while reinforcing the importance of maintaining a balanced, omnichannel operation.

What’s next for Suburbios?

Brand expansion is the goal for Suburbios Skate. Although its products are already distributed through some national channels, continued growth remains its vision for the future.

Recently, Ángel, Luis, and Mario opened their second store in Mexico City – they now have one in Azcapotzalco and the other in Parque Lira.

“We want both stores to be stable and sustainable on their own. The trick, of course, is to keep adding products so that people keep coming in and buying,” says Luis.

In the medium term, Suburbios Skate aims to have both its physical and digital sales channels at the same level and with solid results. They also hope to become a national reference in the B2B market for their products.

For now, the team is focused on what got them here: making skateboarding accessible to communities that have been overlooked. From the suburbs of Mexico City to a growing network of stores and partners, Suburbios has proven that serving an underserved market isn’t just the right thing to do – it’s good business.