Why Fingerboarders Set an Alarm for Prete's Next Drop

Prete is Peter Ringel. The first-party site is refreshingly plain about what the brand is: "professional fingerboard decks, handmade by Peter Ringel in Germany since 2003." Its own history traces prototyping from 2003 to 2005 and an official company registration in 2006 — then two decades of quiet refinement most riders never see.

Two of those refinements matter for anyone who has held a Prete. Metal bottom plies arrived in 2007, and carbon top plies followed in 2012 — construction choices that other small makers have circled around ever since. The rest of the story is a long run of house molds pressed from hand-selected veneer blends, the kind of iteration you only get when the same pair of hands presses every board.

A note on dates, because they get muddled in forum lore: 2003 is when the decks started, 2006 is when the company was registered. Both come from Prete's own history page, and they are not the same thing.

The 6000 series is where Prete's shape language lives, and the 6011 closes it out. The storefront describes the 6011 as combining "the best of both the 6010 and 6010R2low models," with medium kicks, medium concave, and a short wheelbase, pressed from five plies of Grade-A veneer and finished in hard wax oil.

The follow-on 6011FL is billed as a new 2026 shape, listed at around 35 EUR, and — like everything Prete — it ships across a spread of widths (roughly 29–36 mm) rather than one size for everyone. The brand has not published a full spec sheet for the FL beyond the storefront copy, so treat the finer differences from the 6011 as unconfirmed until it is in hand.

Prete does not keep open stock. Boards go out in small, laser-etched batches — often with hand-drawn artist graphics and the brand's rice-ball mascot burned into the wood — and the storefront points buyers to specific windows, including events like Fast Fingers. The scarcity is not a marketing device layered on top of the product; it is the production model. One person, one press, a batch at a time.

That is also why a Prete drop reads as a scene ritual rather than a restock. The release the brand documented on its own channels came with a best-trick contest, a raffle, and a game of skate. You are not buying from a warehouse. You are showing up.

Fingerboarding's early boutique-wood era produced a handful of workshops whose names still carry weight, and most of them either scaled, stopped, or became something else. Prete did none of those things. It stayed one person, kept the batch small, and kept changing the board — metal plies, carbon plies, a new mold when the old one had taught it everything it could.

The 6011FL is not a revolution. It is the twenty-third year of the same argument: that a fingerboard deck is a made object, and that the person who makes it should still be the one pressing it. That is a rarer position in 2026 than it was in 2003, and it is the reason people set an alarm.

For the full timeline, see the Prete Decks pioneer profile.