How it all
came together.
You couldn't keep him away from Legos. By sixth grade, Kyle Buckner was sketching furniture designs during class—planning to build pieces from 2×4s and sell them at the end of his driveway. Not for a school project. For real. The building wasn't learned. It was hardwired.
At fourteen, Kyle started working at his father's car audio and home theater shop. He fell in love with the wood shop immediately. Custom enclosures from fiberglass, aluminum, wood, leather—whatever the build demanded. One rule: every piece had to look factory-made. No carpeted boxes. No cheap compromises. If an industrial designer at the factory saw it, they'd think it belonged there.
The work got noticed. Magazine covers. Industry features. Then the call: one of nineteen installers invited to advanced training in Arizona. Kyle was the youngest in the room. The precision, the obsessive craft, the refusal to cut corners—it set him apart nationally. The goal was never personal fame. It was simpler than that: make dad's shop the best in the business.
Car audio was fading. New vehicles came loaded with everything—there wasn't much left to customize. Kyle enrolled in community college for electronics, realized power plants weren't the path, and pivoted to graphic design. That same year, the iPhone launched. Apple became an obsession. Photoshop became a second language. Design became everything.
Kyle transferred to VCU's art foundation program. For a class project, he built a wooden pedestal for the thing he loved most: the iPhone. He posted it on Facebook. Then MacLife picked it up. Then Gizmodo. Then a dozen more tech blogs. Suddenly there were invitations—a NYC art exhibit, press requests, opportunities he never imagined. Then the call that changed everything: a commission from the Apple Store. A pivotal, life-changing moment. The builder had found his audience.
A coffee table with iPhone aesthetics. Touch-sensitive controls on the surface. A motorized Harman Kardon soundbar that rose from inside. It merged everything—the car audio engineering, the furniture craft, the Apple obsession. Engadget ran the story. Kyle's phone exploded during class. Emails flooded in. George Clooney reached out to buy three. Kyle shipped them worldwide, each one hand-built over two to three months. The demand was insatiable. The builds were painstaking. Something had to scale.
Kyle was at a print shop, getting his logo printed for the side of a furniture crate. He looked at the vinyl and thought: this would work as a phone skin. That night, DesignSkinz was born. He bought every device on the market. Scanned each one. Engineered precision cut files that wrapped perfectly—not generic stickers, real skins. The furniture-maker's obsession with fit applied to phone accessories. It scaled. Etsy. Amazon. Walmart. Wish. QVC. At peak: $350,000 a month. Shipping to thirty-plus countries. Every single day.
Over pizza at Mellow Mushroom, Kyle and his nephew Austin Sparks dreamed up a brand together. Austin was Kyle's shadow—always around, always building alongside him. They'd skateboarded together since Austin was five. The brand started as a furniture line, then pivoted to skateboards. Something they both loved. Austin became one of DesignSkinz's first employees. SPARX sat on the shelf for a while as life pulled them in different directions. But it never disappeared.
DesignSkinz revenue funded the real dream: a workshop where any idea could become reality. CNC machines. Laser cutters and engravers. Industrial printers. 3D printers. Computers running automated print scripts. If Kyle could think it, he could prototype it, brand it, and ship it. He launched Eliivate—a motivational quote brand on canvas, cases, and apparel. First year: invited to the MTV Movie Awards gifting suite. The experiments kept multiplying.
Austin passed away. He'd been one of the first DesignSkinz employees since the very beginning—2011. Kyle stepped back from skins. It was too connected to Austin, too heavy to touch. Months passed. Then Austin's four-year-old son asked Kyle to take him to the skate park. Standing there, watching the kid push around on a board, clarity arrived. SPARX came back. Rebranded. Relaunched. A retail store opened December 16, 2022, in Danville, Virginia—part skate shop, part community space, every fixture built by hand. It closed in 2024 and moved online. But Austin's name lives in every deck.
The brands keep multiplying. ThatQuote.com for everyday humor and motivation on products. Iinkdrop for local printing and vehicle wraps—the requests that kept coming for years, finally answered. Eliivator for e-commerce coaching, drawn from fifteen-plus years in the trenches. Studiio 3, a full-service branding and creative agency. Each brand pulls from every chapter before it—the precision, the design obsession, the refusal to ship anything that isn't exactly right.
The builder never stops building.
