Noah Gere and Sid Fox didn’t mean to corner the local elementary school fingerboard market a few years ago.

For the uninitiated, a fingerboard looks like a scaled-down skateboard, controlled with two fingers. Like a skateboard, users can learn to do tricks and flip with a fingerboard.

“Me and my friend really liked them and decided, ‘Hey, let’s buy a bunch of these at Target,’” Noah explained.

He and Sid, both of McHenry, began buying the fingerboards in bulk, putting them together and selling customized fingerboards to classmates for $5 each.

Their teachers put a stop to that after Noah took a $20 order in front of them, he said.

“The teachers shut down the fingerboard thing. ... It was a distraction,” Sid said.

Now going by the name CALiCO – a title they pulled out of a dictionary – Noah and Sid are now designing custom full-size skateboard decks and selling them at The Trend Cellar skate store in McHenry and via their CALiCO Skateboards Instagram page.

Noah is 13. Sid is 12. They were in 4th and 5th grades when they started selling to their friends at a private Montessori school.

Carol Chrisman at The Trend Cellar said she’s sold three of the CALiCO decks so far.

The decks – the board part of a skateboard – are selling for $55 each, with $5 from each sale going back to McHenry’s Ryan Bus Zone Skate Park. The price “is a good sweet zone for a deck,” Chrisman said. The other components of a skateboard – the trucks, wheels, bearings, grip tape and hardware – are part of the board’s customization and are also sold at The Trend Cellar.

The boards now at her McHenry store feature a Skate McHenry logo, the CALiCO logo and calico cats.

Skate McHenry – where skaters from around the area meet up at the McHenry park Saturday mornings – and a skate camp put on by McHenry native Miles Canevello this summer are what pushed Noah and Sid into getting the deck company going, Noah said.

“That is when we launched, being able to get sales. Suddenly there was this whole audience of people that we can sell boards to,” Noah said.

Chrisman helped them with preorders, and offered to put the boards in her shop. They are making T-shirts, too, Sid said, and selling those at skating events booths.

Both boys are skaters themselves, both starting when they were 7 or 8 years old.

Sid explained that his dad, Jim Fox, skateboards. Sid skates at the McHenry park, Sunset Skate Park in Lake in the Hills or the indoor Asylum Skate Park in Round Lake.

Noah learned to skateboard with the help of one of his uncles.

“My uncles used to skate and we used to live in California way back in the day,” Noah said. He’d watch skaters outside the hotels they’d stay at while Dad worked, and they watched professional skateboarder Tony Hawk videos together too.

The boys came up with the ideas on their own, Noah’s dad, Trevor Gere, said.

“It was all him and Sid together. We facilitate as needed” like setting up an Instagram account and helping out with credit card orders. “He has his own sub-account, through Chase [Bank],” Gere said.

He freely admits it was his brothers, Noah’s uncles, who got his son into skateboarding.

“I grew up in a family of eight. My older brothers were decent, but I never could do it well. I broke my arm once in the process,” he said.

CALiCO isn’t making big money for the boys – and neither did the fingerboards, Sid said. So far, what little they’ve made has gone back into the business.

“It is a good learning experience,” Trevor Gere said. “I don’t know were he will take it. Now he is passionate about it. But combining something he enjoys with something he is passionate about? We will see.”

Sid added: “We haven’t really thought about what we want it to become. We are happy that we have gotten this far and a bunch of the guys at Skate McHenry are into it. Random people like our boards.”