Wizard Number Plates — Dave Marietti and the Number-Plate Trade That Built BMX

A BMXRacingHistory.com chapter · hosted on Legend Bike Co

A 16-year-old kid looked at the front of his race bike, looked at what Bob Haro was building, and decided he could do that too. He was right. He called the brand Wizard, the plates ran on factory bikes inside a couple of years, and before he was old enough to legally drink he'd already wound that company down and started the next one. That kid was Dave Marietti. The number-plate business was never big money. But it was a doorway, and a whole run of BMX companies walked through it.

Where number plates came from

Before there were brands, there were pie plates. The earliest BMX races in Southern California in the early '70s borrowed straight from motorcycle motocross — a plate up front, a number on it, done. Nobody thought of it as a product. It was just a thing you needed to race.

Then Bob Haro got hold of it. Around 1977 Haro and a handful of other young racers started cutting their own numbers and customizing their plates. Haro took it further than anybody. He was hand-cutting vinyl numbers, sticking them on Preston Petty motocross plates, drilling and riveting the mounts, and by August 1978 Bicycle Motocross Action had his Factory Plates written up in the products column at six bucks a pop. Within a year he was molding his own plastic plates, running ads, and the famous Pro Plate with the lightning bolts was the thing every kid in the country wanted. Haro built that into Haro Designs, and Haro Designs is the company that more or less invented freestyle BMX. All of it started with a number plate. Read that whole story on our Haro history page — it's the backbone this one hangs off.

Here's the part people miss. Haro didn't just make a product. He proved something. He proved a teenage racer with a craft skill and a little nerve could turn the front of a bike into a business. Once that was out in the open, other kids did the math.

The kid who did the math

Dave Marietti was one of them. He was a racer first — a sponsored one. He rode for Torker and for Max, and both of those, in his words, were owned by young entrepreneurs. That stuck with him. A teenager looking at grown men who built their own companies around the sport they loved and flew around the world doing it. To a 15-year-old that's about the coolest thing there is.

So he copied the move he'd watched Haro make. “I also tried to emulate another sponsor of mine, Bob Haro, who made number plates and BMX bikes,” Marietti has said. “So I started making number plates in the beginning. They were called Wizard number plates, which I started at 16 years old.” That's it. That's the origin. A factory racer who'd seen the blueprint and ran it himself, in his teens.

Wizard on the track — 1981

Wizard plates show up in the magazine record in the middle of 1981. According to a number-plate timeline built from period Bicycle Motocross Action issues, Wizard plates start appearing in the magazines around June 1981, made — like Haro's Series One and the MCS Hot Plates — from contoured LDPE plastic that wrapped the bar and bent back toward the rider.

One detail tells you Wizard arrived as a real player and not a backyard one-off. By July 1981, the same record shows the BMX Action magazine Trick Team switching off Haro plates and onto Wizard plates. When the magazine's own demo team rides your gear, you've made it past the kitchen-table stage. By the back half of 1981 the plate market was crowded — Haro, MCS/Hot, Neal's Proto Plates, Zeronine, JT, Uni, Aero coming on at year's end — and Wizard was in that mix, on bikes, in print, in the same window as the biggest names doing it.

Then he wound it down and started Hot Shoppe

Here's the thing about Wizard. Marietti didn't ride it for a decade. He started it at 16 and at 19 he started Hot Shoppe. The number-plate company was the first rung, not the whole ladder.

Hot Shoppe began as a t-shirt and jersey shop doing rubberized heat transfers — pretty much a regular print shop that happened to know the racing world from the inside. The name came from the building. Marietti had been making his number plates in the back half of a tiny bike shop, maybe 600 square feet. When the bike shop folded he leased the whole place, retail and all, and named it after the back room he was always disappearing into. The Hot Shoppe. From plates in the back of a bike store to, today, a company with a couple dozen employees making custom team gear for factory racing programs. Everything made to order. Started by a kid making number plates.

Why a number plate matters

It's easy to look at a plastic plate and shrug. But the number-plate trade is one of the quiet engines of early BMX. It was cheap to get into, it sat right where every camera pointed — the front of the bike — and it let a teenager with some hustle build a brand before the industry had real money in it. Haro is the giant example. Wizard is the proof it wasn't a fluke. A whole little ecosystem grew up in those years, plate makers feeding the same riders and the same magazines, and several of those names went on to bigger things in the sport.

Marietti's still around, still active in BMX, running Hot Shoppe. The Torker DNA, as the folks over there put it, never quite washes out. We tip our hat. The plates were the start of it.

Related Legend Bike Co. chapters

• The History of BMX (1970-1995)
• Haro · Bob Haro — the man and the company that turned number plates into a business
• The Bike Shops That Made BMX — the back-of-the-shop world Wizard was born in

Sources

Primary / first-person: Motorcycle & Powersports News (Babcox Media), “Hot Shoppe Design: Jumping from BMX to Apparel” (Oct. 22, 2010) — Dave Marietti, in his own words, on starting Wizard number plates at 16, racing for Torker and Max, emulating Bob Haro, and founding Hot Shoppe at 19. Period magazine record: “The History of BMX Number Plates — The Early Days,” a custom-plate timeline compiled by Michael Gamstetter from Bicycle Motocross Action issues 1978–1983 (fortyfour16.wordpress.com; republished on bmxaction.org) — documents Wizard plates appearing in magazines June 1981 and the BMX Action Trick Team switching to Wizard plates July 1981, plus the Haro plate timeline. Supporting: Torker Racing, “Custom BMX Number Plates” brand page (torkerracing.com) — on Marietti/Wizard following Haro, and on Hot Shoppe today; uses the “Marrietti” spelling. Hot Shoppe Designs (hotshoppedesigns.com). BMXmuseum.com listings referencing Dave Marietti / Wizard plate items. Spelling note: the founder's surname is rendered “Marietti” in his own trade-press interview and by Hot Shoppe; “Marrietti” appears in some BMX sources.