A ‘we’ not an ‘I’. We’re a group of SA surfers who have been exploring and surfing the SA Coastline for more than 40 years. We live here, we work here, our kids go to school, play footy, fish and so on here.
If you’re planning on surfing over here, then our boards are on point. We’ve got a great shaping bay, and Forbesy is doing a ripper job getting our boards under the right feet to ensure our intention isn’t better than our ability. Clearly making boards for SA alone isn’t going to get us a wholesale account at Burford, so to prep us for an expanded range, we’ve paid a couple of world class shapers from the East Coast to help us tinker with some files. Also we don’t have the kit to do Epoxy’s so the Glass Lab are helping us with these, and will likely do so until they don’t want too.
It’s tough to do much with Leg Ropes, almost all the good ones come out of Asia and for a fresh business like ours you’d want a double dose of Diazepam to sleep through the night knowing you’ve convinced some mates to try one not out of the box at 6 foot Caves. So we’re getting ours made there as well for now, we’ve spoken and met with a couple of Uni’s and Research Centres exploring the potential of repurposed marine products like kelp etc. We’re real keen, and hopefully we can do something closer to the front end of the curve in the future but for now you’ll get a logo on the cuff, a stubby holder wrap and a cord that is unlikely to break. There’s a bit more scope for development in Deck Pads, we’ve spent heaps of time getting the look and feel of these right but again the manufacturing, composition, glue etc is pretty much along the line of the major players. Our fins are sick, again made overseas but we’ve hooked a couple of gun lads in to help with the development and manufacturing, so these we’re happy to call home. We’ll stay on the job and we’re not in this to follow others, if we can’t do it better in the future, we’ll pivot somewhere new where we can.
It’ll be hard to do anything especially different, certainly in the early days of us having a crack at this, and we’re highly unlikely to roll out a mission statement… but SA was once the epicentre of Australian Surf Manufacturing and whilst there’s more chance of KI sinking and the Mid lighting up than that happening again, we will have a little crack. We will make mistakes, but we won’t bullshit anyone, wax on about our ethical or environmental footprint or use surfers who are heaps better than us to position our gear beyond those who seek it out. What we will do with vigour is champion the surfers of our State, especially the groms, make as much stuff as we can locally that doesn’t break, stay in our lane, pay our bills and do our very best to balance the promotion and protection of our coastline.
If getting free kit means you’re on our team then yes, and it’s a really big one… hopefully it gets smaller as we get better and can convince someone to pay.
HOW DO I GET ON YOUR TEAM?
See above
