Riders of the ‘Storm

I wish I’d snapped a picture of it.

Middle-aged guy, beleaguered look on his face, tween daughter fecklessly trying to help, overburdened flat cart, the two of them trying—unsuccessfully—to push their way out of the Southern California Costco with a baker’s dozen of Wavestorms that wouldn’t cooperate. That’s thirteen 8-footers stacked in two columns on one cart, each of them taking turns alternately falling off the flat cart one by one, the daughter scurrying to scoop them up, the man cursing under his breath, the Costco lady not helping the process by meticulously counting the now-wobbling number of boards on the flat cart before signing off on the receipt with a flick of the highlighter in her right hand, the line behind the man swelling with irritated people, his face in turn swelling red, me wondering how far he had to go before he reached his car in the parking lot, and if I had time to snap a picture.  

My wife turned to me as I whipped out my phone. 

“What’s that all about?” she asked. “Why does somebody need that many of those things?” 

My wife doesn’t surf, has no interest in surfing, and yet her phrasing—“that many,” “those things”—had her saying a lot more about the modern state of surfing than she ever could have known. 

The Wavestorm, of course, is a surfboard, in a manner of speaking. 8 feet of hard-bottomed, soft-topped foam that one purchases at any number of big box retailers—primarily the wholesaler Costco, but also The Home Depot and others, by pulling them from a bin that more accurately resembles a cubed pallet. For $99, the Wavestorm is yours, and if you break it, which you might, you can return it for a complete exchange at Costco.

And plenty of people are buying them. While there is no independent data analysis, Wavestorm’s parent company, AGIT, based out of Irvine, California, estimated that it sold more than 100,000 Wavestorms in 2016 through Costco alone. Like that, and not surprisingly, the board has become the number one selling surfboard in the world, selling more than five times the nearest traditional surfboard. 

And yet many within the insular confines of the surfboard industry do seem surprised by this. Or at least dismayed. In the fall of 2015, the Wavestorm phenomenon was reported in the glossy Bloomberg Business Week, which wrote an article that threw out, perhaps gleefully, some down-the-middle reporting about the fact that a soft-topped foam board unavailable in surf shops was now the world’s best-selling surfboard. 

As a service to readers goes, Bloomberg Business Week’s “bottom line” feature seems in lockstep with the target demo’s constant yearning for the upshot. In keeping with its readership’s self-identified POV of being time-impacted businessmen eager for straight facts and the effect those facts might have on markets, etcetera, the magazine provides its readership with a one-sentence summation of any given article. In October of 2015, the magazine summed up the state of the surfboard building industry thusly: “A Taiwanese manufacturer and a Canadian toy executive joined forces to make a low-price surfboard that’s a best-seller in the U.S.” 

If that headline (er, Bottom Line) reads post-apocalyptic, or at least antithetical to everything we’ve been taught to believe about the surfboard industry, that’s because it is. In an industry that has its roots in being built methodically for surfers and by surfers, the idea that one would intentionally come in from the outside and begin developing products with the expressed idea of bypassing surfers, surf shops, and the surf industry, is anathema. 

Or was. 

But as the surf industry struggles to find its long-term feet in a landscape that has—thanks to shifting interests and technologies—seen drastic restructuring of its core companies (think Billabong and Quiksilver), its primary competitive vehicle (the WSL), its media, and, with the advent of viable wave pool technology, even the very idea of what constitutes a ridable wave, it’s no wonder that the surfboard and the surfboard marketplace would not be immune to changing surf-culture mores. 

To wit: The money quote in that Bloomberg article comes about halfway through, and is rendered by Wavestorm co-founder Matt Zilinskas, the Canadian toy executive in question, who told the magazine, “We don’t want to mess around collecting money from little surf shops and sporting goods stores. Margins are slim at Costco, but we pump out volume and get paid on time.”

Of course this is heresy to the surf industry, which has historically revered the “core” among all else, and which has its origin story rooted deeply in surfers making products for surfers by surfers. In the case of so-called hard goods, though—surfboards, fins, etcetera—the surf industry has had a historically difficult time monetizing these commodities. The margin on the bare-bones, stock-in-trade, three-hundred-dollar, six-foot thruster was already small when Gordon “Grubby” Clark shut his doors on Clark Foam in 2005, and the ensuing decade-long scramble to find suitable replacement foam blanks helped to encourage a reconsideration of price points and even marketing for what constitutes entry-level boards. Today, an off-the-rack thruster will come with a too-long sticker listing a series of volume-based statistics that didn’t exist ten years ago (most of us might still cock an ear when discussing “liters”), and it will also cost you $700.

But you don’t have to be a salt-hardened purist to know that there’s a qualitative difference between that board and the 8-foot foamy that you buy between hot dogs at the big box. Ours is a culture that believes (both for better and for worse) that inanimate objects like surfboards have animate qualities like souls, and so that board you buy at the shop down the street will either be shaped by hand, or shaped by a machine and glassed by hand—in either case, by surfers—and then stocked in a surf shop that employs surfers who will discuss the various merits and demerits of the board with you as regards to its abilities in the local wave conditions, all while that same employee screws in a set of carbon fiber fins for you, as you both admire the board over a pair of saddle horses.

Still and all, 700 bucks is 700 bucks. And so when your wife’s cousin, say, decides in mid-July that she wants to “get into surfing,” and “what’s a good board to buy,” and “oh, by the way, do I need a wetsuit to surf around here,” why wouldn’t you send her to Costco to purchase an 8-foot soft-top for $99? Or, put another way, who knows what my man with the flat cart was doing with 13 Wavestorms in late December, but I’d venture a guess that the extended family had a lovely surfing holiday. 

After all, for the price of two traditional boards, he was able to assemble his own flotilla, all while knowing that if he breaks any of them, he’s coming back to pick up a replacement for free. Looked at in that way, it’s no wonder that the Wavestorm—a product that’s been on the market for less than a decade—has become the number one selling piece of surf equipment in the world, going away. 

Why wouldn’t you send [your wife’s cousin] to Costco to purchase an 8-foot soft top for $99?

*

Either in spite of or because of all of the change that’s happened in surfing in the last half decade—magazines folding, companies folding, the World Tour changing both hands and formats several times over—our sport is, without a doubt, one of the most conservative subcultures in the world. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is up to the individual to decide, but there’s no doubt that as surfers we’re loathe to change, strictly adherent to tradition. So whenever things like this happen, whenever new trends in the sport are driven by outsiders, we tend to view those people as carpetbagging interlopers, and we tend to view those trends as “kooky” and adjacent and other. 

And so Zilinskas’ summing up of his company’s ambitions—not wanting to “mess around” with “little surf shops,” and his praising of “pumping out volume” and “getting paid on time”—can accurately be construed as a capitalistic affront to the traditional surf business model. 

But why should we care, and why is that a bad thing? 

In thinking about reporting this piece out, I mapped out a number of people I wanted to talk to—boardmakers, retailers, somebody who loved the Wavestorm, someone who hated it, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. To that end, I sent a note to a buddy who is both a board maker and a retailer who owns a mom and pop shop, letting him know what I was writing and would he like to chat? 

The note I got back came swiftly and was concise. “Ugh,” he wrote, in the parlance of our times. “I’ll just come off like an a-hole. There is no way to win the Wavestorm debate.” 

This was par for the course as I talked to friends in the industry. I went to another friend’s house—a house he paid for by selling surfboards—and stood with him in his driveway as he and his neighbor, a local surfer, performed mental gymnastics to try to think about Wavestorms in a perhaps-benevolent and not-crotchety way. 

“They’re just kind of…lame,” I heard my buddy say, and this I expected. But then I asked, “Have you ever ridden one?” 

“Yeah,” my buddy said, gleefully, motioning to his side yard. “I’ve got one on the side of the house. They’re actually super fun!” 

So what is “the Wavestorm debate?” And why would one need to do work to achieve something like equanimity toward something as innocuous as a soft-topped surfboard? 

The answer is not benevolent at all, nor does it speak to the better angels of our nature. The answer is that, for years, soft-tops were the purview of surf schools and kooks, and the boards are simply kooky, and they’re built by kooks and for kooks. And we don’t like kooks.

That’s the not-polite answer. 

But that might be changing. 

If you go down to your local blackball beachbreak mid-summer, you’ll see nothing but surfers on softtops. Blackball beaters. That’s been going on for years, now, and given rise to a number of companies that specialize in small foam-top products for just such an occasion. 

It’s from this ethos, too, that a new generation of would-be cool hunters has adopted the 8-foot Wavestorm as a board of choice. And not just as a goof, or as the ironic zenith (nadir?) of recent hipster-cum-surfer trends in the sport. Instead, you’ll catch some red hot surfers embracing the board almost in the manner of modern-day Luddites, working against the idea of technology generally to pit their skills against their friends: If everyone has the same equipment, if the board itself becomes the control, then the only variable is the surfer. 

Of course, it’s not a zero-sum game, and there are plenty of optimists within the surfboard industry who will tell you that a rising tide floats all boats. There’s a clip on YouTube that adequately sums up the hope that many in the industry have for the Wavestorm, even if they maintain this hope through gritted teeth. It’s Jamie O’Brien, circa early 2010s, dropping into a medium-sized wave at Backdoor on an 8-foot Wavestorm, setting his rail, turning right, and then hopping in one fell, graceful swoop onto a six-foot shortboard he has held in his hands, ditching the Wavestorm, and unleashing a couple of modern cracks before the closeout session. 

If Costco keeps churning out 100,000 Wavestorms a year, some percentage of those would-be surfers are going to stick with things, and will eventually come looking for a “real” board from a “real” shaper at a “real” shop. The hope is that the Wavestorm can provide a 100-dollar on-ramp into the sport. 

Whether or not that will happen remained to be seen. For now, the only thing that’s certain is that they’ll keep pumping out volume, with an eye to getting paid on time.

…some percentage of those would-be surfers are going to stick with things…and come looking for a ‘real’ board.

[Feature image: Illustration by Scott Chambers.]