A snarky remark by my friend Kevin changed everything I thought I knew about surfboards. After parking in front of his house by San Francisco’s Ocean Beach, I unloaded the hefty eight-foot surfboard that guys like us ride when we reach middle age. But Kevin, 62, appeared with a snazzy little 6-foot-4-inch shortboard that looked like something 11-time world champion Kelly Slater would have ridden in his heyday.
Shortboards are like Formula One race cars—insanely fast and fun, but super hard to ride. Kevin and I both gave them up back in the 1990s. And yet, here was Kevin scoffing at my big old-dude board with a friends-don’t-let-friends vibe, and saying, “Is that really what you’re riding?”
I thought he was deluded until we hit the water. Kevin caught a wave and slashed the biggest turn I’d seen him make in decades. We traded boards and I noticed that Kevin’s new toy was wider, thicker, and flatter than the shortboards of the ’90s, which were famously potato-chip-thin and highly curved from nose to tail. It surfed like a dream: I caught a wave, ripped around like an adrenalized kid, and realized that something profound has changed in shortboard design.
I did some Googling over a post-surf burrito and learned that the revolution in contemporary surfboard production has two distinct parts: First, new shaping techniques have made shortboards much easier for older and bigger surfers to enjoy; second, top surfboard companies like Channel Islands, Lost, and Pyzel have pioneered an unusual fusion of artisanal craftsmanship and computerized efficiency to let any surfer anywhere order one of these shortboards perfectly customized to their own skill level, body size, and surf conditions—all for about $1,000.
The design piece of this puzzle turns out to be remarkably similar to what happened with skis in the 1990s, when early parabolic carving boards made learning the sport so much easier that millions of people picked it up. In the case of surfing, board shapers have long known that greater thickness and flatter curve translate into easier riding. But most consumers didn’t want boards like that until about 10 years ago. That’s partly because prior to social media, surfers got their ideas about surfboards from magazine images of young pros so skilled they didn’t need user-friendly designs. Also, unlike centralized ski manufacturing, surfboard production has long been an artisanal cottage industry of independent “shapers” making every board by hand. A surfboard’s highly personal suitability to individual physiques and waves—the perfect shortboard for an NFL-size old-timer in Montauk is too thick for a teen ripper in Huntington Beach—meant most serious surfers ordered custom, sitting first for a heart-to-heart with their shaper and then waiting months or years for the final product.
I thought Kevin was deluded until I watched him catch a wave and slash the biggest turn he’d made in decades.
In the new system, according to Scott Anderson, president of Channel Islands—the maker of Slater’s boards through all of his world titles—veteran shapers collaborate with pro surfers to create standardized surfboard models with distinct performance characteristics. Those models get posted on the shaper’s website with charts showing stock dimensions in four metrics: length, width, thickness, and, crucially, volume measured in liters, which has a big effect on flotation, speed, and control. With just a few thumb taps or a phone call you can order one from a shop like North Carolina’s Real Watersports or California’s Proof Lab, and it will land on your doorstep in days.
But you can geek out too. Online volume calculators allow you to plug in your own body weight, height, age, skill level, and targeted wave size, and generate your own ideal shortboard volume—in my case, 41 liters. That was helpful when I found a Channel Islands model called the Happy. I saw that a 6-foot-4 stock board would come in at 36.6 liters. At that volume, I’d struggle to catch waves.
All I had to do to change that number, it turned out, was click on a tab for “custom build.” Up came numerical-field boxes for all four standard dimensions. By entering different values for the first three—length, thickness, and width—I could change the fourth, volume, until it landed on my desired liters number. Clicking on another tab allowed me to view a three-dimensional image of the board, play around with different tail shapes, and manipulate the whole thing to see it from all directions.
Once I pulled the trigger, Anderson told me, an order sheet would appear at Channel Islands HQ in Carpinteria, Calif. That order sheet would get carried by hand—on paper—to a computerized cutting machine, where an employee would set down a roughly pre-shaped slab of polyurethane foam, enter numerical values generated by my custom order, and have the machine carve it to size. A series of other employees with vivid titles would then spring to action: A shaper would spend about 30 minutes going over the board with 230-grit sandpaper, fine-tuning certain details; a “fin guy” would cut slots on the underside and drop in plastic boxes to support removable fins; a “laminator” and “hot coater” would then wrap the entire board in fiberglass, layer on sealant, and let it cure.
At a time when surfing is already booming (the $4.7 billion global surfboard market is expected to double in the next decade), this blend of high-performance design and custom tailoring is making it easier than ever to ride.
According to Anderson, “there’s probably a top one percent of our direct customers who order at least one board a month. We’ve got customers who’ve ordered hundreds.” These include father-son pairs, Anderson told me, who summer in places like the Hamptons, travel to surf overseas twice a year, and order four or five new boards for every trip.
As for how this new class of surfboards compares to the 100% bespoke boards still handcrafted by local artisans, Chas Smith, publisher of the surf tabloid Beach Grit, says both are “uniquely wonderful” in their own way. “It’s like getting a suit from Dior versus going to Savile Row and getting one custom made. Obviously a custom Savile Row is more unique, but the Dior—it’s like a perfect suit.”
This article appears in the October/November 2023 issue of Fortune with the headline, "Surfboards 2.0."
