[Article] Shape et Mondialisation
PL (Adresse IP journalisée) - sam. 25 août 2018 11:37:57
Sou. : [www.surfer.com]
What Do Imported Surfboards Mean for the Future of Our Culture ?
Justin Housman
This article originally appeared in SURFER Magazine, Volume 59, Issue 4. Subscribe here.
The province of Nonthaburi, Thailand, lies just north of Bangkok and for many years the area has mostly been known for producing durian, a thorny-rind-covered fruit that tastes very good, but smells so much like rotten garbage that it's banned from many hotels and forms of public transit across Southeast Asia. In recent decades, commercial sprawl spreading out from Bangkok has crept into Nonthaburi, with condominiums, office towers and industrial parks sprouting everywhere. The city of Nonthaburi, the province's urban center, is really just a suburb of Bangkok, and home to some 265,000 people living along the winding Chao Phraya River as it snakes its way south, draining into the Bay of Thailand.
Every single day, some of those 265,000 people, who may have once worked harvesting and packaging smelly-but-delicious durian, now head into the city's industrial park to join a manufacturing assembly line building a product most of the workers know little about, save assembly instructions, and few, if any, will ever use. Those products are some of the world's most technologically-advanced surfboards, built at Firewire's Nonthaburi factory.
Firewire's Thailand plant is a massive, 98,000-square-foot facility composed of two separate buildings that sit some 100 meters apart. Workers, forklifts and loading trucks scramble everywhere. It's loud. Six huge computer numerical control (CNC) machines constantly whine as they saw their way through expanded polystyrene foam blanks (the kind that looks like Styrofoam) that will eventually become surfboards under the Firewire, Slater Designs, and Tomo Designs labels. There is a separate room for blank production; Firewire doesn't blow their own foam there but they do insist on assembling the constituent parts of what can sometimes be very complicated and unconventional blanks. Another room houses the machines for vacuum sealing finished boards.
The state-of-the-art factory employs 300 Nonthaburians, and they'd probably be surprised to learn that the surfboards they produce are "Chinese popouts" ("popout," of course, being the derogatory term for surfboards made in large quantities overseas, mostly through the aid of machines). Or at least they are according to many domestically- produced surfboard supporters in the U.S., disdainful of the mass-produced imports shipped to American surf shops. For American workers whose livelihoods depend on a thriving surfboard industry here in the States, imported surfboards are perceived as an existential threat.
As this piece is being written, in fact, Peter Schroff, a surfboard shaper/performance artist in Southern California is using his social media accounts to playfully mock Mark Price, CEO of Firewire, and Kelly Slater, part-owner of Firewire, as greedy capitalists for producing surfboards in Thailand, where they save huge amounts of money in labor costs. Schroff is certainly not alone.
An Instagram music video from a San Clemente-based surfboard company called Edit Surfboards is currently being shared thousands of times over. The video, backed by a catchy pop-punk theme song, curses surfboards made by Firewire and Haydenshapes (also made in Thailand), among other mass-manufactured surfboard companies, for being "made in China." A crude plea to draw attention to the plight of domestic boardmakers.
Misattributed Asian countries aside, many domestic surfboard makers--and the cottage industry of glassers, sanders, airbrushers and mom and pop surf shops they support--are concerned about the intrusion of imported surfboards, especially as those boards have increased in quality and acceptance. Where it was once considered the height of uncoolness to walk across the sand with a machine-made board from overseas, most surfers don't think twice about owning a board like that today. Many in the domestic surfboard business feel the rug being pulled from beneath them. They don't think surfers or the surf media are paying enough attention. Overseas board builders, meanwhile, are excited about expanding their businesses, making surfboard shaping more efficient, and bringing high-quality boards to the surfing public at more affordable prices.
The future of the surfboard industry in the U.S. is murky, to say the least, but what's clear is that the market is rapidly changing, and surfers are beginning to ask themselves some hard questions about what they value when it comes to buying a surfboard. Do we let market forces run their course and embrace more-efficiently-made craft at the lowest possible price? Or do we value the culture around domestic board building enough to support it into the future?
Mark Price is a deeply-tanned man with a debonair sweep of silver hair and a mild South African accent that's faded from years living in California. Sitting across from his desk at Firewire's Carlsbad HQ, Price looks and sounds like a born surf industry executive, and in a sense, he was. An excellent surfer, Price competed on the South African pro tour in the late '70s and early '80s, before hanging up his contest jersey for a career in surf business marketing. He started at Gotcha, moved on to found the (now defunct) Tavarua apparel company, then had stints at Rip Curl and Reef before he left to help kick-start Firewire in 2006. He's been the company's CEO since 2007.
While Firewire's offices are in San Diego, their boards are all produced at their Nonthaburi facility. One of the first things Price told me during a recent conversation was how proud he is of how the Thailand factory is operated and how smoothly the place is run. He seems intent on dispelling any myths floating around out there about shoddy working conditions, or poorly paid and mistreated labor (though the company declined to provide photos of the factory floor when asked).
Price says that Firewire has instituted a profit-sharing system for their workers with a financial management team in place to help the employees decide how best to use the money. "It's not technically a union, but it's like a union," he said. Firewire aims to get their factory Fair Trade certified by 2019, a certification system built on ensuring workers earn a decent wage, working in safe conditions, in factories that aren't environmentally ruinous. It's a process that's been expensive for Firewire to pursue, but one that's quite important to Price. "Not many factories achieve Fair Trade certification, whether making surfboards or otherwise," he told me. But why Thailand? What's there that can't be replicated somewhere else? I put the questions to Price.
"Manufacturing is a pillar of the Thailand economy and has been for a long time," Price said. "The people who run our factory are used to operating manufacturing facilities. And based on our commitment to increased sustainability, everybody who works here, from the people on the manufacturing line to managers and executives are always thinking of ways we can save money and reduce waste."
Then of course, there's the cost. Firewire once produced surfboards in the U.S., but the expense of manufacturing boards domestically pushed the prices well above what customers were used to spending on boards. When they debuted, Firewire was introducing new technology with their odd-looking parabolic stringers wrapped around EPS blanks--space age, at the time--and, Price says, they knew that to elbow their way into the market, they had to bring down costs. Firewire is also on the forefront of sustainable surfboard production, and, as of now, the materials required to adhere to standards like environmental non-profit Sustainable Surf 's celebrated ECOBOARD program are more expensive than traditional foam, fiberglass and resin. Plain and simple, it's cheaper for Firewire to make surfboards in Thailand and ship them overseas, so it's cheaper for you to buy one in California or Florida or New York.
Plus, surfboards made in Thailand for export to international markets don't have import duties slapped on them when they arrive in U.S. ports the way many other consumer goods do. Lots of other outdoorsy products have big tariffs imposed when they reach our shores. Ski gear, for example, can have tariffs as high as 27 percent. Hiking boots are even worse with a 31 percent duty imposed. There's no such impediment to importing surfboards into this country.
I asked Price to imagine how different their business would be if it was operated in, say, Southern California. "If we relocated back to the U.S. we simply couldn't make our boards as well as we'd like and survive as a business," Price said. "Well, not based on the accepted ceiling of price points in the U.S."
Hayden Cox, owner of Haydenshapes, had the same basic motivation when he decided to start building his boards in Thailand. Cox is a young, ambitious entrepreneur who's hit on a winning combination for his surfboard business: easy-to-ride performance boards visibly surfed by a stable of hip riders like Craig Anderson and Creed McTaggart, built on a massive, economically-efficient scale. He still makes a portion of the boards he ships worldwide at his Sydney, Australia, facility in the suburb of Mona Vale, but 65 percent of his boards, and most of the Haydenshapes you see on racks in surf shops, are built in Chonburi, Thailand, at the Cobra International manufacturing plant and distributed by a company called Global Surf Industries.
"My Mona Vale facility wasn't allowing me to make enough boards to penetrate the European and U.S. markets," Cox told me when I pressed him on why he chose Thailand for his factory. "I wanted my boards to reach a global audience. Cobra's been a good manufacturer for a lot of different surfboard brands for many years. It was a great way to scale up, but the production line is identical to the one in Mona Vale."
I put the same question to Cox about how different his business would be if he built all of his boards in the U.S., or at his Sydney HQ. As with Firewire, cost and the sheer scale of production are deal breakers for Cox.
"The boards we make at Mona Vale retail for about $100 more than boards made in Thailand," Cox explained. "But the biggest difference is we don't have the workforce in place to build the quantity of boards we need for a global market. Regardless of where the boards are being built, though, the quality of the product comes first, and I focus on that, heavily. If I wasn't able to make high-quality boards with GSI and Cobra, I'd find somewhere else."
Cox is quick to point out that even though his boards are manufactured in an overseas factory, he still has control over the entire operation, with 100 percent ownership. He likes to think of Haydenshapes as a small, family-run business at heart (his wife Danielle helps with day-to-day operations), just one that's just scaled way, way up.
Using Thailand as a base, manufacturers like Firewire and Haydenshapes can make huge quantities of surfboards for far less money than they would in the U.S., freeing them to experiment with unusual materials and construction techniques. They've tapped into the neoliberal system of globalization in the same way as most of the companies that make everything else we buy. Plus, any significant gap in quality that once existed between boards made in the U.S. and those made in Thailand has all but evaporated, provided you like riding boards made from EPS foam and epoxy resin, the materials favored by companies like Firewire and Haydenshapes.
But not everybody thinks the globalized model of surfboard building is a good thing for the surfing community.
“I believe that in five years time, the big overseas board builders will stop selling their boards in surf shops altogether," Dennis Jarvis, owner of Spyder Surfboards, told me recently. "These brands will have their own warehouses in places like L.A. and San Diego, and when you order a board it will be delivered to your house from their warehouse just like something you bought on Amazon, cutting out the surf shop middle man. That scares the crap out of me."
Jarvis started shaping boards under the Spyder label in 1978. Today he shapes about 1,000 surfboards every year, down from the tens of thousands he made at his peak in the '90s, when surfers like Tom Curren were placing orders. Jarvis once employed 15 ghost shapers when business was rocking, but he's scaled back and now makes every Spyder surfboard himself. He owns three surf shops in the South Bay area of L.A., and as the surfboards manufactured in factories overseas have encroached further and further into the American market, Jarvis has grown increasingly concerned.
His response will seem familiar if you've paid much attention to the decimated steel or coal industries in the U.S.--he favors a protectionist approach built on establishing an import duty on surfboards shipped into the country from abroad. A 60 percent tariff, to be exact. Jarvis sees a hugely unfair advantage for board builders who've offshored production to countries where labor and business costs are so much cheaper.
"All I'm asking for is an increase in import duty to balance out the cost," he explained. "I don't hate the guys in the import surfboard business--I'm a capitalist too, I get it. I just want to level the playing field. I can't compete with surfboards that don't pay an import duty and that cost less to manufacture than boards we build here at home."
But compete he must, so in order to get customers in the doors of his shops, Jarvis has begun buying Wavestorms at Costco and selling them at cost, and has even brought in cheaply produced, high-performance boards from Asia just to attract beginning surfers, who, according to Jarvis, have flocked to inexpensively-made, imported surfboards. He's aware that he's undercutting his own argument by doing that, but he sees it as a necessary survival tactic.
Jarvis is particularly wary of big boardmakers establishing a consignment model for selling in surf shops, allowing shops to stock well-known board labels without actually having to purchase the boards for their inventory. Instead, big brands can simply flood a shop with surfboards, only taking payment once a customer actually swipes a credit card, with the retailer getting a small cut. It's good for the retailer, but terrible for small-scale domestic shapers, as most can't afford to produce massive quantities of boards with nothing upfront. Jarvis sees large-scale consignment as the potential death knell for local board builders.
During last May's Boardroom surfboard show in Del Mar, California, attended by mostly domestic surfboard shapers, Jarvis went around collecting signatures for a petition calling for a surfboard import duty. He didn't expect much interest. "I thought I'd get dagger eyes and maybe 100 signatures," he said. Instead, Jarvis quickly collected more than 400 signatures and ran out of petitions by the first afternoon.
He next plans to develop a website with an online petition so board builders from across the country, or even concerned customers, can sign on. Jarvis hopes to use crowd-funding to help pay for a lobbyist to draw congressional attention to what he sees as a wildly-unfair system.
"The import surfboard companies wouldn't be so successful if the average board buyer cared about where their boards were made," said Jarvis. "But I think if customers in the U.S. really understood what was at stake, and how livelihoods are threatened for so many people in the surfboard industry here at home--shapers, glassers, sanders, their neighbors, the guys next to them in the lineup--I think they'd care a lot more about who's making their surfboards."
Jarvis looks around and sees middle-aged sanders and glassers who are being put out of work as the industry changes. He fears for what his colleagues in the board building industry will do if the market dries up. "I want my kids to take over my shop," he said. "I want to protect a boardmaking community we built here by hand."
Jarvis has an ally in Schroff, who's made an art form out of protesting oversees manufacturing. If you've seen video of a large, middle-aged man twirling about a parking lot wielding a chainsaw like Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, then mowing an imported board into shreds, you've seen his work. He's declared himself something of a foot soldier in the battle to keep imported boards at bay. His tactics mostly consist of controversial social media posts that Photoshop Price and Slater in various sorts of strange, compromising situations and poses meant to shock and poke fun at what Schroff considers a greedy grab at profits above all else ("I've gotten past personalizing the attacks, but I get annoyed by the outright lies and misinformation," Price told me in response to Schroff).
Schroff began shaping boards professionally in the Newport Beach, California, area in the '70s, then abandoned the craft to work in clothing design and as a professional artist. About five years ago, he picked up a planer again and was shocked at how the surf industry had changed.
"I jumped back into the shaping world, saw a glut of imported surfboards, and thought 'Holy shit! Surfing's turning into a generic sport,'" Schroff told me recently from his San Pedro home. "The lifestyle's melting away."
Schroff sees mass-produced import boards as a direct threat to a surf culture that he's always thought revolved around the artistry of surfboards, built with care, supporting a homegrown industry of craftsmen and surf shops. "I'm just hoping to preserve the art of surf culture. Surf culture is everything to me, and has been since I was 11 years old."
"In five years there won't be any middle ground left," Schroff said of the future of the surfboard market. "There will be rich and there will be poor, but that's it."
But why should an average customer with no skin in the boardmaking game really care where their board comes from? It's obvious why domestic shapers are alarmed by offshore board production, but for a surfer who works outside the industry, who just wants a decent board that rides well so he or she can surf three times a week, what's at stake for them?
"The surfboard is the nucleus of a $200 billion industry (think of entertainment, film, TV, snowboarding, skateboarding, fashion and so many other tributaries that stem from the surfboard)," Jarvis wrote in an email. "If the center of our lifestyle suddenly becomes as mundane as a plastic Barbie Doll, then we have to realize there will be some sort of paradigm shift. And a good portion of those people affected by this shift will pay a price."
“The fundamental problem isn't domestic versus import," Price told me when asked about the concerns held by domestic shapers about imported boards. "There have just been too many board builders out there making boards for too few customers, and too many boards sold factory direct which drives down margins for everyone."
Price looks at the domestic surfboard market and sees a vast field of shapers all producing similar boards at the same low price point. Unless those shapers offer something unique, they're going to struggle in a globalized surfboard market and likely be left far behind. And there's no way we're putting that globalization genie back in the bottle.
"Ultimately, this all comes down to innovation and uniqueness," he said. "I'd argue there's a reason you don't see a shaper like Danny Hess [the San Francisco shaper known for building entirely-wooden surfcraft] out there screaming about import boards on social media."
Price is likely right. Jarvis and Schroff both told me they expect there to be a two-tiered hierarchy of surfboard manufacturing in the future without import duties being imposed on surfboards. On the low-end will be relatively inexpensive boards made offshore or in huge quantities in domestic factories, easy to purchase online, shipped to your home, or bought on consignment in a big surf shop.
Then there will be artisanal shapers making expensive, unique surfboards by hand, for discerning buyers who don't mind paying $1,000 and up for a quality craft that will last. These shapers aren't competing against mass-produced board builders. These are your Tyler Warrens, Danny Hesses, Ryan Lovelaces and Chris Christensons, among many others. Surf shops that offer these kinds of locally-made, high-end surfboards don't seem particularly threatened by Asian imports.
"There will always be a place for well-made artisanal boards," Price said.
"I'm philosophically opposed to import popouts more than I'm economically concerned about them," J.P. St. Pierre, owner of the iconic Surfy Surfy shop in Leucadia, California, told me when I popped into his store recently. "I don't think the rise of Asian imports really affects what I do here." Surrounded by "Support Surfer Labor" stickers and beautiful, hand-made fish, mid-lengths and longboards, St. Pierre's customers probably aren't the target market for companies like Firewire and Haydenshapes anyway.
"When Surftech [one of the original Asian-manufactured composite board companies] came out years ago, everybody thought it meant the end of real surfboards," St. Pierre said, gesturing around at racks of handmade boards. "And, yet, here we are."
There are analogies here to the resurgence of vinyl records, or the rise in publication of high-end print journals. The digital revolution brought drastic shocks to the music and publishing industries, crushing the economic structure that had been the foundation of those businesses for decades. In their wake, high-quality products that fetch much higher prices are sold to smaller, boutique markets, while the masses are served by a hyper-efficient, cost-effective model. Without something like protective tariffs on import boards, it's difficult to see any way around this structure applying to surfboards in our immediate future as well.
Globalization remains an undefeated force in world commerce. Firewire and Haydenshapes certainly aren't the only boardmakers to manufacture at least a portion of their surfboards in Asian factories--many cherished American companies that mass-produce boards have offshored at least some of their production. Surfing isn't immune from the same economic forces that have changed how we buy everything else in our lives. Now it's up to surfers to decide if we want our boards to be simply another thing we consume.
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I DROWNED IN THE SEAS AND I HAVE BECOME ALL SEAS. David Tibet
What Do Imported Surfboards Mean for the Future of Our Culture ?
Justin Housman
This article originally appeared in SURFER Magazine, Volume 59, Issue 4. Subscribe here.
The province of Nonthaburi, Thailand, lies just north of Bangkok and for many years the area has mostly been known for producing durian, a thorny-rind-covered fruit that tastes very good, but smells so much like rotten garbage that it's banned from many hotels and forms of public transit across Southeast Asia. In recent decades, commercial sprawl spreading out from Bangkok has crept into Nonthaburi, with condominiums, office towers and industrial parks sprouting everywhere. The city of Nonthaburi, the province's urban center, is really just a suburb of Bangkok, and home to some 265,000 people living along the winding Chao Phraya River as it snakes its way south, draining into the Bay of Thailand.
Every single day, some of those 265,000 people, who may have once worked harvesting and packaging smelly-but-delicious durian, now head into the city's industrial park to join a manufacturing assembly line building a product most of the workers know little about, save assembly instructions, and few, if any, will ever use. Those products are some of the world's most technologically-advanced surfboards, built at Firewire's Nonthaburi factory.
Firewire's Thailand plant is a massive, 98,000-square-foot facility composed of two separate buildings that sit some 100 meters apart. Workers, forklifts and loading trucks scramble everywhere. It's loud. Six huge computer numerical control (CNC) machines constantly whine as they saw their way through expanded polystyrene foam blanks (the kind that looks like Styrofoam) that will eventually become surfboards under the Firewire, Slater Designs, and Tomo Designs labels. There is a separate room for blank production; Firewire doesn't blow their own foam there but they do insist on assembling the constituent parts of what can sometimes be very complicated and unconventional blanks. Another room houses the machines for vacuum sealing finished boards.
The state-of-the-art factory employs 300 Nonthaburians, and they'd probably be surprised to learn that the surfboards they produce are "Chinese popouts" ("popout," of course, being the derogatory term for surfboards made in large quantities overseas, mostly through the aid of machines). Or at least they are according to many domestically- produced surfboard supporters in the U.S., disdainful of the mass-produced imports shipped to American surf shops. For American workers whose livelihoods depend on a thriving surfboard industry here in the States, imported surfboards are perceived as an existential threat.
As this piece is being written, in fact, Peter Schroff, a surfboard shaper/performance artist in Southern California is using his social media accounts to playfully mock Mark Price, CEO of Firewire, and Kelly Slater, part-owner of Firewire, as greedy capitalists for producing surfboards in Thailand, where they save huge amounts of money in labor costs. Schroff is certainly not alone.
An Instagram music video from a San Clemente-based surfboard company called Edit Surfboards is currently being shared thousands of times over. The video, backed by a catchy pop-punk theme song, curses surfboards made by Firewire and Haydenshapes (also made in Thailand), among other mass-manufactured surfboard companies, for being "made in China." A crude plea to draw attention to the plight of domestic boardmakers.
Misattributed Asian countries aside, many domestic surfboard makers--and the cottage industry of glassers, sanders, airbrushers and mom and pop surf shops they support--are concerned about the intrusion of imported surfboards, especially as those boards have increased in quality and acceptance. Where it was once considered the height of uncoolness to walk across the sand with a machine-made board from overseas, most surfers don't think twice about owning a board like that today. Many in the domestic surfboard business feel the rug being pulled from beneath them. They don't think surfers or the surf media are paying enough attention. Overseas board builders, meanwhile, are excited about expanding their businesses, making surfboard shaping more efficient, and bringing high-quality boards to the surfing public at more affordable prices.
The future of the surfboard industry in the U.S. is murky, to say the least, but what's clear is that the market is rapidly changing, and surfers are beginning to ask themselves some hard questions about what they value when it comes to buying a surfboard. Do we let market forces run their course and embrace more-efficiently-made craft at the lowest possible price? Or do we value the culture around domestic board building enough to support it into the future?
Mark Price is a deeply-tanned man with a debonair sweep of silver hair and a mild South African accent that's faded from years living in California. Sitting across from his desk at Firewire's Carlsbad HQ, Price looks and sounds like a born surf industry executive, and in a sense, he was. An excellent surfer, Price competed on the South African pro tour in the late '70s and early '80s, before hanging up his contest jersey for a career in surf business marketing. He started at Gotcha, moved on to found the (now defunct) Tavarua apparel company, then had stints at Rip Curl and Reef before he left to help kick-start Firewire in 2006. He's been the company's CEO since 2007.
While Firewire's offices are in San Diego, their boards are all produced at their Nonthaburi facility. One of the first things Price told me during a recent conversation was how proud he is of how the Thailand factory is operated and how smoothly the place is run. He seems intent on dispelling any myths floating around out there about shoddy working conditions, or poorly paid and mistreated labor (though the company declined to provide photos of the factory floor when asked).
Price says that Firewire has instituted a profit-sharing system for their workers with a financial management team in place to help the employees decide how best to use the money. "It's not technically a union, but it's like a union," he said. Firewire aims to get their factory Fair Trade certified by 2019, a certification system built on ensuring workers earn a decent wage, working in safe conditions, in factories that aren't environmentally ruinous. It's a process that's been expensive for Firewire to pursue, but one that's quite important to Price. "Not many factories achieve Fair Trade certification, whether making surfboards or otherwise," he told me. But why Thailand? What's there that can't be replicated somewhere else? I put the questions to Price.
"Manufacturing is a pillar of the Thailand economy and has been for a long time," Price said. "The people who run our factory are used to operating manufacturing facilities. And based on our commitment to increased sustainability, everybody who works here, from the people on the manufacturing line to managers and executives are always thinking of ways we can save money and reduce waste."
Then of course, there's the cost. Firewire once produced surfboards in the U.S., but the expense of manufacturing boards domestically pushed the prices well above what customers were used to spending on boards. When they debuted, Firewire was introducing new technology with their odd-looking parabolic stringers wrapped around EPS blanks--space age, at the time--and, Price says, they knew that to elbow their way into the market, they had to bring down costs. Firewire is also on the forefront of sustainable surfboard production, and, as of now, the materials required to adhere to standards like environmental non-profit Sustainable Surf 's celebrated ECOBOARD program are more expensive than traditional foam, fiberglass and resin. Plain and simple, it's cheaper for Firewire to make surfboards in Thailand and ship them overseas, so it's cheaper for you to buy one in California or Florida or New York.
Plus, surfboards made in Thailand for export to international markets don't have import duties slapped on them when they arrive in U.S. ports the way many other consumer goods do. Lots of other outdoorsy products have big tariffs imposed when they reach our shores. Ski gear, for example, can have tariffs as high as 27 percent. Hiking boots are even worse with a 31 percent duty imposed. There's no such impediment to importing surfboards into this country.
I asked Price to imagine how different their business would be if it was operated in, say, Southern California. "If we relocated back to the U.S. we simply couldn't make our boards as well as we'd like and survive as a business," Price said. "Well, not based on the accepted ceiling of price points in the U.S."
Hayden Cox, owner of Haydenshapes, had the same basic motivation when he decided to start building his boards in Thailand. Cox is a young, ambitious entrepreneur who's hit on a winning combination for his surfboard business: easy-to-ride performance boards visibly surfed by a stable of hip riders like Craig Anderson and Creed McTaggart, built on a massive, economically-efficient scale. He still makes a portion of the boards he ships worldwide at his Sydney, Australia, facility in the suburb of Mona Vale, but 65 percent of his boards, and most of the Haydenshapes you see on racks in surf shops, are built in Chonburi, Thailand, at the Cobra International manufacturing plant and distributed by a company called Global Surf Industries.
"My Mona Vale facility wasn't allowing me to make enough boards to penetrate the European and U.S. markets," Cox told me when I pressed him on why he chose Thailand for his factory. "I wanted my boards to reach a global audience. Cobra's been a good manufacturer for a lot of different surfboard brands for many years. It was a great way to scale up, but the production line is identical to the one in Mona Vale."
I put the same question to Cox about how different his business would be if he built all of his boards in the U.S., or at his Sydney HQ. As with Firewire, cost and the sheer scale of production are deal breakers for Cox.
"The boards we make at Mona Vale retail for about $100 more than boards made in Thailand," Cox explained. "But the biggest difference is we don't have the workforce in place to build the quantity of boards we need for a global market. Regardless of where the boards are being built, though, the quality of the product comes first, and I focus on that, heavily. If I wasn't able to make high-quality boards with GSI and Cobra, I'd find somewhere else."
Cox is quick to point out that even though his boards are manufactured in an overseas factory, he still has control over the entire operation, with 100 percent ownership. He likes to think of Haydenshapes as a small, family-run business at heart (his wife Danielle helps with day-to-day operations), just one that's just scaled way, way up.
Using Thailand as a base, manufacturers like Firewire and Haydenshapes can make huge quantities of surfboards for far less money than they would in the U.S., freeing them to experiment with unusual materials and construction techniques. They've tapped into the neoliberal system of globalization in the same way as most of the companies that make everything else we buy. Plus, any significant gap in quality that once existed between boards made in the U.S. and those made in Thailand has all but evaporated, provided you like riding boards made from EPS foam and epoxy resin, the materials favored by companies like Firewire and Haydenshapes.
But not everybody thinks the globalized model of surfboard building is a good thing for the surfing community.
“I believe that in five years time, the big overseas board builders will stop selling their boards in surf shops altogether," Dennis Jarvis, owner of Spyder Surfboards, told me recently. "These brands will have their own warehouses in places like L.A. and San Diego, and when you order a board it will be delivered to your house from their warehouse just like something you bought on Amazon, cutting out the surf shop middle man. That scares the crap out of me."
Jarvis started shaping boards under the Spyder label in 1978. Today he shapes about 1,000 surfboards every year, down from the tens of thousands he made at his peak in the '90s, when surfers like Tom Curren were placing orders. Jarvis once employed 15 ghost shapers when business was rocking, but he's scaled back and now makes every Spyder surfboard himself. He owns three surf shops in the South Bay area of L.A., and as the surfboards manufactured in factories overseas have encroached further and further into the American market, Jarvis has grown increasingly concerned.
His response will seem familiar if you've paid much attention to the decimated steel or coal industries in the U.S.--he favors a protectionist approach built on establishing an import duty on surfboards shipped into the country from abroad. A 60 percent tariff, to be exact. Jarvis sees a hugely unfair advantage for board builders who've offshored production to countries where labor and business costs are so much cheaper.
"All I'm asking for is an increase in import duty to balance out the cost," he explained. "I don't hate the guys in the import surfboard business--I'm a capitalist too, I get it. I just want to level the playing field. I can't compete with surfboards that don't pay an import duty and that cost less to manufacture than boards we build here at home."
But compete he must, so in order to get customers in the doors of his shops, Jarvis has begun buying Wavestorms at Costco and selling them at cost, and has even brought in cheaply produced, high-performance boards from Asia just to attract beginning surfers, who, according to Jarvis, have flocked to inexpensively-made, imported surfboards. He's aware that he's undercutting his own argument by doing that, but he sees it as a necessary survival tactic.
Jarvis is particularly wary of big boardmakers establishing a consignment model for selling in surf shops, allowing shops to stock well-known board labels without actually having to purchase the boards for their inventory. Instead, big brands can simply flood a shop with surfboards, only taking payment once a customer actually swipes a credit card, with the retailer getting a small cut. It's good for the retailer, but terrible for small-scale domestic shapers, as most can't afford to produce massive quantities of boards with nothing upfront. Jarvis sees large-scale consignment as the potential death knell for local board builders.
During last May's Boardroom surfboard show in Del Mar, California, attended by mostly domestic surfboard shapers, Jarvis went around collecting signatures for a petition calling for a surfboard import duty. He didn't expect much interest. "I thought I'd get dagger eyes and maybe 100 signatures," he said. Instead, Jarvis quickly collected more than 400 signatures and ran out of petitions by the first afternoon.
He next plans to develop a website with an online petition so board builders from across the country, or even concerned customers, can sign on. Jarvis hopes to use crowd-funding to help pay for a lobbyist to draw congressional attention to what he sees as a wildly-unfair system.
"The import surfboard companies wouldn't be so successful if the average board buyer cared about where their boards were made," said Jarvis. "But I think if customers in the U.S. really understood what was at stake, and how livelihoods are threatened for so many people in the surfboard industry here at home--shapers, glassers, sanders, their neighbors, the guys next to them in the lineup--I think they'd care a lot more about who's making their surfboards."
Jarvis looks around and sees middle-aged sanders and glassers who are being put out of work as the industry changes. He fears for what his colleagues in the board building industry will do if the market dries up. "I want my kids to take over my shop," he said. "I want to protect a boardmaking community we built here by hand."
Jarvis has an ally in Schroff, who's made an art form out of protesting oversees manufacturing. If you've seen video of a large, middle-aged man twirling about a parking lot wielding a chainsaw like Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, then mowing an imported board into shreds, you've seen his work. He's declared himself something of a foot soldier in the battle to keep imported boards at bay. His tactics mostly consist of controversial social media posts that Photoshop Price and Slater in various sorts of strange, compromising situations and poses meant to shock and poke fun at what Schroff considers a greedy grab at profits above all else ("I've gotten past personalizing the attacks, but I get annoyed by the outright lies and misinformation," Price told me in response to Schroff).
Schroff began shaping boards professionally in the Newport Beach, California, area in the '70s, then abandoned the craft to work in clothing design and as a professional artist. About five years ago, he picked up a planer again and was shocked at how the surf industry had changed.
"I jumped back into the shaping world, saw a glut of imported surfboards, and thought 'Holy shit! Surfing's turning into a generic sport,'" Schroff told me recently from his San Pedro home. "The lifestyle's melting away."
Schroff sees mass-produced import boards as a direct threat to a surf culture that he's always thought revolved around the artistry of surfboards, built with care, supporting a homegrown industry of craftsmen and surf shops. "I'm just hoping to preserve the art of surf culture. Surf culture is everything to me, and has been since I was 11 years old."
"In five years there won't be any middle ground left," Schroff said of the future of the surfboard market. "There will be rich and there will be poor, but that's it."
But why should an average customer with no skin in the boardmaking game really care where their board comes from? It's obvious why domestic shapers are alarmed by offshore board production, but for a surfer who works outside the industry, who just wants a decent board that rides well so he or she can surf three times a week, what's at stake for them?
"The surfboard is the nucleus of a $200 billion industry (think of entertainment, film, TV, snowboarding, skateboarding, fashion and so many other tributaries that stem from the surfboard)," Jarvis wrote in an email. "If the center of our lifestyle suddenly becomes as mundane as a plastic Barbie Doll, then we have to realize there will be some sort of paradigm shift. And a good portion of those people affected by this shift will pay a price."
“The fundamental problem isn't domestic versus import," Price told me when asked about the concerns held by domestic shapers about imported boards. "There have just been too many board builders out there making boards for too few customers, and too many boards sold factory direct which drives down margins for everyone."
Price looks at the domestic surfboard market and sees a vast field of shapers all producing similar boards at the same low price point. Unless those shapers offer something unique, they're going to struggle in a globalized surfboard market and likely be left far behind. And there's no way we're putting that globalization genie back in the bottle.
"Ultimately, this all comes down to innovation and uniqueness," he said. "I'd argue there's a reason you don't see a shaper like Danny Hess [the San Francisco shaper known for building entirely-wooden surfcraft] out there screaming about import boards on social media."
Price is likely right. Jarvis and Schroff both told me they expect there to be a two-tiered hierarchy of surfboard manufacturing in the future without import duties being imposed on surfboards. On the low-end will be relatively inexpensive boards made offshore or in huge quantities in domestic factories, easy to purchase online, shipped to your home, or bought on consignment in a big surf shop.
Then there will be artisanal shapers making expensive, unique surfboards by hand, for discerning buyers who don't mind paying $1,000 and up for a quality craft that will last. These shapers aren't competing against mass-produced board builders. These are your Tyler Warrens, Danny Hesses, Ryan Lovelaces and Chris Christensons, among many others. Surf shops that offer these kinds of locally-made, high-end surfboards don't seem particularly threatened by Asian imports.
"There will always be a place for well-made artisanal boards," Price said.
"I'm philosophically opposed to import popouts more than I'm economically concerned about them," J.P. St. Pierre, owner of the iconic Surfy Surfy shop in Leucadia, California, told me when I popped into his store recently. "I don't think the rise of Asian imports really affects what I do here." Surrounded by "Support Surfer Labor" stickers and beautiful, hand-made fish, mid-lengths and longboards, St. Pierre's customers probably aren't the target market for companies like Firewire and Haydenshapes anyway.
"When Surftech [one of the original Asian-manufactured composite board companies] came out years ago, everybody thought it meant the end of real surfboards," St. Pierre said, gesturing around at racks of handmade boards. "And, yet, here we are."
There are analogies here to the resurgence of vinyl records, or the rise in publication of high-end print journals. The digital revolution brought drastic shocks to the music and publishing industries, crushing the economic structure that had been the foundation of those businesses for decades. In their wake, high-quality products that fetch much higher prices are sold to smaller, boutique markets, while the masses are served by a hyper-efficient, cost-effective model. Without something like protective tariffs on import boards, it's difficult to see any way around this structure applying to surfboards in our immediate future as well.
Globalization remains an undefeated force in world commerce. Firewire and Haydenshapes certainly aren't the only boardmakers to manufacture at least a portion of their surfboards in Asian factories--many cherished American companies that mass-produce boards have offshored at least some of their production. Surfing isn't immune from the same economic forces that have changed how we buy everything else in our lives. Now it's up to surfers to decide if we want our boards to be simply another thing we consume.
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I DROWNED IN THE SEAS AND I HAVE BECOME ALL SEAS. David Tibet
Re: [Article] Shape et Mondialisation
calli (Adresse IP journalisée) - sam. 25 août 2018 12:37:02
Difficile de penser quelque chose de ça, jarvis a surement raison dans le sens que ces grosses boites finiront par se passer des surfshops tout du moins pour le neuf.
Le débat de l'industrialisation est valable pour tout, artisanat ou pas je trouve que les composites sont des produits de merde pour la santé ( ayant fait une mission dans l'industrie composite) ,en sachant que l'epoxy se fixe dans les poumons etc.
En dehors du cote taf mondialisation, il faut prendre le facteur humain en compte, beaucoup de taff industriels sont pénibles et nocifs pour la santé, pour moi on vis les derniers heures de l'industrialisation humaine. Même les chinois automatisent de plus en plus, c'est le cas pour le shape bientôt pour la strate. Ils ne vont donc pas vivre la mondialisation mais la fin des industries humaine.
[www.cnbc.com]
Il restera le côté artisanal , d'ailleurs certains shapeur (explorer) font la nique aux grande marque en shapant leurs modèles...
Le plus gros problème pour l'artisan shaper sera de savoir si il peut vivre de ça passion.
Mais malheureusement tout ça touche également tous les domaines, la destruction d'emplois est bien réelle, la société a actuellement le cul entre deux chaises sur cette question, beaucoup de gens ont conservés la morale d’après guerre lié au travail ... et personne n'a envie de se retrouver du côté chômeur , pourtant aujourd'hui il est difficile à éviter, la société se modifie sans contre balancer ces évolutions.
La vraie pression c'est celle qu'on s'est mise nous même en chiant sur les gens qui n'avaient pas de travail, ou celle de la famille, des administrations publiques.
D'ailleurs la pression est tellement forte chez certains , qu'ils préfèrent garder un commerce qui ne fonctionne pas juste pour entretenir l'illusion "qu'ils travaillent".
Bref le débat peut durer longtemps .
ps: j'ai trouvé se passage très drôle
"Then there will be artisanal shapers making expensive, unique surfboards by hand, for discerning buyers who don't mind paying $1,000 and up for a quality craft that will last. These shapers aren't competing against mass-produced board builders. These are your Tyler Warrens, Danny Hesses, Ryan Lovelaces and Chris Christensons, among many others. Surf shops that offer these kinds of locally-made, high-end surfboards don't seem particularly threatened by Asian imports."
En sachant que christensons est ( était visiblement) fait chez uwl chez nous.
Modifié 3 fois. Dernière modification le 25/08/18 13:14 par calli.
Le débat de l'industrialisation est valable pour tout, artisanat ou pas je trouve que les composites sont des produits de merde pour la santé ( ayant fait une mission dans l'industrie composite) ,en sachant que l'epoxy se fixe dans les poumons etc.
En dehors du cote taf mondialisation, il faut prendre le facteur humain en compte, beaucoup de taff industriels sont pénibles et nocifs pour la santé, pour moi on vis les derniers heures de l'industrialisation humaine. Même les chinois automatisent de plus en plus, c'est le cas pour le shape bientôt pour la strate. Ils ne vont donc pas vivre la mondialisation mais la fin des industries humaine.
[www.cnbc.com]
Il restera le côté artisanal , d'ailleurs certains shapeur (explorer) font la nique aux grande marque en shapant leurs modèles...
Le plus gros problème pour l'artisan shaper sera de savoir si il peut vivre de ça passion.
Mais malheureusement tout ça touche également tous les domaines, la destruction d'emplois est bien réelle, la société a actuellement le cul entre deux chaises sur cette question, beaucoup de gens ont conservés la morale d’après guerre lié au travail ... et personne n'a envie de se retrouver du côté chômeur , pourtant aujourd'hui il est difficile à éviter, la société se modifie sans contre balancer ces évolutions.
La vraie pression c'est celle qu'on s'est mise nous même en chiant sur les gens qui n'avaient pas de travail, ou celle de la famille, des administrations publiques.
D'ailleurs la pression est tellement forte chez certains , qu'ils préfèrent garder un commerce qui ne fonctionne pas juste pour entretenir l'illusion "qu'ils travaillent".
Bref le débat peut durer longtemps .
ps: j'ai trouvé se passage très drôle
"Then there will be artisanal shapers making expensive, unique surfboards by hand, for discerning buyers who don't mind paying $1,000 and up for a quality craft that will last. These shapers aren't competing against mass-produced board builders. These are your Tyler Warrens, Danny Hesses, Ryan Lovelaces and Chris Christensons, among many others. Surf shops that offer these kinds of locally-made, high-end surfboards don't seem particularly threatened by Asian imports."
En sachant que christensons est ( était visiblement) fait chez uwl chez nous.
Modifié 3 fois. Dernière modification le 25/08/18 13:14 par calli.
Re: [Article] Shape et Mondialisation
NONO44450 (Adresse IP journalisée) - mer. 29 août 2018 08:24:30
Sorry Calli mais pour Christenson ca n'a jamais été fait chez Uwl , et ce n'est pas du handshape
j'aime beaucoup certain modèles( notamment le deadsled ) et j'ai rencontré en fevrier dernier deux gars en Espagne qui les ont glassées pendant 2 ans chez pukas.
c'est Pukas en Espagne qui a la licence christenson suivant une logique purement industrielle
ce sont des shapes 100 % machine ,Chistenson vient en Espagne et shape quelques modèles qui sont reproduits a la machine CNC et fini par des ghost shapers ,meme les signatures sont dupliquées ( comme dans beaucoup d'autres factory aux usa )
j'aime beaucoup la relation shaper/surfeur et le fait de faire un vrai custom a tes cotes et avec ton prenom , ca fait pour moi la difference entre artisanat et industrie , si en plus tu peux assister en live au shape de ta board c'est juste incroyable comme moment .
j'aime beaucoup certain modèles( notamment le deadsled ) et j'ai rencontré en fevrier dernier deux gars en Espagne qui les ont glassées pendant 2 ans chez pukas.
c'est Pukas en Espagne qui a la licence christenson suivant une logique purement industrielle
ce sont des shapes 100 % machine ,Chistenson vient en Espagne et shape quelques modèles qui sont reproduits a la machine CNC et fini par des ghost shapers ,meme les signatures sont dupliquées ( comme dans beaucoup d'autres factory aux usa )
j'aime beaucoup la relation shaper/surfeur et le fait de faire un vrai custom a tes cotes et avec ton prenom , ca fait pour moi la difference entre artisanat et industrie , si en plus tu peux assister en live au shape de ta board c'est juste incroyable comme moment .
Re: [Article] Shape et Mondialisation
calli (Adresse IP journalisée) - mer. 29 août 2018 14:07:50
Merci nono , pour la précision ( j'ai peut être aussi eu du mal à comprendre la phrase de jarvis ).
C'est vraiment le côté artisanal/ custom / quantité, limité qu'il faut garder en tête.
C'est vraiment le côté artisanal/ custom / quantité, limité qu'il faut garder en tête.
Désolé, seuls les utilisateurs enregistrés peuvent envoyer dans ce forum.