By Carl Stahmer
Surfing is not just a sport. It’s a business! Yes, I know the “B” word sends shivers up the spine of every ‘soul surfer.’ (And every surfer, if asked, will tell you he or she is a ‘soul surfer.’) We despise business. We spit at it. We’d blow off a surefire, million dollar deal for a good southwest swell. But you gotta eat, right?
This reality has plagued surfers since the Hawaiian Kings first put balsa to water. Over the years, it has led many a grommet to the idea that, perhaps, he or she could somehow combine surfing and working when he or she grows up. A few manage to pull this off, but there are only so many slots on the professional tour, and the tour has only been around for so many years. But there’s always room for another shaper or surf shop, right?
Just about ever young surfer, at some time in his or her career, entertains the idea of shaping boards out of a grass shack on the beach for a living, surrounded by young devotees of the opposite sex. Or, maybe just opening a surf shop where everyone will hang out all day and watch surf videos until the next swell hits and then hang up the “Gone Surfing” sign and lock the door on the way out, if there’s time.
When I was coming up, everyone I knew had shaped at least one board for her or himself, and I remember a time when every city block in Encinitas had a house on it with some kid shaping boards out of the garage, intent on being next up-and-comer. Most of these guys work for Bank of America in Phoenix, Arizona now. And it would take several pages for me to list all of the surf shops in southern California that I’ve watched start and fail over the past twenty years or so that I’ve been paying attention to this kind of thing.
The truth is that the surf industry is volatile, at best. Surfing has been around longer than most of the action sports out there, but it’s history is one of rapid change and growth nonetheless. In a little over half a century it has grown from a relatively unknown sport to a major, worldwide, corporate industry. This growth brought with it changes in the technology of surfing—longboards evolved to shortboards and back again, balsa evolved to foam and is threatening to evolve again into epoxy, and freezing your you know what off in the winter evolved into neoprene. It also brought with it changes in the business structures needed to support production and distribution to an international market. All of this, while at the same time keeping up with the latest style. (You need to look good while you surf, after all, don’t you?)
Few businesses are able to weather this kind of rapid change. Much like surfing itself, you need to be able to adapt, on-the-fly, to rapidly changing situations while negotiating your way to the execution of a deliberate, planned maneuver if you want to succeed in this kind of dynamic environment. Encinitas is home to two very different businesses that have managed to do just that. Hansen’s, 1105 S. Coast Highway 101, and Encinitas Surboards, 107 N. Coast Highway 101, have both managed not only to survive this rapidly changing industry, but to establish themselves as leaders in it. Anyone who has been to both of these stores knows that they are as different as night and day. But both have been riding a wave of success with their unique style of business for well over twenty years.
For those who don’t already know it, Don Hansen is one of the guys who gave birth to surfing as we know it. The list of surfing names and companies that he spawned is a who’s who of the surfing world. Names like Mike Doyle, Jim Jenks, founder of Op Sunwear, and even the guys that run Surfride all got their start in the industry working for Don Hansen. He was, hands down, one of the best surfers, best shapers, and, as it turns out, best businessmen of the 1960’s. If you didn’t know Hansen and ride one of his boards, you wanted to.
Don Hansen started Hansen’s in Hawaii in 1961. But in 1962 he moved the shop back across the pacific to Cardiff Reef and into the building now occupied by the Kraken (2531 S. Coast Highway). According to Rick Doyle’s autobiography, if you wanted to work for Don Hansen in those days you had to earn the right by ripping it in the beach-break south of Cardiff reef, which, for obvious reasons, was called the “proving ground.” But by 1967 demand for Don Hansen’s boards was so high that he outgrew the Cardiff Reef location. He was shaping literally thousands of boards a year and shipping them all over the globe, so he bought some land and moved the shop to its present location.
Hansen continued to do business as a strictly board shop for six years after his move to the new location. The core of his business in those years was manufacturing and selling surfboards. But according to Josh Hansen, Don Hansen’s son who now oversees the daily operations of the store, “between 1972 and 1973 our orders dropped from over 6,000 boards a year to less than 3,000. My dad had to change something in order to stay in business.” The result of this change is the Hansen’s we know today—a large-scale retail operation that sells and distributes products all over the world, including an advanced online store (hansensurf.com).
Hansen still manufactures and distributes his own line of surfboards, but the majority of his business now is retail sales of clothing, wetsuits, ski and snowboard equipment, and related Action Sports apparel and accessories. Don Hanson still runs the business, but by remote control from his home in Montana where he spends most of his time. According to Josh Hansen, a competitive skier, “I knew my dad as a guy who loved horseback riding and being on the mountain a lot and surfed every once in a while. It wasn’t till I moved here two and a half years ago to work in the store that I found out that he’s ‘the man’ to in surfing community.”
There were several factors that contributed to the rapid decline in board sales that prompted Hansen to shift from a manufacturing to a retail based business—none of which had anything to do with Don Hansen or his abilities as a shaper. In the early 1970’s surfing changed from a Longboard to a Shortboard dominated sport. As more and more people were retiring their longbaords in favor of the new shorter boards, demand for Hansen’s classic longboard designs naturally decreased. The led to an intense period of experimentation in board design, as a result of which more and more people were either shaping their own boards or buying them from small garage shops down the street rather than from established shapers. The industry itself had changed.
About the same time that Hansen was restructuring his business to compete in the new surfing economy, two kids from Encinitas were looking for a way to make their dreams of getting paid to surf come true. Marc Adam and John Kies both migrated to Encinitas with their parents when they were children. Friends from the surf, they worked together in the early 1970’s at the old Koast Surf shop in Cardiff. They left Koast Surf at the same time, and John, who was making a name for himself as a longboard shaper, moved to Hawaii to try to make a go of it there, while Marc stayed behind in Encinitas, taking a job at the original George’s restaurant on the beach in Cardiff. About a year later Mark gave John a call to let him know that Koast Surf had closed its doors. A few months later, John was back in town and, in 1975, Encinitas Surfboards was born.
The Marc Adam, John Kies partnership proved to be an equation for success. It didn’t take long for John to establish his reputation as a shaper and for Marc, who runs the retail operation, to convert this reputation into the rapid growth and success of the Encinitas Surfboards name. By the late 1970’s, if you lived anywhere in California and didn’t have one of those long sleeved T-shirts with “Encinitas Surfboards” written down the sleeve you just plain old weren’t cool, and probably didn’t surf very well either.
A key reason for their success was John’s ability to adapt his shaping skills to the shortboard market. You could always find a few longboards on the rack at Encinitas Surfboards, even during the height of the shortboard revolution when most shops were treating longboarders as if they had the plague. But Kies threw himself into the world of shortboard design and production like it was second nature. According to Marc Adam, “John is a shaper extraordinaire,” which allowed Encinitas Surfboards to service both the shortboard and longboard markets.
Like Hansen, Adam and Kies also had to find a way to compete with the backyard shaping industry that was growing during the 1970’s. Their solution to this problem was a simple one. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. They started selling the raw materials needed to manufacture a surfboard--foam blanks, resin, fiberglass cloth, gelcoat, and more. (Today, you can still go into Encinitas Surfboards and buy everything you need to make your own board.) This way they made money whether you bought a good board from John Kies or a bad board from the guy in the garage down the street. A win, win situation.
Today, the self-shaped board craze is pretty much over. As Marc Adam puts it, “Now days, people come into the shop and they want a board they can surf right now. People are surfing so many more kinds and sizes of waves than they used to, and they need a board that’s going to perform for them under the right circumstances.”
The moral of this story is that there’s more than one way to skin a cat, and that a grommet with a good head on his or shoulders can find a way to surf and get paid! Too often in life we get stuck in our own thinking, convinced that our way of solving problem is the only one that could possible work. This tale of two surf shops if proof that there are usually, if not always, at least two equally effective ways to accomplish the same task.
Encinitas Surfboards and Hansen’s are two completely different kinds of surf shop. But they ended up that way by responding, in their own creative ways, to the same industry pressures. Each business came up with a different solution to the problems that confronted both of them. Hansen diversified. Adam and Tieg got lean, mean, and flexible. As Marc Adam put it, “Our philosophy is to keep our overhead down and our business operations simple so that we can respond to whatever changes come our way.”
Both the surfing industry and the City of Encinitas benefit from the fact that both these solutions worked. According to Josh Hansen, “some guys get really competitive about who has the best surf shop in town. But I think we all do better when we support each other.” (You ‘some guys’ know who you are and should take a lesson!) When I talked to Marc Adam and the guys at Encinitas Surfboards, they echoed this philosophy. I’ve seen guys at both shops regularly send customers to the other so they could get exactly what they were looking for. This kind cooperation has served both of the businesses and their customers well. We all benefit when we encourage and support diversity, even in business.
Both Hansen’s and Encinitas Surfboards plan on selling surfing their own way long into the future. In fact, Hansen’s is about to expand both its building and its operation, bringing “The Boardroom” back under the Hansen’s name and connecting the two buildings so shoppers will be able to browse the entire store without going outside. And for all those Encinitas Surfboards regulars, you’ll soon be able to park in the parking lot that’s being built between Encinitas Surfboards and the new Rhino Art building to the south.
Aside from these changes, neither store is currently planning any major shifts in their operations in the near future. But you can count on one thing. Both stores will be ready to go with the flow and adapt in their own way to whatever changes come down the surfing industry pipeline in the future.