September 3, 2007
Good wood | Grain Surfboards builds its brand through the do-it-yourself market
By Jodi Hausen
In the spring of 2005, while building a wooden boat in York, Mike LaVecchia pondered ways to use his boatbuilding skills to construct a wooden surfboard.
"It just came to me one day," he says.
The next day he was in the garage of his York Beach rental home building his first hollow wooden surfboard. Calling his tiny operation Grain Surfboards, he then built a handful for family and friends. After an Associated Press story about the surfboard builder appeared in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and other papers across the nation in December of that same year, a business was born.
"I had no intent of starting a business," LaVecchia says, "I was just having fun."
That article elicited six orders "overnight," he says. "The phone just kept ringing. It was amazing and a little bit scary," he adds.
These days, LaVecchia is spending more time building his business than shaping boards. Most recently, the company launched a new product ˆ do-it-yourself wooden surfboard kits.
The kits allow surfers to own a typically pricey wooden surfboard for a fraction of the price: According to Brad Anderson, a principal with Grain, foam boards sell for $600 to $1,100 as opposed to the $1,600 to $2,200 price tag for one of Grain's wooden boards. The kits, by comparison, sell for between $420 and $720 and are sold primarily through the company's website, but also available at about six retail venues in Florida, North Carolina, Massachusetts, New Jersey, California and Maine. The company is focusing primarily on small, independent surf shops, and also is discussing distribution possibilities in Australia and England. "We don't have any targets for retail yet," Anderson says, but notes the company's goal is to sell between 300 and 500 kits this year.
"He's growing faster than his equipment and his personnel can handle, which is a good problem to have," says Jim McGinley, owner of Corduroy Surf Boutique and Gallery on Market Street in Portland, which sells the kits.
Kits have never been done for surfboards, says McGinley. Wooden surfboards are difficult to build ˆ each one takes between 60 and 80 hours ˆ and difficult to ship, driving up the price, McGinley points out.
Today, Grain Surfboards has created a market niche and has sold about 100 surfboards and 200 kits to customers throughout the globe.
LaVecchia, 40, says he spent very little to start his company. He took out a $5,000 personal loan to build the initial boards for friends and is now beginning to look into lines of credit with local banks.
LaVecchia has attracted a cadre of friends and fans who have provided time, energy and equipment to his endeavor. His logo, cotton/bamboo t-shirt designs and some of the equipment used to build the boards were friendly barters.
"Mike's a loveable guy who has a real talent for coordinating people and pulling things together," says Anderson. "People just love to do things for him and people just love what we're doing."
Catching the green wave
LaVecchia attributes some of his company's success to the demise of the world's foremost manufacturer of polyurethane foam blanks used to make surfboards ˆ California-based Clark Foam ˆ under a cloud of allegations of environmentally unsound manufacturing processes. (For more on this, see "The last wave," Jan. 9, 2006). The news hit just one week prior to the Associated Press' story on Grain Surfboards.
The company's mission is underpinned by an environmental ethic. Their boards are made from Maine-grown white cedar and coated in fiberglass. But the company is experimenting with bamboo fiber sheeting and already is using a resin that, unlike many fiberglass resins, does not generate greenhouse gases.
Meanwhile, Anderson says buying an environmentally friendly surfboard has struck a nerve with many surfers. "We didn't start out with the idea of how to capture the green sector of the market," he says. "What we did was what we thought was right and good and the market has responded to that."
McGinley of Corduroy agrees: "He's cornered a niche market," he says. "Green is the new black."
And surfing is a growing sport and industry. Debbie Hodges, executive director of Eastern Surfing Association in Virginia Beach, Va., says membership in the 40-year-old organization grew an unprecedented 37% last year. Those members, 70% of whom are competitive surfers, only represent the East Coast, Great Lakes and Puerto Rico. "It's off the hook," says Hodges.
Jennifer Kelly, spokesperson for the Surf Industry Manufacturer's Association, says her group is planning a study next year to better identify the number of surfers nationwide, but that "the accepted guesstimate is about 2 million."
In 2006, the surfing gear and apparel industry represented $7.48 billion in national gross sales, outpacing snow sports, paddling and scuba by a wide margin. The next highest netting industry, snow sports ˆ skiing and snowboarding ˆ generated a mere $2.34 billion in manufacturing revenue.
Grain currently has eight full-time workers, including builders, managers and LaVecchia's brother, Nick, who designs and maintains the company's website.
Mike LaVecchia, who also spent several years as a team manager for Burton Snowboards, declined to divulge neither his fledgling company's worth nor its gross annual sales. "We're doing as well as we'd like to be doing," he says. "We're able to pay our bills but nobody is getting rich at this point. People who are working here are able to make a modest living but they're very happy."
Jodi Hausen, a writer in York County, can be reached at editorial@mainebiz.biz.
"It just came to me one day," he says.
The next day he was in the garage of his York Beach rental home building his first hollow wooden surfboard. Calling his tiny operation Grain Surfboards, he then built a handful for family and friends. After an Associated Press story about the surfboard builder appeared in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and other papers across the nation in December of that same year, a business was born.
"I had no intent of starting a business," LaVecchia says, "I was just having fun."
That article elicited six orders "overnight," he says. "The phone just kept ringing. It was amazing and a little bit scary," he adds.
These days, LaVecchia is spending more time building his business than shaping boards. Most recently, the company launched a new product ˆ do-it-yourself wooden surfboard kits.
The kits allow surfers to own a typically pricey wooden surfboard for a fraction of the price: According to Brad Anderson, a principal with Grain, foam boards sell for $600 to $1,100 as opposed to the $1,600 to $2,200 price tag for one of Grain's wooden boards. The kits, by comparison, sell for between $420 and $720 and are sold primarily through the company's website, but also available at about six retail venues in Florida, North Carolina, Massachusetts, New Jersey, California and Maine. The company is focusing primarily on small, independent surf shops, and also is discussing distribution possibilities in Australia and England. "We don't have any targets for retail yet," Anderson says, but notes the company's goal is to sell between 300 and 500 kits this year.
"He's growing faster than his equipment and his personnel can handle, which is a good problem to have," says Jim McGinley, owner of Corduroy Surf Boutique and Gallery on Market Street in Portland, which sells the kits.
Kits have never been done for surfboards, says McGinley. Wooden surfboards are difficult to build ˆ each one takes between 60 and 80 hours ˆ and difficult to ship, driving up the price, McGinley points out.
Today, Grain Surfboards has created a market niche and has sold about 100 surfboards and 200 kits to customers throughout the globe.
LaVecchia, 40, says he spent very little to start his company. He took out a $5,000 personal loan to build the initial boards for friends and is now beginning to look into lines of credit with local banks.
LaVecchia has attracted a cadre of friends and fans who have provided time, energy and equipment to his endeavor. His logo, cotton/bamboo t-shirt designs and some of the equipment used to build the boards were friendly barters.
"Mike's a loveable guy who has a real talent for coordinating people and pulling things together," says Anderson. "People just love to do things for him and people just love what we're doing."
Catching the green wave
LaVecchia attributes some of his company's success to the demise of the world's foremost manufacturer of polyurethane foam blanks used to make surfboards ˆ California-based Clark Foam ˆ under a cloud of allegations of environmentally unsound manufacturing processes. (For more on this, see "The last wave," Jan. 9, 2006). The news hit just one week prior to the Associated Press' story on Grain Surfboards.
The company's mission is underpinned by an environmental ethic. Their boards are made from Maine-grown white cedar and coated in fiberglass. But the company is experimenting with bamboo fiber sheeting and already is using a resin that, unlike many fiberglass resins, does not generate greenhouse gases.
Meanwhile, Anderson says buying an environmentally friendly surfboard has struck a nerve with many surfers. "We didn't start out with the idea of how to capture the green sector of the market," he says. "What we did was what we thought was right and good and the market has responded to that."
McGinley of Corduroy agrees: "He's cornered a niche market," he says. "Green is the new black."
And surfing is a growing sport and industry. Debbie Hodges, executive director of Eastern Surfing Association in Virginia Beach, Va., says membership in the 40-year-old organization grew an unprecedented 37% last year. Those members, 70% of whom are competitive surfers, only represent the East Coast, Great Lakes and Puerto Rico. "It's off the hook," says Hodges.
Jennifer Kelly, spokesperson for the Surf Industry Manufacturer's Association, says her group is planning a study next year to better identify the number of surfers nationwide, but that "the accepted guesstimate is about 2 million."
In 2006, the surfing gear and apparel industry represented $7.48 billion in national gross sales, outpacing snow sports, paddling and scuba by a wide margin. The next highest netting industry, snow sports ˆ skiing and snowboarding ˆ generated a mere $2.34 billion in manufacturing revenue.
Grain currently has eight full-time workers, including builders, managers and LaVecchia's brother, Nick, who designs and maintains the company's website.
Mike LaVecchia, who also spent several years as a team manager for Burton Snowboards, declined to divulge neither his fledgling company's worth nor its gross annual sales. "We're doing as well as we'd like to be doing," he says. "We're able to pay our bills but nobody is getting rich at this point. People who are working here are able to make a modest living but they're very happy."
Jodi Hausen, a writer in York County, can be reached at editorial@mainebiz.biz.
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