Retyped without permission:
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
The shape of things to come
Clark Foam’s closure forces $1 billion industry to find alternative source of surfboard cores, but some wonder if quality will suffer, at least in short term.
By NANCY LUNA and SHAWN PRICE
The Orange County Register
After hand-shaping surfboards for more than 40 years, Rich Harbour did the unthinkable in 2000.
He flirted with mass production overseas.
It didn’t work, and the owner of Harbour Surfboards in Seal Beach continued with his exclusive arrangement with Clark Foam of Laguna Niguel.
But now Harbour and others in the $1 billion surfboard-making industry have no choice but to look elsewhere for the lightweight foam cores after Clark’s unexpected closure last week.
In the past week, shapers and their suppliers have scrambled to come up with a Plan B to survive, including looking at alternative materials to maintain supplies over the next 90 days. Companies in Australia, Brazil, South Africa, California and Hawaii are being flooded with calls. And board makers are looking beyond the popular polyurethane core that Clark pioneered to materials such as Styrofoam epoxy, which costs more and is harder to shape.
For the long term, industry experts say no single foam supplier will likely emerge as dominant a player as Clark.
“Down the line, there will be a lot of competition and better foam then ever, and better prices then ever,” said Brian Hinde, who heads national sales at Fiberglass Supply, a Washington state supplier of Clark Foam blanks and other board supplies. “Capitalism will prevail.”
Clark’s closure triggered bruising foam shortages and scattered layoffs and sent prices soaring on surfboards and the remaining Clark cores. It also has set off an emotional chain reaction among surfers, shapers and board suppliers who have questioned whether the quality of the custom boards they’ve come to love will disappear, at least in the short term.
“We are all artists, and Clark gave us the best paper to draw on,” said Hinde, a shaper who first met Clark in the early 1970s in Hawaii. “It’ll take 10 years to get where (Clark) was.”
Part of the reason for the dominance of Clark - which supplied about 60 percent of the global market - was founder Gordon “Grubby” Clark’s ability to crank out custom molds within a couple of weeks of a shaper’s request.
By contrast, Randy French, whose Santa Cruz-based Surftech mass-produces custom boards overseas, said the turnaround time for his boards is four months. They are made from custom molds using Tuflite, a plastic that allows surfers to paddle faster but gives them less maneuverability, critics contend.
Surf Industry Manufacturers Association, a San Clemente trade group, estimated Monday that Clark produced roughly 1,000 foam blanks a day to meet worldwide demand for his proprietary foam. Clark, who last week unexpectedly announced to customers that he was shutting down, held 90 percent of the blank manufacturing market in North America and about 60 percent internationally, SIMA’s Bill Bahne said Tuesday.
By contrast, the combined output of Australia’s top foam manufacturers is 2,500 blanks a week, said Carl McCarthy, general manager of South Coast Foam in Australia, which has received hundreds of calls this past week from desperate foam seekers.
“With the closure of Clark Foam, make no mistake, it will be very hard to replace this level of production immediately as alternative production capacity does not yet exist anywhere in the world,” Bahne said in a statement this week.
The panic over shortages has forced some area foam suppliers and board retailers to increase prices, in some instances by as much as double. For example, Huntington Beach shaper John Taylor said a Clark Foam longboard blank priced at $98 now costs $175. He’s also seen retail board prices jump from $425 to nearly $800.
In the meantime, Bahne - who runs Fins Unlimited in Encinitas - has been researching short-term solutions for SIMA membersup and down California’s coast.
On Monday, Bahne e-mailed suppliers, shapers and wholesalers, telling them to turn to foam producers in Australia, Brazil and South Africa.
SouthCoast’s McCarthy said his Australian company, which makes polyurethane blanks similar to Clark’s, has logged 300 calls, and 200 e-mails from “big labels” stretching from California to Asia over the past week.
“We as a manufacturer have taken on commitments to supply selected customers but are certainly not in the position to jump in and offer a cure to the crisis,” said McCarthy, in an e-mail earlier this week.
Closer to home, Bahne pointed to Just Foam in Riverside and Walker Foam in Wilmington. Both are poised to “produce and deliver” roughly 2,000 domestically produced blanks per month over the next 45 to 60 days, Bahne said.
But he also suggested businesses look at Styrofoam epoxy board makers, where supplies are available immediately.
“We are getting lots of inquiries about our new Styrofoam blanks. We are just ramping up production, so this looks like a great opportunity for us to introduce our product,” said Jim Richardson, president of Styrofoam core maker Surflight Hawaii, based at Waialua, Oahu.
Distributors and respected shapers have shied away from these options for years because Styrofoam boards require an epoxy resin, which has a longer production cycle and is difficult to shape, making it more expensive to produce.
But, suppliers and shapers say they now have no choice: “We’re going to become more diversified, which is what we should have done in the past,” said Brad Nadell, owner of Foam E-Z, a Westminster reseller of Clark Foam blanks.
Even Harbour, who has rejected alternative materials in the past, now must give other sources and materials a shot. The few Thailand-made boards he ordered from Surftech in 2000 are equivalent to buying off-the-rack suits, and are “lightning fast” when it comes to paddling. However, they don’t give surfers the ability to navigate waves effectively, said Harbour, who eventually stopped using Surftech.
Now, in the midst of one of the biggest turmoils of his 46-year career, Harbour admits change is inevitable. “If Randy French (of Surftech) called me today, I would give him serious consideration,” he says. “Because, hey, we got to eat.”