Looking through the “surfboard” listings on Ebay, I found this:
(link abbreviated)
Blank factory for sale in Las Vegas(?)
$250k
haha i wish i had an extra $250k chillen around…
Those guy’s pumped in over $1,000,000 dollars so that’s $0.25 on the dollar!
What a scary business?
Holy s***
Thats a classic.
Great waves in Vegas eh! All your surf stoked wokers can get a session in their lunch breaks…
LOL
It just amazes me the more I see into the engineering world, the money that people will plow into things…
You can make a much much superior blank in your back yard, outlaying next to nothing for equipment, and using vastly less toxic materials
To me that sums up the surf industry.
Things had escalated so much, that people were prepared to invest in crazy complex technology like this, rather that branch out and find a better way
Spend 1m and never show a profit … so many people thougt they’d make Clark’s millions for themselves. No one figured that Clark had ruined the whole blank industry before he left by keeping prices artficially lower than they should have been. Chemical prices doubled in the last 5 years of Clark’s reigh and he never raised prices because he had become uninvolved. He had no overhead left, very organized and slick manufacturing process and made his own polyols onsite. No one today could compete with him if he were still there and yet their still trying to compete with his pricing. At this point, the business is at best a difficult, toxic, losing proposition. I would feel sorry for all those who got involved had they gotten in for the right reasons.
Not for sale anymore, everything went in a garage sale. Some scored on their MDI blank inventory, and probably will be advertised here. The investor’s lost a lot (more than just $1M), just like everyone who thought that they could corner the blank market after Clark was gone. Some of the equipment when to Oz I heard.
Pete is right, they lost millions. We ended up with half their inventory, the other half going to one of their previous owners to fill prior commitments/obligations. The blanks are now in the Los Angeles area. I have placed an ad in the “Surfshop” section if anyone is interested in getting a good deal on some blanks.