The Soul of Surfing: Hand-Shaped Boards in a Factory-Built World

Your shaper knows where and how you surf and what you’re strengths and weaknesses are, and uses that knowledge to build the best board for you. This relationship is, for some people, so important that legendary shaper Gary Linden says, “If I didn’t shape, the best shaper I knew would be my best friend.”

These days, however, a board can be ordered online as easily as socks and made to order like pizza. The speed and ease of large-scale manufacturing, compounded with the shortage of boards caused by the sports’ growing popularity, has factory-built boards from overseas pushing local shapers out of a lot of surf shops.
“Shapers don’t make surfboards to get rich, they do it because they love it,” says San Francisco shaper Danny Hess.
In many cases, a friendship develops between a surfer and a shaper, who in many cases deliver something better than the surfer wanted. Such was the case when local San Francisco surfer Ian Wallace asked Lyle Carlson to replicate the 11-foot big-wave board he’d snapped. Carlson decided Wallace would be better off with a board 11 feet, 6 inches tall and, without even talking to Wallace about it, built one.

“It turned out to be the best board ever,” Wallace said. “Sometimes the board you need is not the board you asked for.”
Sounds pretty close to our corner of the world.