It's a surfboard but for softies

By Dan Nakaso
Advertiser Staff Writer

Jim Richardson held up a surfboard that felt soft and spongy but was designed to carve through waves as well as — or better than — any high-performance board.

Jim Richardson holds one of the soft-body surfboards that his company manufactures in Waialua. He waited more than 30 years before the opportunity arose to found Surflight and he's hoping to mass-produce his boards in California. Bruce Asato • The Honolulu Advertiser

So, as he pursued advanced college degrees and a teaching career at the University of Hawai'i, his idea lay dormant for decades.

Then in 1995 Richardson was granted tenure at UH and found himself with both the time and technology to turn his idea into an actual board. He founded a company called Surflight and is now hoping to mass-produce his boards in California.

Richardson's idea is the result of a life spent divided between two vastly different arenas — surfing and academia.

"My first love is ideas, the world of ideas," Richardson said. "I like to be around universities and knowledge and research.

"But I also like to make things and have people tell me how my boards performed in sometimes extreme conditions.

"It's a very different world from the academic world."

At age 50, Richardson is finally able to combine his university training and shaping experiences on a large scale.

While other companies have produced soft boards, they tend to be clunky and twist during turns, said Jeff Johnston, a former professional surfer and North Shore shaper who now shapes many of the Surflight boards.

"Surfboards haven't really changed in 30 to 40 years. We're still basically using the same design and materials," Johnston said. "Jim's boards are the first thing that advances both technology and the sport in a long time."

The key to the design is a composite of carbon graphite and styrofoam sandwiched between two softer pieces of polypropylene, making the board flexible but not so loose that it twists. The layers act together to let surfers cut into turns without having the board turn to mush, Richardson said.

The flexibility, Johnston said, means surfers can feel the action of the waves better, cut quicker and even get a boost of propulsion.

"Just because it's soft doesn't mean it's slow," Johnston said. "As you come out of a turn, the board actually throws you with recoil."

Richardson's 3,000-square-foot Surflight factory, once part of the old Waialua Sugar Mill, has turned out nearly 1,000 boards since 1999 but he declined to give exact sales figures.

He said production costs are 50 percent higher than for conventional fiberglass products, given the expense for the styrofoam, polypropylene, carbon graphite, epoxy resin to laminate his boards all together and the time spent making each board by hand and vacuum-packing it to give the board its shape.

But Surflight boards are still priced about the same as or slightly higher than conventional boards, from $475 for a short board to $800 for a 10-foot board. For now, Richardson believes he has to get them into surfers hands even if it means eating into profits, he said.

At the same time he's seeking investors and trying to put together a production operation in California to mass-produce his boards at lower cost and sell them to Mainland, Hawai'i and Japanese markets.

Richardson has spent a lot of his life thinking about surfboards.

He grew up surfing the South Bay area of Los Angeles and moved with his family to Santa Cruz in 1965 when he was 13. By the time he was 16, he was shaping fiberglass boards and breezing through high school. He enrolled at UC Santa Cruz to study physics and in 1974 founded a company to produce a new surfboard fin system and coating designed to make boards go faster. Along the way, he became fascinated with the idea of a soft, flexible body boards that he thought could be safer, quicker and more adept for big waves.

"The materials just weren't available to do it right," Richardson said.

He and his older brother moved to the North Shore in 1975 and Richardson gained a following as a shaper. He was 23, churned out 10 boards a week and earned enough money to finance a part-time physics education at UH.

"But I didn't want to be a surfboard shaper for the rest of my life," Richardson said. He gave up shaping to pursue degrees in physics, operations research and decision sciences at the University of California at Santa Cruz, UH, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

In 1990 he returned to UH. Two years later a friend from Santa Cruz, Mike Croteau, visited and helped develop the idea of combining carbon graphite and styrofoam to give a 6-foot-2 prototype board both strength and flexibility.

On the inaugural ride at the Daystar break at Mokule'ia, Richardson felt a new sensation.

"We had solved the problem of twisting," he said. "We thought we had something pretty cool that would make a major contribution to surfing."

In 1994 they applied for a U.S. patent and now hold design and manufacturing patents in Australia, Japan, Brazil and several countries in Europe.

The next year, Richardson got his UH tenure and started focusing seriously on forming a company. He solicited $75,000 from a lawyer, dentist and real estate appraiser — all of them surfers — who became Surflight's first stock holders.

Richardson's original plan was to subcontract all of the work to traditional fiberglass companies and shapers. But they didn't like dealing with the new techniques and materials, Richardson said. So in 1999 he opened his own factory in Waialua near his house.

Most Surflight boards are sold factory-direct, or over the company's Web site, www.surflight.com, partially because they weren't moving through traditional retail surf shops, Richardson said.

"With the retailers' overhead, the boards were the most expensive in the store," he said. "And retailers weren't pushing them."

Although Surflight turns out short boards and specialty boards for tow-in surfing, the company is focusing on the older, longboard market.

"The kids who surf high-performance boards are influenced by the surfing media and what the pros are using," Richardson said. "The longboarders like the comfort and durability. And when these boards hit you, they don't hurt as much."