Lesser-Known
Longboard Shapers

First published 2026-05-25 · ~15 min read · 20+ shapers · Updated as new material surfaces

The auteur-shop operators, women shapers, regional makers, and sustainable experiments that define what a 2020s log actually feels like to ride — and that the mainstream surf press has, for the most part, declined to document in one place.

The names that appear in most longboard travel writing are a short list, and it has been a short list for a long time: Joel Tudor's boards, Donald Takayama, Hap Jacobs, maybe Bing Copeland if the writer did their homework. These are real figures and their influence is real. They also represent, at this point, roughly the first three paragraphs of a much longer story — the agreed-upon opening that lets everyone in the room feel they are standing on common ground before moving on to the actual conversation.

The actual conversation, in 2026, is happening somewhere else. It is happening in shaping bays in Leucadia and San Clemente, in a corrugated-metal shed near Noosa Heads, in a garage in Los Angeles that has been producing some of the most design-consistent noseriders of the past fifteen years under a label most people surfing those boards cannot name without checking the stringer sticker. The post-2010 logger renaissance — the cultural movement that made the single-fin log the aspirational object of a generation of surfers who weren't alive in 1968 — produced, as a parallel consequence, a renaissance in small-shop shaping. A cohort of design-conscious, intentional shapers whose aesthetic sensibility is as legible as any furniture designer's, and who are mostly unknown outside the fairly tight circle of people who actually seek out this kind of equipment.

This piece is the working reference list for those shapers. It covers the auteur core of the California logger renaissance, the women shapers whose work has been systematically underwritten about (with cross-reference to our longer Women in Longboarding history piece), the regional and international operators doing interesting work outside the California media orbit, the shapers building with non-conventional materials, and the operators just coming into legibility in the 2024-2026 window.

A few ground rules on what this list is and is not. This is not a ranking. It is not a buyer's guide and it is not a shopping list. It is an editorial inventory of shapers whose work is worth understanding — the design logic, the provenance, what problem they are solving, why their boards feel the way they do. Some of these labels produce fifty boards a year. Some produce several hundred. None of them is distributed nationally through surf retail channels in the way that a production brand is. That is, more or less, the criterion: if you can walk into a surf shop and pull one off a rack, it is probably not on this list.

The category gap this fills is straightforward. The surf press has two modes for covering shapers. Mode one is the canonical-legend profile — Donald Takayama, Dick Brewer, the Hobie heritage. Mode two is the equipment test — a panel of surfers tries five boards and assigns star ratings. Neither mode is useful for the surfer who wants to understand who is doing the most interesting design work right now, at small volume, outside the production pipeline. That surfer has been mostly left to figure it out through Instagram and by asking around at invitational contests. We are writing it down so they don't have to.

One transparency note: URLs and operational details for small-shop shapers change. Where we have not been able to confirm a current website or operational status independently, we have said so. We would rather flag the uncertainty than send you to a dead link or an operation that has since closed. If you have a correction, the address is at the bottom of the page.

The auteur shapers

The label "auteur shaper" is borrowed from film criticism, where it describes a director whose personal sensibility is so consistent across their work that the films are recognizable as a body of work independent of any other element. In shaping, the equivalent is a maker whose boards have a design language — a particular rocker line, a way of treating the rails, a finish vocabulary, a consistent philosophy about what the board is for — that is readable across the line. You see the board leaning against a wall and you know who shaped it. That consistency is less common than it sounds. Most production shaping is, by necessity, a negotiation between the shaper's preferences and the market's demand signals. The auteur shapers are the ones who have held the line on the former.

Robin Kegel · Gato Heroi · Los Angeles, California

If you are trying to identify a single shaper whose work is most responsible for the post-2005 logger revival, the honest answer is Robin Kegel. That is a strong claim and it is worth defending. Kegel, a Los Angeles-based shaper operating under the label Gato Heroi, developed a long and documented working relationship with Kassia Meador — whose visual and cultural influence on women's longboarding is covered in detail in our Women in Longboarding history — and that collaboration produced a set of board shapes that became the reference for what the contemporary single-fin log was supposed to be.

The Kassia Meador connection is not the whole of the Kegel story, but it is where the influence runs deepest. Meador's surfing — the low-stance, parallel-feet, hands-quiet noseride drawn from 1960s Malibu film footage — required boards that could support that approach without punishing a surfer who wasn't putting aggressive rail pressure into the turn. Kegel built those boards. The result was a shape that prioritized forward glide, stable trim, and a noseride platform that didn't require heroic weight placement to lock in. Boards shaped to that specification are now so common that they read as the default. In 2005 they were not. That gap — between what was then typical and what Kegel was building — is the practical measure of his influence.

Gato Heroi's broader line includes single-fin longboards, noseriders built on traditional templates from the late 1960s California tradition, and mid-length gliders. The design philosophy is resolutely non-flashy. The rails are soft where they need to be soft, the tails are clean squares and pintails appropriate to their function, and the glass jobs are done well enough that the boards hold up to regular use. Kegel is not building display pieces. He is building boards for surfers who want to surf them hard, frequently, and for years.

Gato Heroi boards turn up regularly in the hands of the invitational-contest circuit — the Joel Tudor Duct Tape events, the Vans series, the Malibu gatherings — and the label has something close to a word-of-mouth distribution model: surfers who ride a Kegel board and are satisfied recommend Kegel to other surfers, and the wait list builds accordingly. If there is a downside to working in this mode, it is that the cultural footprint of the label has been allowed to remain smaller than the quality of the work warrants. Kegel is less famous than many shapers he has influenced. That is not an accident. It is a choice.

A note on the label name: Gato Heroi translates, approximately, from Portuguese as "hero cat." The backstory is not one Kegel has elaborated on publicly. The name appears on the boards; the boards speak for themselves.

Tyler Warren · Warren Surfboards · San Clemente, California

Tyler Warren is the rare shaper whose work is equally legible to someone who has never surfed. His boards have a visual identity — a particular treatment of the deck art, a consistency of color and graphic sensibility that links his illustration work to his board design — that makes them recognizable at a glance. This is not decorative. The visual coherence is evidence of the same design attention that makes the boards function the way they do.

Warren grew up in San Clemente surfing through the period when the modern logger revival was beginning to cohere, and his early shaping work was done within the specific California single-fin culture of that moment — small waves, long rides, the emphasis on trim and hang-five and walk-back-and-snap that defines the West Coast longboard tradition. His boards from the first half of his career are traditional in the best sense: rooted in late-1960s templates, executed with contemporary precision, and functional in a wide enough range of conditions that they are not purely nostalgic objects.

The more interesting part of Warren's shaping trajectory is what happened after the traditional log work was established. He moved progressively toward more experimental territory: asymmetrical shapes (different rail lines on the toe and heel sides of the board, designed to account for the directional bias of how a surfer actually stands and turns), finless and displacement hull shapes influenced by George Greenough and Bob Simmons, and a set of mid-length designs that sit in the space between classic longboard and contemporary performance shape without resolving neatly into either category. The asymmetrical work in particular has been influential beyond the log category; it is now a recognized design approach with its own growing body of practitioners.

Warren's illustration and visual work has appeared in surf publications, on clothing and accessories through his collaborations with brands in the Southern California art-and-surf intersection, and on the boards themselves — the deck art on a Tyler Warren board is, if you are paying attention, part of the design statement rather than decoration applied afterward. That integration of image-making and board-making is unusual enough that it functions as an authenticating detail: you are buying the sensibility of a person who thinks visually about everything, including how the rocker line works.

Warren Surfboards operates primarily through direct commission, with some boards placed through select retailers. Wait times vary. The label's Instagram presence is the most reliable current source for what shapes are in production and how to make contact.

Tom Wegener · Wegener Surfboards · Noosa, Queensland, Australia

Tom Wegener did something that has not happened many times in the history of surfboard design: he revived a board form that had been functionally extinct for roughly one hundred years and made it work well enough that it generated a global movement of practitioners. The alaia — the thin, finless, parabolic-railed surfboard that Hawaiian surfers rode before the introduction of Western-style boards in the early twentieth century — was a known historical object when Wegener began experimenting with it in the early 2000s. It was not a living practice. Wegener, working in Noosa with traditional Paulownia timber and consulting historical records and museum specimens, rebuilt the construction methodology and began surfing the results. The films of Wegener and a small group of collaborators surfing finless timber alaias in the peeling point-break conditions of Noosa's First Point circulated widely enough, by the late 2000s, that alaia surfing became a recognized category with its own small but serious community of practitioners.

The alaia is not a longboard in the contemporary sense — most are five to eight feet long, thin as a cutting board, and completely finless. But the Wegener project belongs in this piece because it represents the most radical version of the same instinct that drives the logger renaissance: the conviction that what the longboard was before the shortboard revolution is worth understanding in practice, not just in photographs. Wegener extended that conviction backward past the 1950s, past the redwood planks, all the way to the pre-contact Pacific. In doing so he illuminated something about what all surfboards, including contemporary longboards, are: a negotiation between the physics of wood moving through water and the desires of the person standing on it.

Wegener Surfboards' current production line (as of mid-2025) includes Paulownia timber longboards and mid-lengths as well as alaias. The timber boards are hollow, lightweight, and functional in a way that surprises surfers who expect them to behave like antiques. They do not. They are contemporary functional designs executed in a non-contemporary material, and the combination produces a ride that is reported consistently to feel unlike any foam-and-fiberglass alternative. The label operates from Noosa; boards are available by direct commission and through a small number of Australian retailers. International inquiries are handled individually. Wegener has also written and spoken extensively about the construction methodology, making Wegener Surfboards unusual among small-shop operations in its commitment to transparency about process.

Oscar Guru · Guru Shapes · California

Note on verification: Oscar Guru and Guru Shapes appear in references to Bay Street Boards (Santa Monica, California), which has stocked or represented the label. A standalone website for Guru Shapes has been difficult to confirm as current; the primary online presence appears to be through affiliated retailers and social media. We have not been able to confirm the current direct-contact URL with confidence. If you are attempting to order, Bay Street Boards in Santa Monica is the best-documented starting point as of this writing.

Oscar Guru, shaping under the label Guru Shapes, works in the traditional California single-fin and noserider tradition. The boards are consistently referenced in conversations about the contemporary logger scene in Southern California — they surface in the hands of the invitational-circuit surfers and in the recommendation lists that circulate within the small-shop shaping community — but the label has maintained a low editorial profile, which is both a character choice and a function of the tight-community distribution model that most small-shop California shapers rely on.

The design emphasis is on traditional log geometry: wide tails, full noses, moderate concaves forward, and glass jobs heavy enough to give the boards the weight and drive that makes noseriding feel like gliding rather than balancing. These are not boards built for the kind of progressive surfing the contemporary shortboard world rewards. They are built for small, clean, point-break conditions — the waves where the logger renaissance has its strongest cultural home — and within those conditions they are reported to do what a good noserider is supposed to do: lock in, hold trim, and give a surfer the platform to walk.

Andy Davis Designs · California

Andy Davis is, depending on which part of his output you encounter first, a surf artist, a graphic designer, a muralist, or a surfboard shaper. The correct answer is that these categories are not meaningfully separate in his practice. Davis's visual work — bold, flat-color illustration informed by mid-century California graphic design and by the visual vernacular of classic surf brand identity — appears on surfboards, on prints, on apparel, on murals, and in gallery settings. The boards that carry that artwork are functional: they are shaped to be ridden, and the surfers who ride them ride them. But the context in which the boards exist is deliberately art-adjacent in a way that most functional equipment is not.

Andy Davis Designs operates at the intersection that is increasingly the relevant commercial space for small-shop shapers: the board-as-object collector market, where the purchaser wants something that works in the water but also functions as a design artifact in a room. Davis's work is particularly successful in this space because the visual language is consistent enough that a board with his art on it reads as a coherent object even when it's hanging on a wall. That consistency is harder to achieve than it looks. It requires both a strong visual identity and enough discipline to not dilute it for market reasons.

The board-as-art-object market is real and growing, but it creates a tension that most shapers who operate in it are aware of: the boards that are most likely to be purchased for display are often the boards that are least likely to be surfed, which creates a feedback loop where the visual language gradually detaches from the functional language. The best small-shop operators in this space — Davis among them — resist that drift by keeping the shapes functional regardless of the surface treatment. Whether the buyer surfaces them is the buyer's business.

The lesser-known women shapers

The women shapers active in longboarding in 2026 are documented in more detail in our Women in Longboarding history piece, which covers the competitive and cultural history of the discipline alongside the shaping work. The profiles below are cross-reference summaries; the longer editorial treatment lives at that piece.

The short version of the structural situation: surfboard shaping has been, and largely continues to be, one of the most male-dominated specialties in the surf industry — more so than the surfing itself, more so than surf retail or surf photography or even surf publishing. The reasons are a combination of apprenticeship-pipeline closure (established shapers have historically been reluctant to take on female apprentices), physical-space access (shaping bays are often attached to surf retail operations whose social cultures have been explicitly or implicitly male-coded), and the feedback loop that comes from under-coverage: if you never see a woman in a shaping room, you don't conceive of a woman in a shaping room as a possible identity, and the pipeline stays closed. That pipeline has been opening, unevenly and slowly, since roughly 2010. The figures below are the ones who have pushed it furthest.

Cher Pendarvis · the historical starting point

Cher Pendarvis is the documented starting point for women in surfboard shaping. She began repairing boards in San Diego in 1965 and shaped boards for herself and her husband, surf historian Steve Pendarvis, through the 1970s and 1980s. Her career predates the modern shaping-industry structure entirely; she was shaping during the same period that the shortboard revolution was displacing the longboard from the competitive mainstream. The historical record of her work is held primarily in the Pendarvis family archive and in scattered features in The Surfer's Journal. It has not been systematically digitized or placed in any public archive. The oral history of Pendarvis's contributions to shaping is the most time-sensitive documentation project in the history of women's surfboard design.

Rachel Lord · Lord Bords · Ventura, California

Rachel Lord trained as a sculptor and painter at the Rhode Island School of Design. She received her first surfboard at twenty-nine in 2015, began shaping in 2016 entirely through self-directed study, and has built Lord Bords into a working label whose boards are immediately recognizable for their high-contrast, color-blocked finish treatment — visual language closer to mid-century West Coast painting than to the muted resin tints of the California shaping tradition. The boards are technically conservative (the rocker and foil are not experimental) but visually unlike anything else on the market. They have been ridden by Karina Rozunko, Lola Mignot, and several of the other renaissance-era loggers whose work defines what contemporary women's logging looks like in editorial and film.

Christine Brailsford Caro · Furrow Surfcraft · Leucadia, California

Christine Brailsford Caro started shaping over a decade ago with a plywood paipo. Her label, Furrow Surfcraft, is now one of the most respected small-shop operations on the California coast. The design vocabulary draws from the transitional era of the late 1960s — the moment just before the shortboard revolution — and centers on single-fin eggs, twin-fin fishes, and dedicated noseriders. Output runs under 200 boards per year; wait lists run four to six months. Caro has been profiled by Men's Journal and the WSL's editorial operation, making her one of the more institutionally visible women shapers, though the scale of coverage still lags what the quality of the work warrants.

Valerie Duprat · Mère-Made Surfboards · California

Valerie Duprat is a French-born biochemist whose path to shaping tracks closer to Rachel Lord's outsider trajectory than to the traditional apprenticeship model. Her label, Mère-Made Surfboards, leans toward functional longboards and mid-lengths and has developed a customer base that is substantially composed of women learning to surf in mid-life — one of the fastest-growing demographic segments in the sport and one of the most poorly served by the mainstream shaping market, which is built around young male performance surfers and the equipment preferences that demographic generates. Duprat's ability to build boards calibrated to a surfer's actual needs — volume, stability, paddling ease — rather than the aspirational performance model the industry defaults to is a genuine market service, not a consolation offering.

Ashley Lloyd Surfboards · Santa Cruz, California

Ashley Lloyd is a Santa Cruz-based shaper specializing in performance longboards — boards built to surf with speed and precision in the kind of punchy, variable California beachbreak that the classic noserider template does not favor. Lloyd's position in the women's shaping landscape is as the performance-end practitioner: if the classic-log tradition that Caro and Lord work within is one pole of women's shaping, Lloyd is the other. Her boards are shaped to win heats in variable conditions, not to trim stylishly on a perfect point. That both ends of the spectrum now have credible women practitioners is a recent development, and one the category has not historically been able to claim.

Cross-reference: the longer editorial history of each of these shapers — their training, their design philosophy, the boards they build, and the surfers who ride them — is in our Women in Longboarding history piece, specifically in "Part nine: The women shaping the boards." We have not duplicated the full profiles here.

Regional and international

The cultural geography of the logger renaissance has, since roughly 2015, been shifting away from its original California-and-Hawaii center of gravity. European logging events — particularly in France (Anglet, Biarritz), Spain (Galicia), and the UK (Cornwall) — have built consistent audiences and have generated enough local demand to support small-shop shapers who do not need to import their boards from the United States. The Australian scene, never fully peripheral, has produced several makers who are known well in Australasia and largely unknown outside it. Mexico has developed a small but active shaping community adjacent to the logging destinations that have attracted international surfers since the 2010s. The profiles below are the most documented of these regional operators; we note where verification has been difficult.

Bing Surfboards · Encinitas, California

Bing Surfboards is technically not lesser-known — Bing Copeland is a canonical figure in California longboard history — but it belongs on this list because the contemporary operation, still based in Encinitas and still shaping under the Bing name, functions as a small-shop auteur label rather than a production brand, and most surfers under forty have limited awareness of the current work as distinct from the historical reputation. Bing Copeland began shaping in the mid-1960s and built one of the most influential longboard labels of the classic era; the company went through various ownership and production configurations over the following decades. The current Bing label maintains a small-volume, design-consistent operation rooted in classic California longboard geometry. The historical pedigree is real. The current work is also real and is being done by people who take the design tradition seriously. Worth distinguishing from the legacy.

Walden Surfboards · Encinitas, California

Walden Surfboards, founded by Mark Walden and operating from Encinitas, is the historical reference for the modern epoxy longboard market and for the volume-and-stability approach to longboard design that serves the intermediate-and-improving surfer rather than the specialist. Walden is not strictly a small-shop operation — it has achieved wider distribution than the other labels on this list — but it appears here because its historical role in making the longboard accessible to a broad market in the 1980s and 1990s is consistently underestimated in accounts of how the logger renaissance assembled its audience. You cannot build a renaissance culture without the initial audience, and Walden built a large part of that audience in California. The current production line is more diverse than the mid-century-fetish aesthetic of the logger renaissance might suggest: Walden makes everything from traditional noseriders to hybrid mid-lengths, in both fiberglass and epoxy constructions.

Jacobs Surfboards · Hermosa Beach, California

Jacobs Surfboards, associated with shaper Hap Jacobs, is another historical California longboard name whose current operation is less documented than the legacy. Jacobs was among the defining shapers of the early 1960s California longboard scene and built boards for many of the figures who established West Coast surfing's visual identity. The Hermosa Beach label has continued under family involvement beyond Hap Jacobs's primary shaping years. What is being produced now and under what quality standard is something we have not been able to confirm with the detail we would want; we flag the name as a historical reference and encourage direct contact if you are considering a commission.

Liam McNamara · Sproutboards · Hawaii

Verification note: Sproutboards, associated with Liam McNamara and operating in Hawaii, has been referenced in discussions of Hawaiian small-shop longboard shaping. We have not been able to independently confirm a current operational website or production status as of mid-2025. The name and general description are included here as a reference; confirm current status before making contact.

Liam McNamara and Sproutboards represent the Hawaii small-shop end of the shaping spectrum — an operator working in the islands, shaping primarily for local surfers, and largely invisible to the California and European editorial machine that drives most of the logger-renaissance coverage. Hawaiian longboard culture is its own thing, with its own lineage (Waikiki beach boys, the early 20th century surf clubs, the specific style of surf that Waikiki's slow, long, forgiving breaks reward) and its own community of practitioners who may or may not have much interest in the aesthetic preoccupations of the mainland logger revival. Small-shop shapers operating within that culture make boards calibrated to those waves and that community, and the result is equipment that often functions differently from California shapes built for similar lengths and styles.

Kookbox · Hawaii

Verification note: Kookbox has been described as a Hawaii-based minimalist longboard label. We have not been able to confirm current operational status, website, or production details. The name appears in references to Hawaiian small-shop shaping; confirm status directly before making contact.

Kookbox is referenced as a minimalist, functional-shapes operation in Hawaii — the kind of label that builds straightforward, honest longboards without decorative pretension, optimized for the actual conditions where they'll be ridden rather than for the aesthetic statements that California and European shaping increasingly involve. If the Kookbox description is accurate, it is the kind of operation that is most useful to surfers who want a board that works rather than a board that reads as a cultural signal. That is a smaller market in the contemporary logger scene than it perhaps should be, and shapers who serve it deserve acknowledgment.

Hatfield Surfboards · Australia

Verification note: Hatfield Surfboards has been referenced in connection with Australian small-shop longboard shaping. We have not been able to confirm the current location, operational status, or shaper details to our satisfaction. Included as a reference; verify independently.

The Australian longboard scene, centered geographically around Noosa (Queensland's premier point break and home to the annual Noosa Festival of Surfing, one of the largest longboard gatherings in the world), has produced a number of small-shop shapers who are well-regarded domestically and largely undocumented in the English-language surf press outside Australia. Hatfield Surfboards is one of the names that surfaces in this context. The Noosa community specifically rewards boards that work in the particular conditions of the First Point — a long, right-hand point with a specific combination of speed and wall that rewards trim, cross-stepping, and a forward-biased approach that not all longboard templates accommodate well. Shapers who have spent time shaping for Noosa have often developed templates that reflect that specificity, which makes them less versatile in other conditions but unusually good in the ones they were designed for.

The quiet European shapers

Europe's longboard scene built its current depth during a roughly fifteen-year window that began around 2005, when a generation of young European surfers — primarily French and Spanish, with a secondary wave of British and Portuguese practitioners — encountered the visual language of the California logger revival and began building a parallel scene around it. The European version of logging has its own distinct character: waves in Atlantic France and northern Spain are often heavier and more powerful than the California point breaks that defined the logger aesthetic, which pushed European shapers toward designs with more volume in the tail and more rocker forward than a California-optimized template would carry. The result is a European longboard design tradition that is related to but not identical to the California tradition, and that has produced some genuinely distinctive small-shop work.

Tris Surfboards · UK

Verification note: Tris Surfboards has been referenced as a UK small-shop operation. We have not been able to confirm current website, operational status, or shaper details. The name appears in references to UK-based longboard shaping; confirm directly.

British longboard shaping exists in a particular set of conditions: Atlantic swells that are often powerful and cold, breaks that are predominantly beach and reef rather than the point breaks that favor the classic log, and a surf culture that is, by the nature of the UK's latitude and wave quality, more committed in its practitioners than the casual-surfing demographic that drives the California market. Tris Surfboards, if confirmed as currently operational, is one of the names associated with UK small-shop longboard work. The conditions in which British shapers work have historically pushed them toward designs with more rocker and more volume than California equivalents — boards that can handle the choppier, punchier Atlantic conditions — and the interesting question is whether those adaptations have produced anything that is genuinely distinctive or whether they represent standard adjustments that any competent shaper would make for different conditions.

Helena Larsson · Larsson Surfboards

Verification note: Helena Larsson and Larsson Surfboards have been referenced in connection with European women's longboard shaping. We have not been able to confirm operational status, home country (Sweden has been suggested), or current contact information with confidence. Flagged here as a reference; verification required before making contact.

The presence of women shapers in European surf markets is, if anything, even less documented than in the California market. Helena Larsson, if the Larsson Surfboards operation is as described, would represent the Scandinavian end of the European longboard shaping conversation — an unusual geographic location given that Scandinavia's surf conditions are limited to the North Sea coastlines of Norway and Denmark and a handful of spots in Iceland. Scandinavian surf culture is real but niche; it tends to attract serious practitioners precisely because the conditions are demanding enough that casual participants are filtered out. A shaper operating in that context would be building boards for a small, cold-water, committed community rather than for the aspirational warm-water audience that drives most longboard shaping markets.

The quiet Mexican shapers

Mexico's Pacific coast has been a staging ground for the logger renaissance since at least 2010, when the combination of accessible warm-water point breaks, lower cost of living, and a growing community of international surf-and-stay visitors began generating consistent demand for local longboard culture. La Saladita — a slow, long, left-hand point break in Guerrero, about three hours south of Zihuatanejo — became the most legible of these destinations, partly because of its wave quality and partly because a cluster of notable surfers (including Lola Mignot, who made it a semi-permanent base) gave it editorial visibility. The shaping community that has developed around these destinations is small and largely under-documented in the English-language press.

Local shapers at La Saladita

Verification note: We have seen references to a shaper known as Brandon operating locally at or near La Saladita. We have not been able to confirm a surname, a label name, a website, or any verifiable production details. References to "Brandon Surfboards" at La Saladita appear in surf-travel writing about the area but have not been independently confirmed to our standard. We are flagging the existence of local Mexican shaping at the destination rather than making specific claims about an individual whose details we cannot verify.

The broader point about Mexican shaping is structural: the slow-wave conditions of Mexico's Pacific point breaks — La Saladita, Punta Mita, the various breaks along the Nayarit and Oaxacan coasts — are among the most favorable conditions for traditional longboard surfing anywhere in the Americas. The demand for locally-made equipment in those conditions is real. The supply, at the small-shop end, is built around a handful of shapers who are serving the local surf community and the growing international logging-vacation market. These shapers are almost entirely invisible to the surf-media apparatus that runs through California. They are not invisible to the surfers who use their boards.

Patty Cervantes · Sayulita area

Verification note: Patty Cervantes has been referenced in connection with surfboard shaping in the Sayulita-area surf community. We have not been able to confirm a label name, operational status, or production details. Flagged as a reference; confirm directly if attempting contact.

Sayulita, in Nayarit state, is a more densely populated surf-tourism destination than La Saladita and has a correspondingly more developed surf-industry infrastructure. The break is a right-hand point that works on a wider range of swell and tide combinations than many of the more purely single-condition logging waves, which means it attracts a broader range of equipment and a broader range of surfers. A women shaper operating in this context — if the Cervantes reference is accurate — would be working in one of the more culturally visible Mexican surf communities, building boards for a mix of serious local surfers and the international surf-tourism market.

Sustainable and eco-material shapers

The surfboard industry has a materials problem that it has been aware of and largely not solving for several decades. The conventional construction — polyurethane foam blank, polyester resin, fiberglass cloth — is petroleum-derived from blank to glass job, produces toxic VOC emissions during the shaping and laminating process, and generates boards that are not recyclable at end of life. The industry has been aware of this since at least the early 2000s, when the Clark Foam closure of 2005 forced a temporary scramble for alternative blank suppliers and briefly opened the conversation about whether the blank-and-laminate model was the only viable approach. The answer, twenty years on, is that alternatives exist, that they are technically functional, and that they remain a small fraction of overall production.

The sustainable shaping conversation sits at the intersection of a few different trajectories. One is the hollow wooden construction tradition that Tom Wegener's alaia and Paulownia work represents — using timber rather than foam, with no resin lamination in the traditional sense. Another is the recycled and bio-based foam blank development, pursued by organizations like Sustainable Surf and through industry initiatives that have gained some traction since the late 2010s. A third is the experimental use of plant-based resins (bio-resins derived from plant oils rather than petrochemicals), which can replace polyester or epoxy resins in conventional blank-and-glass construction without changing the shaping process. Each of these trajectories has working practitioners and documented boards.

Tom Wegener · Paulownia timber construction

Already profiled above, but worth re-noting here: Wegener's timber longboards and alaias represent the most developed tradition of alternative-material surfboard construction currently in production at any meaningful scale. Paulownia is a fast-growing timber with a high strength-to-weight ratio; the hollow construction Wegener uses produces boards that are lighter than comparable foam-and-fiberglass shapes and that, when finished appropriately, require no petroleum-derived resins for the primary construction. This is not a marginal craft project. Wegener has been refining the construction for roughly twenty years and the current boards are competitive with conventional construction on all the criteria that matter to a surfing performance: flex, weight, rail response, durability. The environmental case is straightforward: timber is renewable, the construction process does not involve VOC emissions, and a board that breaks can be repaired and eventually composted rather than landfilled.

Atua Tau Surfboards · Aotearoa New Zealand

Verification note: Atua Tau Surfboards, associated with flax-and-wood traditional construction in Aotearoa New Zealand, has been referenced in connection with indigenous Pacific board-building traditions and sustainable materials. We have not been able to confirm current operational status, contact information, or production details with confidence. Flagged as a reference; verify independently.

The most interesting territory in sustainable surfboard construction is not the bio-resin reformulation of conventional design — which produces incremental improvement in the right direction — but the application of non-Western board-building traditions that were never organized around petroleum materials in the first place. Atua Tau Surfboards, if the description is accurate, represents the New Zealand end of this inquiry: construction using traditional Maori materials including flax (harakeke) and native timbers, building forms that draw on pre-contact Pacific surfing traditions in the same spirit that Wegener drew on Hawaiian alaia construction. We have not been able to confirm the details of this operation to the standard we would want, which is why the verification note is attached; but the concept — indigenous-material Pacific surfboard construction — is real, has practitioners, and deserves coverage that the mainstream surf press has not provided.

Sustainable Surf · Ecoboard Project

Sustainable Surf is a California-based nonprofit that has, since roughly 2013, been operating the Ecoboard Project — an industry-wide initiative to identify and verify surfboards built with reduced environmental impact, primarily through the use of recycled EPS foam blanks and bio-based resins. The Ecoboard certification is not a shaper label; it is a third-party verification that a board from any shaper meets specific materials standards. A number of small-shop and mid-size shapers have built boards to the Ecoboard standard; the certification appears on the board as a sticker indicating which criteria were met.

The Sustainable Surf project is worth including here because it represents the most systematic attempt to bring alternative-materials surfboard construction into the mainstream production pipeline. Individual shapers experimenting with bio-resins or recycled blanks are doing important work; the Ecoboard Project is attempting to aggregate that work into a market signal that a surfer buying any board can look for. Whether the market signal has been strong enough to move production decisions at meaningful scale is the open question. As of 2026, Ecoboard-certified boards remain a small fraction of overall production but a growing fraction of small-shop production, which is where adoption was always most likely to happen first.

A note on the honest limits of eco-material construction: the environmental case for any individual surfboard is more complex than the materials alone. Transportation emissions from shipping boards internationally, the energy use of shaping facilities, and the end-of-life question for boards that are no longer rideable but still chemically complex objects — these are not fully addressed by switching from polyester to bio-resin. The materials conversation is real and worth having, but it is not the complete picture. The shapers doing the most serious work in this space tend to be aware of the complexity and resist the marketing simplification that "sustainable materials" implies a fully sustainable object.

What's worth following next

The logger renaissance has, by now, established its institutional forms: the invitational contest circuit, the established small-shop labels, the visual vocabulary of single-fin logs and high-waist swimsuits and hand-rolled resin tints. What happens next in small-shop longboard shaping is harder to read, but a few trajectories are legible.

The Brazilian scene

Brazil has been the most surprising development in competitive longboarding over the past five years. The Brazilian CT scene — which has been dominant in shortboard surfing for two decades — has not historically overlapped with the longboard world, but a younger cohort of Brazilian surfers has developed serious longboard technique, and the demand signal that generates tends to produce small-shop shaping responses. The Brazilian logging scene is not yet well-documented in English, and several shapers operating in São Paulo state's beach communities (Ubatuba, Maresias, Itamambuca) and in the wave-rich South (Florianópolis, Garopaba) are beginning to attract attention. We are watching this space and will update this piece as the picture clarifies.

The Mediterranean

Mediterranean surf is a contested category — the waves are small, inconsistent by Atlantic standards, and dependent on specific wind conditions that are not always cooperative. But Mediterranean surf culture exists, particularly in the Canary Islands (which are Atlantic but geographically proximate to the Mediterranean), Morocco, and the Italian and Greek coasts. Small-shop shaping in these markets is beginning to develop, and the particular conditions — smaller, slower, sometimes mushier waves than Atlantic Europe — favor the kind of traditional longboard design that is this piece's subject. Whether a distinct Mediterranean shaping aesthetic emerges from these conditions is an open question; it has not happened yet at a scale that produces identifiable labels, but the ingredients are present.

Iceland and cold-water Atlantic Europe

Iceland has a surf culture. It is small, serious, and built around conditions that are objectively hostile — cold water, powerful exposed-coast swells, limited daylight in winter — and that filter participation to a committed few. The surfers operating in Iceland are mostly riding shortboards by necessity, but the growth of the longer-wave exploration tradition (the fishing-town point breaks, the northern-peninsula reefs) has begun to produce some longboard surfing. Whether small-shop shaping follows is unclear. The more likely scenario is that Icelandic surfers who want custom longboards will continue to source them from mainland Europe or California. But the cultural conditions for an Iceland-specific longboard shaping tradition are, marginally, better than they were five years ago.

The asymmetrical and alternative design movement

Tyler Warren's asymmetrical work has seeded a wider movement in alternative longboard design that is worth watching as a design trajectory rather than a geographic one. A small but growing cohort of shapers — working primarily in California and Australia — is experimenting with finless and semi-finless longboard shapes, displacement hulls applied to longer lengths, and channel-bottom constructions that are new to the longboard context even if they have a long history in shorter boards. These experiments are mostly happening at the edges of the small-shop production world, in one-off commissions and personal projects rather than catalog shapes. But the track record of small-volume design experimentation in surfing is that today's one-off becomes tomorrow's standard shape. The asymmetrical and alternative-design work happening now at the long end of the size spectrum is worth tracking.

The 2024-2026 emerging labels

Without being able to verify the details to the standard this piece applies, we can note that the period from 2024 to 2026 has seen a noticeable increase in the number of first-generation small-shop shapers — people who received their first boards in the logger renaissance era, began shaping as a self-directed practice, and are now producing at sufficient volume and quality to have a public label and a wait list. This is the same trajectory that Rachel Lord's Lord Bords followed; it is now happening in parallel at a dozen other small operations whose names have not yet established the editorial visibility that would make them confident inclusions in a reference piece. We are tracking this cohort and will update this guide when the picture is clearer. If you are one of these shapers and believe your work belongs here, contact us.

Shapers at a glance

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