FRK

Dan Mann on Designing Kelly Slater’s Board:

“I knew immediately what I wanted to make him. I saw it all in my head from the bottom contour to the tail template. The way the volume would distribute through the width, the whole shape. It might actually be the most intuitive design I’ve ever done, probably because I’ve spent so many years both watching Kelly surf and shaping boards. As crazy as it sounds, I was certain it would work for him. Oddly, after sending him the board in 2015, I never heard back from Kelly about how it went, so I moved on to other projects. Then, one afternoon in 2017, I got a stream of text messages about how Kelly was blowing up at Trestles on my board. It completely caught me off guard. Turns out, Kelly’s good friend from Florida, who was visiting at the time, grabbed the board from Kelly’s shed where it had sat untouched for two years. He surfed it and then told Kelly that he would love it based on having known him his whole life, and understanding the kind of boards Kelly enjoys from all the times they’d swapped boards before.” – Dan Mann