Company History

Randy French founded Surftech in 1989 when his back­ground as a surf­board shaper and a pio­neer in the wind­surf indus­try drove him to exper­i­ment with dif­fer­ent mate­ri­als in an effort to make surf­boards lighter and stronger. He adapted the com­pos­ite board con­struc­tion tech­niques he had devel­oped for wind­surf boards to surf, which resulted in major tech­no­log­i­cal break­throughs with regard to both board dura­bil­ity and weight.

Surftech offi­cially began when Randy built a pro­to­type with Rusty Preisendor­fer at his fac­tory in Ore­gon. These orig­i­nal boards remain the most sought after of all Surftech shaper’s sam­ple boards. Surftech soon part­nered with a world class inter­na­tional fac­tory that matches Surftech’s com­mit­ment to excel­lence, pro­vid­ing unpar­al­leled capa­bil­i­ties, strong envi­ron­men­tal aware­ness and unmatched craftsmanship.

Surftech’s first pro­duc­tion surf­boards were a series of wood veneer mod­els shaped by Randy French. Their suc­cess led the Com­pany to part­ner with other shapers who wanted to use Surftech’s com­pos­ite con­struc­tion to make their already high qual­ity surf­boards con­sid­er­ably stronger and lighter.

The first shaper to join with Randy and Surftech was leg­endary South Bay shaper, Dale Velzy. Soon after Reynolds Yater, Mickey Munoz, Robert August and Don­ald Takayama all were on board and enthu­si­as­tic about what this new tech­nol­ogy would mean to the world of surf­ing. Before long, Surftech was pro­duc­ing entire quiv­ers from these leg­endary shapers and Randy’s vision of shar­ing this new tech­nol­ogy became a reality.

As the long­board side of Surftech con­tin­ued to grow through the early ’90s, the com­pany turned it’s atten­tion to the short­board world.

Randy started by intro­duc­ing his own line of short­boards in 1990, which were get­ting very good feed­back from the Santa Cruz crew. Geoff Rashe, shaper and owner of M10 Surf­boards in Santa Cruz was con­vinced after his top team rider, Jason “Rat­boy” Collins tried one of the boards and wouldn’t give it back.

Soon short­board shapers from around the globe includ­ing Glen Minami, Phil Byrne, John Carper, Rusty Preisendor­fer, and Al Mer­rick saw the advan­tages of work­ing with Surftech; its amaz­ingly durable and light­weight Tuflite Technolgy.

Part­ner­ing with the world’s top shapers intro­duced Surftech to the top surfers in the world includ­ing Shane Dorian, Pan­cho Sul­li­van, Rat­boy, Matt Rock­hold, Tom Car­roll, Myles Padaca, Tyler Smith, Pete Mel and a host of oth­ers. Hear­ing their feed­back on the Tuflite boards was con­fir­ma­tion that Randy’s vision of a lighter, stronger, higher-performance surf­board was for real.

Since that time, Surftech has enjoyed amaz­ing growth and now offers a wide range of tech­nolo­gies across both its surf and stand-up-paddle lines. In addi­tion to Tuflite and the Wood lines, we sell ULTRAFLX, Soft­Top and Black­Tip with sev­eral new tech­nolo­gies to come in the next few years. Stay tuned…