SVEIN RASMUSSEN: POSITIVE ENERGY

 

SVEIN RASMUSSEN: POSITIVE ENERGY

Svein Rasmussen, the visionary founder of Starboard, tells us about his goals for the brand, his belief in synergies, as well as his dedication to protecting our planet for future generations.

Words: Svein Rasmussen // Photos: John Carter

---

INNOVATION

We started making windsurfing boards in 1994. They were not just another range of windsurfing boards though, but an introduction to the future of design thinking. Imagine boards with gravity control system (GCS), a recessed mast base area and built in a wood sandwich layup, which was about a kilo lighter than any other production boards on the market. Thirty years ago, such ideas were fun to bring to the market, and now we have introduced wood sandwich boards that are lighter again than carbon sandwich boards, other than our exclusive Reflex Carbon tech, while the gravity control system still delivers its magic in our iSonics, Carve’s and even Hyper wave boards. It’s great to see that GCS has become a proven concept adapted by the industry.

In 2006, I visited Jeff Henderson at Hot Sails Maui, he was working on converting longboard surfboards to windsurfing longboards. We were catching fun waves with them and one evening Jeff asked me to leave the rig on the beach, threw me a paddle and asked me to go paddle surfing. I was a bit wobbly on the 11’0” x 22”  surfboard, but realised that this could be an amazing new direction once we made the gear more user-friendly.

When I came home to our workshop we designed the 10’0”x34” Whopper. My wife tested it with me in Bali in smaller waves while Jake ‘The Snake’ Paterson, who was a Pipeline master surfer, put it to the test in bigger waves. It changed the entry to SUP surfing and quickly became the world’s number one selling SUP. Seeing that SUP could use some crazy ideas I jumped into paddleboarding as the brand manager 17 years ago.

PAVING THE WAY

During my time as SUP manager, I often thought of my father Arne, who was paddling while standing up on a Starboard GO on our Lake Taco around 1999. He was a kayak paddler and said that at the age of 75 he preferred the feeling of standing up now, getting a better view and feeling freer. So yes, my father was my original SUP experience, and it took many years to realise the path he had paved for me and Starboard.

One day, Ollie O’Reilly from England arrived out of the blue, he had the instinct for getting a job done properly – analysing, planning and building communities. He has been with us for ten years and last year  I finally managed to convince him to become the brand manager of paddleboarding, which in turn enabled me to devote more time to windsurfing again.

When you run a company, you just look for good people, and when you find somebody capable of doing a job, then that’s great.

BACK IN THE SADDLE

Pro windsurfer, Nico Prien, was in charge of windsurfing for a few years and he did an awesome job. Nico is a young man and still loves his windsurfing, but after two years he realised that he was not ready to become a truly dedicated office rat just yet, and decided it would be much more fun to travel and race again. So after Nico went back to focus on the PWA Slalom World Tour, it left me with the opportunity to have some fun managing the windsurfing side of things again. We are very fortunate to have Rémi Vila as our designer, he even dreams about windsurfing and is the essence of our sport. The 2024 range has been very well received. Our warranty claims are very low and we aim to have a 0.5% rate (1 in 200 boards) that experience any issues, which we were at when we introduced the Innovation Quality slogan. Rémi is at the factory every Thursday for his weekly quality inspection, so we are quite ahead of the game. Seeing our team riders charging is amazing, Lennart [Neubauer], Liam [Dunkerbeck], Sarah-Quita [Offringa], Oda [Brødholt] and Matteo [Iachino] are a very special crew and we are so lucky to have them on board.

GOALS

There are three things I want to do as windsurfing brand manager:

 

1. I want to find a way to re-energise the appeal of windsurfing. I would like to see a lot younger crew coming in, as that is fun, and has always been part of my drive. If you teach a seventy-year-old to windsurf, that is great, but if you teach a seven-year-old to windsurf, that is even better. Whenever we run our advertising campaigns, we try and involve a lot of kids and plenty of ladies too.

 

2. Then we need to semi-revolutionise the sport in terms of equipment. Since windsurfing incorporated foiling, there hasn’t been a lot of new concepts and we need to figure out what the next level might be. There was a time when snowboarding had overtaken skiing as the most popular snow sport, but then suddenly the carve ski brought skiing back as the most popular snow sport. I see one of windsurfing’s evolutions in wing-foiling, which is just another way to surf with wind power and is easy for us windsurfers to adapt to.

 

3. We also need to re-energise the sport through better equipment, which is easier and more fun to ride. We want boards to be more durable, while being lighter and less expensive. The Start 2 is 6 kg lighter and 30% less expensive than our entry level boards, and they convert to “wing-board learners” with the two supplied front fins. The Go Fly boards entered the market this year and they make windsurf foiling super easy to learn, I wish every windsurf centre would have one as its such a plug and play toy. Then the 7’9” Airfoil Learner is the ultimate all-round board, you can learn to windsurf, get planing, learn to wing and then to wing-foil all at 9kg.

The iQFOiL 85 Surface 2 Air is a fabulous offering, you learn to windsurf with two fins, then learn to plane with the back fin and finally can participate in the iQFOiL Youth Worlds. In addition, last year it won the PWA World Cup in Japan, so it’s a real all-rounder.

On the high performance level side we will continue to deliver the very best year after year, proven with 14 our of 16 PWA constructors titles over the years. We keep on working intensively with Rémi Vila, Matteo, Sarah, Lennart and Liam to develop gear that they, and the rest of us, rate as the best in our industry.

DEEPER PURPOSE.

At my age, surviving unspoken challenges and enjoying amazing days, I need to keep a very careful eye on our business, while also taking responsibility for its impact.

How can we depart from our fragile planet knowing that at least Starboard had a minimal negative. impact, or perhaps even a positive one. It’s about responsibility beyond the performance and the money, something that not many people will agree with me despite most scientists clearly showing that unless we start to take our future seriously, we will have no future at all.

We run a luxury business offering watersports equipment with high emissions and 80% of our equipment is fossil fuel based. So while we slowly move towards more planet friendly materials and manage to get our energy over to renewables we all need to do more. We need to make up for the emissions of the past, the ones that have initiated the big change we currently experience.

Mangroves, or Sea trees, from what our research has found are the most efficient carbon “draw down“ per square metre and per dollar, so we have a few  million trees in the  ground by now.

Our tree planting programs are certified by Verra and our plastic offset program, the first in the world, is also expected to receive Verra certification this year.

To me, the important thing is all about biodiversity, re-creating forests, taking care of our coastlines, setting up educational programs and financially supporting livelihood projects through carbon credits.

Our Blue Carbon Verification Carbon Units (VCU) from Worldview International Foundation are AA rated, which is the most expensive and desirable in the market. Through our planting, we help bring in millions of dollars to livelihood projects in the areas around the new forests.

Then on the other side is plastic pollution, which is another huge challenge in itself, brought on solely by us ignorant and convenience seeking humans. We have forbidden single-use plastic at our offices and have removed almost all single-use plastics from our products since 2019 already. We have been working to get the single-use plastic guidelines in Thailand to become legislation and laws. In 2017, we had already joined forces with the UN, ASEAN, Coca Cola and the CP group, to try and speed up the process. However, each year more and more plastic ends up in our ocean’s, it is currently estimated that each person contributes 1.4kg of plastic per year, so that’s why we aim to pick up 1.4kg of plastic per board sold. We have already removed 920,000kg of plastic from the beaches/oceans, but by 2030 we would like that number to be more like a couple of million kilos.

 

Our customer(s) is/are the final part of our journey, so when a person invests in a Starboard product, they are not just investing in the physical product itself, but also into biodiversity, livelihood, carbon draw down, and one of the largest anti-plastic pollution projects on earth, it becomes  a purchase with deeper purpose

OLYMPICS

The Olympics is a huge inspiration for Starboard. I remember being at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games, but at the time, I would never have imagined ever becoming a part of the windsurfing industry or anything like that. So to see that our crew actually developed products that was awarded the Olympic discipline, and that Gonzalo Costa Hoevel has driven iQFOiL-ing to be as successful as it beyond my imagination.

iQFOiL has brought new life back to windsurfing and helps to engage more clubs and federations within our sport. At the Olympics, it is was probably the most impressive sailing sport and windsurfing is now being noted.

We just had a meeting with the LA ’28 organiser’s while at the Paris Games, and they were impressed with the  iQFOiL action.

The financial side for us has been challenging, as we have invested hugely, by supporting both the class and the riders, but in the long term this will pay off for the sport, and hopefully, also for Starboard. We are extremely proud to be able to showcase the iQFOiL class as the first Olympic sport to be 10x climate positive.

Since the first major event in 2020, we calculated the carbon footprint of all travel associated with iQFOiL and all the iQFOiL equipment, we then planted enough mangroves to offset the emissions by ten times over. We actually also did this for the PWA and ICF SUP events, which is a huge job, and we have a team of four eco specialists to help oversee it all. All our Starboard products are 10x climate positive and we even collect 11.4kg of beach/ocean plastic per iQFOiL board produced, which is the weight of the board. In 2020, we received the World Sailing Sustainability Award, and I was very happy to be congratulated by the America’s Cup winners’ when we first presented our initiatives during the 2019 World Sailing AGM in Bermuda.

SYNERGY & TALENT

I believe in synergies around the universe, so you almost naturally tend to work with people that come to you through random means. That is a synergy and that has seemed to work out for me over the years. Our (Starboard’s) first designer was Jean-Louis Colmas from New Caledonia. I was racing there and I looked at his boards because he was just so fast. Not long after that, we decided to start making boards together. Then came Tiesda You from the UK, who sent me two emails. Honestly, I couldn’t read, or understand, either of them as there was no spaces between the letters. It was as if you were trying to read one giant line of text. In someway it tweaked my interest though, so I asked him to fly out to Thailand instead, so that we could have a face-to-face conversation about what he was trying to say.

What you realise with a synergy is that you can find some really amazing crew. And the same can be said with all the brands that we are working with. A lot of the time it is friends who want to create something together. No matter whether it is our friends in South Africa, who make Airush Kites or the crew in Australia, who make Severne, it is all synergetic work. I can say with my hand on my heart that I don’t think we ever even advertised for such important positions – they are just naturally occurring synergies.

FENG SHUI

When we built our offices we used architects and Feng Shui experts. They can sense and feel the energies flowing through the building and angulations, so we worked with them to ensure that the flow is always improving. It’s important that the environment in which you work should promote creativity and productivity. Essentially, we want it to feel like a resort, which is precisely why we have a swimming pool and we are situated in a wake park. The last thing you want as a company is that people dread coming to work. Instead, it’s much better to try and create an environment that makes them look forward to returning, rather than trying to run away.

TESTING

I am probably the least talented windsurfing world champion in history, however, on the flip side I am probably also the hardest working one. On the development side of things, I might have tested more boards than anyone else, and my talent lies in feeling what can be improved in a board’s shape.

DETAILS

I like to keep my finger on the pulse with everything that is going on at Starboard. I think most managers like to follow things very carefully. We want to make sure that we are minimising mistakes, while maximising potential. You can call it micro-management, but I like to call it macro-management. Personally, I want to see more, not less. We can take the advice from wonderful management books, but if any other brand managers from our windsurfing world are reading this – they might agree that in our tiny industry we need to know most of the nuts and bolts.

QUICK RESPONSE

Every email I receive, I make a point of answering it within twenty-four hours if possible. I like to answer things immediately if I can! Sometimes I miss one and then I receive a follow up email, which I then feel very guilty about. It is not only our company policy, but it is also just a sign of respect! If someone talks to you in person, you are not going to stand there and wait for two days before you answer.

MAGIC BOARDS

I am a Carve addict. That board to me feels like winning the lottery, honestly. Rémi did an amazing job on the latest design. I love the Carve and then the other board I love is the Go-Fly because it just makes the process of learning to foil so much easier. The Go-Fly gets you up on the foil with almost no effort. It naturally wants to come up on the foil, and once you are up, you are in total control. It is an entry level to advanced foil board; you could almost learn to windsurf on this board and then take off and go straight into foiling. You hardly even plane, you just go straight into foiling mode. In the past, we have said that you become hooked on windsurfing when you get planing for the first time, but you could also now argue that some people will become even more hooked, if they are foiling straightaway.

There was a year when Jean-Louis was too busy to shape the new Carve’s, so I started learning how to shape, which was around 1999-2000. Now we are on our 2025 model, which is over twenty years later. It really is a great range. Five years ago, I was not so happy with them, but what we have now is this ultimate mix between super early planing, top-end speed and a board that is really easy to enter and exit the gybe. It gives me everything I need to be happy on the water. It is a board I think most windsurfers would enjoy riding as you can learn so quickly how to gybe on this board.

WINGS

Winging is windsurfing to me. With winging we just have a rig that is a bit different. It is surfing with the wind in essence, which is the same as windsurfing. Wing-foiling is also challenging windsurfing in a positive way. Windsurfing now needs to create even better gear and that can only be a good thing.

FOCUS

My focus will be to bridge the gap between continuing to deliver the highest performing gear and getting more people into our sport, while protecting our playgrounds from all sorts of pollution. I thank all our customers, shops, distribution partners, riders, staff and suppliers for believing in us and working together to make Starboard the best brand on and for the planet – we are all a team.

The post SVEIN RASMUSSEN: POSITIVE ENERGY appeared first on Windsurf Magazine.