Who taught you to shape? The actual shaping of a bodyboard isn’t the hardest part. It’s the fabrication that takes the real skill. So with that being said, I would say my shaping education was two-fold. Rick initiated me in the fabrication basics and my skills in those areas were developed by countless hours on the production line. Buzz taught me the nitty-gritty of shaping and also turned me on to the engineering side of things. He really challenged me to ask questions as to why material reacted the way they did, and try things even if they failed horribly, which they often did. I also have to give a lot of credit to the riders, who have tested all my ideas and given invaluable feedback over the years. The ultimate test is in the riding and it’s a great feeling when your work is helping guys to achieve world championships and push the limits in various areas.

What was the appeal? Well, I never grew up and thought “I’m going to shape bodyboards for a living.” Actually, I was pretty keen to be a cop! I loved to ride bodyboards, but I was pretty average and the waves in New Zealand aren’t exactly great. When I got the job with Rick, I really loved working there and found I had a bit of a knack for figuring out the problems that tend to occur when you work with heat and plastics. I was more skilled at working with the various machines than shaping, but when I moved to Australia and Rheo, the original shaper guy left pretty quickly and I just assumed his role. As I said previously, I think the real joy is to see your boards being ridden in crazy conditions by the world’s best. It’s an unreal feeling and that keeps me going.

How and why did you set up your own brand? I started Mez Boards/Toobs Australia when I returned to Australia in 1997. I had been shaping customs in Hawaii for all the Toobs guys and some prominent Morey riders too. I mucked around at one doomed company for a few months, but when the opportunity came about to start my own gig in Australia, I jumped at it. I was pretty young and naive and got into trouble a few years later. I could make good boards, but I had no idea what it took to run a business. I left the company in 1999 and moved back to New Zealand to work for Rick once more. He had just won the worldwide contract to build all the Morey high-end boards.

It was in New Zealand that I started NMD, first as a custom brand in 1999, then introducing NMD Stox (stock boards) in 2001. Why did I do it all over again? Well, I saw the error of my ways from my first venture and also saw that companies had lost the plot with regards to performance bodyboards. There were fins in rails, funky deck skins and shocking tail shapes. The big Australian brands of the day were losing their way and I wanted to introduce a board and a brand that concentrated on function and quality.

How did you come about setting up your own factory? At the start of the new millennium, a couple of USA bodyboard companies followed the worldwide trend and moved their production to China. That was the beginning of the end for large scale manufacturing in the western world and most factories closed within five years. The New Zealand factory was no different — we were leaking money. Rick found some investors in Indonesia and by 2002 we had moved lock, stock and barrel to Indo. It turned out that Rick wasn’t able to keep up his end of the Indo deal, so I took over the whole show sometime in 2002. I have partners in the Indo factory, as it costs a small fortune to run a decent-sized factory and all that goes with it, but I treat it like my own and my partners are happy to let me run wild.

Do you enjoy your job? Most days, though Indo can do your head in every so often. I have to give out much respect to my right-hand man, Dan Sivess. I travel back and forwards between my family in Australia and the factory in Indo and Dan holds the fort while I’m away. He’s a young guy and was only 21 when he moved to the jungle. He’s held tough and keeps me on track, and has developed into a great shaper in his own right.

What do you think about the state of the bodyboarding industry at the moment and your brand’s position within the industry? I think the industry is strong, because a large number of the companies nowadays are owned and run by bodyboarders. In the scale of things, our sport is still in its infancy and I truly believe that somewhere down the track we’ll start to see things take off. Bodyboarders, for the most part, have been forced underground, and as a result we tend to be more loyal. Stand-ups have everything put in front of them with the big three’s domination of surf retail, so bodyboarders have to hunt down locations that stock bodyboarding clothing and equipment, but we tend to cherish it more in the end. Where do I see NMD’s position in the industry? Hopefully as a market leader, a brand that produces good boards that you can depend on year in year out. We may not offer the boards with the most bells and whistles, but we do the little things right and focus on quality and performance ahead of gimmicks.

Who are your team riders? In Australia we have Ben Player, Dave Winchester, Max Arent, Joe Clarke, Charlie Holt and Thorpe Waluew the supergrom. Lilly Pollard flies the flag for the ladies. We have team riders in each country where NMD boards are sold. In the UK we have Jack Johns, Danny Wall, Rob Barber, Alistair Daniels, Dan Skajarowski, Aaron Dinham, Lew Smart, and groms Luke Brabyn and Dan Garton.

What is the brands ethos? “It starts with the board” — This means that it’s the actual board on which the company is built. If you don’t have a good product, the rest is just hype.

What R&D do you do? R&D is a constant part of my company. I have some of the best riders in the world riding my boards and they e-mail every week with comments about the boards. Also, as I am in the factory and not designing from an office a million miles away, I have the luxury of trying out new ideas and new materials. I love this aspect of designing and am always giving my guys new things to try.

How do you stay on top of your quality control? As I trained all my original staff here in Indo, not just in fabrication, but also in methodology, I take pride in the fact that they know what to look for in terms of quality and finish. Indonesians are amazing craftsmen and I have to say that they are superior to 99% of the crew that worked for me in other parts of the world. Dan and I are constantly monitoring the factory floor and our more experienced guys have evolved into supervisor roles. The production is set up in such a way that each workstation inspects the work from the previous station and that allows for inline, step by step quality control. There’s no waiting until the board gets to the packaging stage and then finding an imperfection that could have been rectified earlier.

What sets your boards apart from the rest of the market? I think it has to do with the fact that I run my own factory. I’m there at the coal face and can make changes or tweaks as required. Most other brands are run remotely, i.e. the guys who design the brand are in Australia, USA or Europe, while their boards are produced in Asia and they only visit the factory maybe once or twice a year. I also think that with NMD and VS, I have arguably one of the best teams in the world. These guys demand only the best from their boards and this heavily influences the boards we design for the market.

What are the latest innovations in your boards? We recently dropped some serious cash on a CNC shaping machine specifically designed for bodyboards. This gives us crazy accuracy and consistency with our template profiling and will ensure that the boards are as close to the custom templates as possible. I am also working on a core at the moment that is based on layered/sandwich construction, as found in snowboards, and features multi layered densities and substrates. The aim is to blend the flex of Dow PE core, with the stiffness of PP core to a level that’s the best of both worlds.

What do you think are going to be the biggest changes in board design in the future? One of the biggest issues that faces the industry is the cost of the raw materials. As plastics are derived from petrol, this means that the cost of our materials are intrinsically linked to that of world oil prices, which have skyrocketed over the past three years. It will be interesting to see how companies look to innovate while keeping retail board prices in check.

VS
Who are your team riders? VS is a strictly limited project featuring Mitch Rawlins, Ryan Hardy and Pierre-Louis Costes.

What is the brand’s ethos? The VS project is a collaboration between the sport’s best riders and the some of the industry’s finest shapers. The shapers were selected on the basis that I had personal involvement in their training and we all work together to create a strictly high performance line of boards.

What R&D do you do? A lot of what I do for NMD is also integrated into VS, though with VS I leave a lot of the R&D to Dan (Sivess), Todd (Quigley) and Jarrod (Gibson) who work with the riders to test and develop their own individual deals.

How do you stay on top of your quality control? VS is a special division of NMD, so VS benefits from the same levels of control as NMD.

What sets your boards apart from the rest of the market? The riders and shapers involved blended with the best materials and production facilities.

What are the latest innovations in your boards? We’ve got the shapes to a level that Mitch, Ryan and Pierre are stoked on. Now with the CNC machine, we want to take the consistency of the production boards to the next level, providing the riders out there with boards as close to what the pros ride as possible.