Austin Barrette

Austin Barrette hand shapes every surfboard he sells, and he has made more than 600 of them.

He found SALTYmf by accident. He was looking at coverage of the Southern Surf Slam, the event held up near Olympic Park, landed on the SALTYmf page and decided to send them a message. Both of them had tents at the Slam. He came on the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast a short while after that, carrying a knife he had made from the hardened resin that runs off his glassing table, and handed it over on the spot.

He does not take measurements. He designs on a computer so the customer can see the numbers, then puts the laptop away and cuts the foam by eye and feel, and after five or six hundred boards he can hold a shape to about an eighth of an inch and a liter and a half. Two high schools have asked him to teach it as a curriculum and he has had to tell them he cannot, because there is nothing to write down. If you order from him, he invites you into the shaping bay and hands you the planer. He asks something like 300 questions first about your weight, your height and whether you ride off the front foot or the back. About 85 percent of the board comes from local suppliers, with the foam out of Atlanta or Gainesville.

The business started with a board getting destroyed. He was living in Virginia Beach, had spent around 800 dollars on a new WRV, rode it three times, then paddled into a crowd of longboarders and took a fin through the middle of it. He ordered a blank the same day and made his own. The first fifty were not good, he says, and requests were already arriving from Florida, California and Hawaii before he had the skill to fill them. He and his wife have moved across the country five times, and every move meant learning a new community from nothing. When they landed in Georgia he was ready to hang up his planer. He then had to teach himself to wake surf on a wave that came up to his kneecaps, and the first time out he could not find where the power behind the boat was.

Boards for his own test riders come out of his pocket, and nobody signs a contract with him. He puts profit into adaptive boards for Wake for Warriors, and he started building a hydrofoil in his garage to see whether he could get men who are used to jumping out of planes up on one. The shop is in his backyard in Flowery Branch. When he and his wife looked at the house, he walked in the front door, straight out the back and into the shop to see if it would work, then came back in to check whether the house was livable.