Shaper of the Year: Bert Berger and the Rise of the Firewire

Yet out there in the wider surfing world, things are shifting. Another sailboard maker, Randy French, manages to sell a critical mass of a new kind of surfboard, Surftech, effectively breaking the global urethane monopoly. Suddenly, new kinds of surfboards begin to look like serious business propositions. In the midst of it, Queensland boardmaker Nev Hyman parts ways with one business enterprise and begins looking for another. Nev is unbelievably energetic and fired-up about the future. He knows people like Matthew Perrin, ex-CEO of Billabong, who sold his shares in the company for $66 million only a year or so ago, and Matthew’s savvy former general manager Dougall Walker. Nev and his partners come knocking on Bert Burger’s door.

And it all happens just in time for Gordon Clark to wake up one morning and send Surfboardland a faxed letter saying he was junking his polyurethane juggernaut and going home.

It’s a weird, weird world. The Giant Company that Raped Surfing turned out to be the one that’d been there all along. Now it’s gone, and the door’s open for every kind of new idea anyone can think of, make, and sell. The money machine is funding the little guy and his radical alternative, and the world might just be beating a path to his door. Welcome to Burgerworld.

BERT BURGER

Interviewed by Nick Carroll just after the ASR tradeshow, Sept 15, 2006

SURFING MAGAZINE: I wonder if we can talk a bit about how you developed as a shaper and a surfer. You started surfing very young: what part of you connected so early with surfboard building? Why’d you pick that?

BERT BURGER: Well, there was always this real love for the ocean. But as far as board building, I don’t know. It’s funny. When I was 27 years old I met my Dad for the first time. He left us when I was about two years old and I’d never met him, I didn’t have any memories of him. I finally meet the guy at 27 years of age and he starts telling me about our family history and where our family came from in Holland. My grandfather had had a business that was passed down to him over a 400-year period from father to son. My father never took on the business because he decided to travel and pissed off to Australia, and my grandfather decided to sell it. My father was devastated because he was really looking forward one day to taking on that business.

The business was wooden boat building and engineering. And when my Dad met me he freaked. Because here I am in Australia, never had any connection with my family at all, and I’ve got a business building wooden surfboards. Of all the things that you could do with your life, I ended up doing something my family had been doing for hundreds of years. I dunno. I think there might be a bit of genetic recall or genetic predisposition there somewhere.

For you, as you described it, it was all about performance, how to find new performance. Can you describe what you were looking for as you went down the path of epoxy and styrene and wood veneers?

Well, because I had been exposed to those epoxy boards, it was “wow there’s a difference.” I suppose that gave me the concept that if the materials are different, then the ride’s gonna be different. I had that in the back of my mind. It got to the stage when I was in my early 20s, I was a board consumer. I’d have a board two days and I’d snap it. If I had a board longer than three months I was doing well. So that was one side of it, I thought I wouldn’t mind something stronger.

But there was also the idea of what can I do to make ‘em better. I just felt I was chasing my tail around with board design. I made my boards as light as I possibly could, that was definitely an element in performance: if they were light, you could throw ‘em round, you got control, and so I knew that. And from those epoxy boards, I knew they were REALLY light. That was probably the first motivation, just to bring the weight down.

And that got me back to the idea that you could change performance through changing materials. I would make boards identical to my urethane board, and depending on the structure I was using, some would go waaay better and some would go waaay worse. The original rule was performance through weight, then it became performance through what the materials were doing.

It didn’t happen overnight. It’s still changing now all the time, fresh concepts creeping in. It’s good. One thing I love about making boards is that you never know anything.

Reader Comments 

Posted Fri Apr 4, 2008, 10:10 AM — By Brandon Droz

In my business class we have to pick a future career that we are interested in, and i want to be a surfboard shaper, but no one in my area knows any. So if you could answer some questions for me it would be great. What is the offical name of the career? Can you give me a short description of the career? Some educational requirments, related careers, and the earnings potential.

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