SurferMag Message Boards: Has Greg Loehr opened up a glass shop in California yet?

I don’t know this to be the case with Rusty/Diamond, but sometimes a small business servicing a very LARGE client will have to do little things that they don’t really make much (if any) money on, to retain the portion of the business they do make money on.

Is Diamond open to anybody showing up at their door with shaped EPS blanks for 60 buck over glass jobs, or are they just servicing Rusty?

Speaking of Diamond and Moonlight, here's a good article...

INDUSTRY NEWS
Surfboard Glassers: Overworked And Underappreciated

By John Maynard

Posted 09.22.2003
When a surfer talks about riding a magic boarda board that responds precisely to each subtle motion as if it were an extension of the body rather than an inanimate piece of foam and fiberglasshe usually credits the shaper. Rarely, if ever, does he tip his hat to the boards glasser, the person who spends hours finishing the board to his exact specifications.
Not too many businesses or surfers have much of an idea or can comprehend exactly what goes on and what we dothe detail and complexity involved, says Morning Glass Owner Tom Nesbit. However, we dont do it for the fame or fortune. We do it for the love of the sport and for the passion we have for building boards.

Consider the intricate process a board goes through once it leaves the shaping bay. Its laminated, hot-coated, and then the fins and leash plug are installed. Thats followed by round after round of dry- and wet-sanding using increasingly finer grits of paper. Dont forget that many are airbrushed, pinlined, or get a gloss coat and polish.

In all, a glasser will spend at least four hours handling a shaped blankand thats not including all the set-up (drying) time. Added together, the process can take up to six days or more.

Its pretty time-consuming, says Peter St. Pierre, one of the four cofounders of Moonlight Glassing Company in San Marcos, California. We run from two to eight weeks {to glass a blank}, depending on how complicated they are.

Surfboards are among the last of a dying breed of custom-made handcrafted goods. While most consumer products are spit out 2 4/7 in automated factories, high-end surfboards are each painstakingly shaped, painted, glassed, and sanded by hand. This is an art, not a business, says St. Pierre, referring to the process of making surfboards.

Somewhere in the evolution of the surf industry, the shapers and glassers got left in the dust of the higher-margin clothing and accessories companies dash to the bank. They didnt (couldnt?) board the lucrative locomotive that many surf companies are riding on today.

Nevertheless, theyre an integral part to the surf industry. Without surfboards, there wouldnt be a surf industry. Its almost like were the evil necessity, the anchor that drags them {surf companies}, says St. Pierre.

Diamond Glassing Owner Bob Boeche shares a similar viewpoint and adds that the entire industry should be taking a vested interest in domestic surfboard manufacturing, before its history. I think they {surfwear brands} need to be as concerned as we are, he says, between wheezing coughs. I think everyones got to be concerned whos part of this industry. Were all in it together. Were just a glass shop. Were probably the lowliest dregs of all of them. But people dont realize how much we do.

The Moonlight Experience

Moonlight sits nestled in a nondescript industrial park seven miles inland in North San Diego County. Its in a booming part of San Diego thats been exploding in tract-home development. Rancho Santa Fe Road, a vital artery to the area, has been subject to months of widening and renovationand bottlenecks. Adjacent to Moonlight, which has been in the same spot since its nascent days in 1979, is a childrens day-care center. The laughing and shrieking of carefree kids on the playground is a great juxtaposition to the realities inside the close-knit glassing shop.

St. Pierre puts in 60 to 70 hours per weekand hes not an anomaly in the glassing business. Most of the guys I know who are doing it {working in a glass shop} are doing that many hours. On an average day, hell be at Moonlight by 6:00 a.m. and not leave until 6:00 p.m. Its not that out of the ordinary to find him plugging away on a Saturday.

Hes not a masochisthes got that much work to do. But he is a bit of a perfectionist. St. Pierre is Moonlights pinliner and airbrusher, a job that needs the kind of person who pays stringent attention to detail. His three partners each have their own specialty: Gary Stuber is a master laminator, Mark Donnellon is a glosser and has been described as a magician of a polisher, and Kenny Mann is the primary sander. Combined, they have more than 125 years of surfing experience.

St. Pierres wife Sally also works at Moonlight, packing finished boards that are shipped to shops or trucked back to Channel Islands Surfboards, Moonlights main account. When she has a free moment between bubble-wrapping and bagging, Sally cuts out discs of sand paper. This probably saves them a half an hour, she says, rounding off a black sheet of 3M fine-grit paper.

Moonlight finishes between 60 and 70 boards a week. Therere hundreds of four-by-six prints on the office wall of happy customers (including pros such as Rob Machadoa Moonlight regular) who posed with their boards in front of the shops life-size poster of Shaquille ONeal. Moonlights volume is low by glass-house standards (other shops regularly pump out as many as 150), but its reputation for craftsmanship has earned the company a lot of custom orders for resin tints, pinlining, airbrushing, and gloss coatsboards that take more time to produce. St. Pierre estimates that 30 percent of the blanks Moonlight receives get either airbrushed, pinlined, or tinted resin. Therere shops that do 150, but theyre usually doing all clear, sanded finishes, he says. Sixty or 70 {boards} is pushing it for us. Its a lot of work.

CompensationOr Lack Thereof

The elbow grease that glassers put forth not only gets little recognition, it also earns little money. Thats because the cost of making a boardthe raw materials, rent, utilities, insurance, and laborhas surged, but the amount shops charge hasnt followed a similar pattern.

Weve raised our price maybe ten bucks in the last four years. Its not enough, says St. Pierre with a tinge of bitterness and frustration. Glass shops should be {charging} twice as much as they are. But who would pay it when you can buy a board at Costco for 250 bucks?

True, one reason the surfboard-glassing business is struggling to keep its head above water is the influx of overseas production. You might think those boards coming in from across the Pacific have left a trickle of business for domestic glass shops. But St. Pierre says thats not the caseMoonlight gets as much business as it can handle. The real impact those overseas boards have on domestic surfboard makers, he says, is the price: the cheap overseas boards have kept pricesand therefore revenuedown. They have made an already cheap clientele even more price-sensitive, so glass shops cant charge more for their services.

We have plenty of work, and theres plenty of work out there, but everybodys working for nothing, laments St. Pierre. You just cant compete. I pay the guy who sweeps my floor more in a day than a guy in Thailand who works in a Surftech {factory} makes in a month.

Shrugs an astonished Boeche at Diamond, I mean, what are they paying them over there? A bowl of rice and a buck a day? If we keep going in the direction were going, this entire industry could be in trouble.

Along with overseas boards, another fact U.S. glassers must deal with is increased competition. Its horrendous, notes St. Pierre. Its like theres a new shop popping up all the time. Theres so much competition that they {shapers} can basically dictate the price they want to pay.

Less experienced shops have fewer expensessome may be operating under the tableand can undercut prices established glassing shops charge. You cant charge more because youve got all these little backyard shops scraping around saying, Ill do it for 125 {dollars}, and they get kids who dont even know what theyre doing, says Boeche.

While the business at Moonlight has been relatively consistent, St. Pierre says hes never certain how many boards his shop will glass each month. You have to grovel for every board you get. Theres no security in this business whatsoever. Its either feast or famine.

There hasnt been one year where I said, Wow, that was bitchen, I made a ton of money, he continues. Now Id be happy if I didnt lose money.

Indeed, St. Pierre says Moonlight was in the red at the end of last year. Moonlight charges 170 dollars a board on average. So I figure it costs 180, St. Pierre says half jokingly. Diamond also charges 170 dollars, an increase of only 25 dollars since it opened for business twenty years ago. Nesbit says Morning Glass charges 160 dollars to glass and finish the average blank, excluding fins. He says the shop must average 60 boards per week to break even.

Another factor thats eroded margins is overhead. Over the past couple decades, overheadlabor, rent, utilities, insurance, and workers comphas shot up, but the price Moonlight and other glass houses charge hasnt. St. Pierre says the biggest increase has been in Californias workers comp fees. Its just out of hand. For every 100 bucks I pay, I have to pay another eighteen dollars into the workmans comp systemthats on top of the Social Security we pay, the state disability says St. Pierre. Pretty soon no ones going to be able to afford to manufacture here.

Cost increases for raw materials have also chewed into their share of profits. When I first opened this place a drum of resin was 175 dollars, says Boeche. Now its almost 600 dollars a drum. Glass used to be twenty, 30 cents a yard. Now its a dollar-seventy-five, a dollar-eighty a yard.

The Final Countdown?

Are the days of glass shops numbered? St. Pierre thinks they are for the majority. Stuffs going to go overseas. Therell always be some {glass shops}, but I dont know.

When asked the same question, Boeche responds rhetorically: Are the days of surfboards being built in America numbered?

That sounds a little doom-and-gloom, but thats the way many glassers feel. Were the bottom of the bucket, says St. Pierre. Glass shops are pretty much disposable.

In fact, St. Pierre doesnt even feel part of the surf industry (he draws a distinction between the surfboard industry and the surf industry). He plays down the impact he and his industry cohorts have on the surf market: We just build surfboards. Were not part of that whole scene. Were not in that loop.

That may be, but glassers and shapers are an integral part of surfing. Boeche says surfwear companiesimage peopleought to support surfboard manufacturers. If the magic of surfboards is lost, he argues, then surf brands will become irrelevant to consumers.

The people in the stores dont make very much on a surfboard. They make it on the clothing and the watches and the sunglasses and all the other stuff, Boeche says. But a surfboard is what brings the people in there.

Once the image of the surfboard goes down, he continues, what are we going to have?

We need the whole industry to get behind it. If the whole industry doesnt get behind it, it just wont work. The Rustys, the Al Merricks, and the Losts are doing all they can do, but its going to take help from the big companies, the clothing companies, that have the money. To keep this going, theyre going to have to help us out. Were all in it together.

But even though theyre overlooked and under-recognized, and even though the cost of running their business has become extremely expensive and nearly unfruitful, glassers like St. Pierre have managed to keep it all in perspective: If the surfs good, I just leave and go surfing. Thats the only thing thats kept me going. And its rare in America that you get to build something bitchen and actually see it being used. Thats fun. Going down to the beach and seeing your friends riding something you built makes it worth it.

http://www.twsbiz.com/twbiz/industrynews/article/0,21214,707907,00.html

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GWS was here