“The Cult of the Costco Surfboard!”

The world's biggest-selling surfboard in The New Yorker.

In your most uproarious fantasy, did you ever imagine the biggest-selling surfboard in the world would be an eight-foot long softie from a membership-only warehouse retailer?

The Wavestorm costs one hundred and forty-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents and comes in a choice of two graphics (classic stripes or in the colours of the Ethiopian flag, red, yellow and green).

Over the past few years, the Wavestorm has been championed by very good surfers, notably Jamie O’Brien, in the sort of ironic gesture that often morphs into a general acceptance.

Like those ironic shakas you throw at pals that quickly replaces a wave. Like calling everyone “bro” for laughs until it becomes standardised.

Recently, The New Yorker examined the phenomenon in a story called “The Cult of the Costco Surfboard.

Read a little.

Though it has been nipped, tucked, and stiffened over the years, the Wavestorm eight-footer has existed in roughly the same form since 2006. That’s when Matt Zilinskas, a former manager of the Boogie Board brand, and the Taiwanese businessman John Yeh, of AGIT Global—Boogie Board’s manufacturer—tweaked AGIT’s sandwich of expanded polystyrene foam and plastic to create a board for a surfer’s “first standup experience.” The Wavestorm, a high-volume, low-profit-margin play, was priced at a third of what most starter surfboards cost. By 2015, Bloomberg Businessweek reported that over half a million Wavestorms had been sold, and Costco was on pace to sell a hundred thousand that year alone. (Zilinskas calls those numbers “outrageous” but declined to provide more accurate figures.) In peak summer, they can be bought at nearly two hundred coastal Costco locations.

And,

The Web is where the Wavestorm phenomenon has been most thoroughly documented. The Instagram account the Kook of the Day, which has over half a million subscribers, compiles surreptitiously snapped photos and footage of neophytes committing various style errors and surfing sins. In one shot, a Wavestormer wears board shorts over his wetsuit; in another, a person riding a hoverboard drags the tail of his Wavestorm though an intersection. One Kook of the Day staple is a shot of Wavestorm boards hastily shoved through the sunroof of some sedan, splayed like pickup sticks. A number of videos show Wavestormers face-planting in foot-high surf.

But not all social-media fodder over the Wavestorm has been as barbed. The Instagram account Team Wavestorm Official—which, despite its name, is not affiliated with the brand in any way—has more than twenty-three thousand followers, and enthusiastically cheers on Wavestorm riders, whom the account’s creator, Nate Rohner, calls “the outcasts of surfing.” There are photos of locals riding the budget boards on the thunderous waves of Makaha, a surf break near an economically depressed town in Oahu, and there are surfboard selfies taken by Mike Coots, a shark-attack victim who surfs on a Wavestorm because his prosthetic leg would damage a fibreglass board.

Read the entire story here. 

Questions: do you enjoy the democratising effect of cheap, easy-to-ride surfboards?

Do you own a Wavestorm?

Or are you such an insubordinate cuss your mood grows dark at the mention of Wavestorm?