Luke Daniels: The Blend Maker
Asyms, handshapes, and feedback from Rasta to Chippa — not a bad focus group.
Ogle high-performance handshapes here.
At the peak of his powers, rockstar shrink Jordan Peterson banged on an awful lot about the Pareto principle, otherwise known as the 80/20 rule. Roughly 80% of outcomes, he’d say, stem from 20% of causes. Wealth. Health. Mating prospects. The list goes on.
But one glaring omission the pop-psych oracle never touched was perhaps the most pertinent here: how Pareto plays out in surfboard sales.
At the recent WSL Finals, 60% of the World Title contenders had a Mayhem in their quiver. One shaper, six superstars on his outlines. A triumph for Matt Biolos, who has spent five decades perfecting the performance shorty, working his ass off and ploughing cash back into the culture. Still, a daunting prospect for anyone else trying to scrape a living in a crowded, inelastic market.
That thinking: ‘how do we usher in the next gen?’ underpinned our “10 Shapers To Watch In The Next 10 Years” editorial triptych, and informed our selection of shapers in this year’s EAST with Mikey February. Turns out there are tens, maybe hundreds, of underground talents trying to mow foam into a livelihood. Which also meant, inevitably, we overlooked some.
Such as Luke Daniels: a Bronte kid turned Northern Rivers family man, who swings the hammer three days a week to keep food on the table between handshaping magic sleds and conical vision quests at the nearby points (he fucken’ rips).
Daniels spent years at Glass Lab on the Gold Coast, ghost-shaping for Sharp Eye, Simon Jones Designs, Eric Arakawa and others. “Learning under those really high-end short boards and getting the consistency and accuracy to shop quality was super valuable. But financially, I was going backwards…”
So, like any tradesman with two kids, a mortgage and some common sense, he went back to the jobsite.
As a fellow Bronte Boardrider, I can vouch for the narrow diet of boards that defined our patch of city surfing. The success of local CT vets Tom Whittaker and Luke Hitchings did little to widen the aperture. For a long time, pointy-nosed thrusters were the only game in town.
But culturally, that’s shifted in the past decade and a half. “Yeah, the big guys dominate,” says Luke, responding to my observation about the number of Mayhems at the recent WSL Finals. “But surfing’s so broad right now—foiling, logging, finless—that there’s space for niches and something more bespoke. People will always want something in between, something made for their style, whether it’s ripping, cruising, or both.”
A testament to that is his best-selling Blend model — a high-performance asym that he’s been slowly evolving over the past nine years, enlisting the help of some high-ranking Yodas for feedback: Dave Rasta, Taj Burrow, Brad Gerlach, Laurie Towner and Chippa Wilson to name a few.
The ‘Blend’ is an apt model name. It’s what happens when you graft Formula 1 design features (rocker, rails) onto a VW Beetle. It shouldn’t work, but it does. They’re fast, loose and oddly beautiful. Put it this way: I still feel visceral pain three years after having broke mine second surf pulling into a closeout at the Wreck. That’s the thing with handshapes. You can’t just pop another one out…
You could read more about it here, or just watch Laurie Towner’s Winkipop lines and let the evidence speak for itself.
