Watch: Benji Brand, Finn McGill, And More Prove The Versatility Of Pyzel’s New Twinnie
And an explanation of the ‘Tiger Twin’ from the polyurethane architect himself.
“You’ve seen how we operate, we don’t like to overdo it with too many models,” says Jon Pyzel, as I call him mid-Balinese vacation. “If we’re going to introduce a new model, I don’t want it to overlap with everything that we already have. I don’t want to be fast fashion surfboard guy. Like, ‘even though you had that other one that I said was really good, here’s the new one that’s even better.’ It’s hard too, because stuff does overlap so much, but this new board is something that is pretty unique for us.”
The board he’s referring to is called the Tiger Twin, and it’s capabilities are displayed by Benji Brand, Finn McGill, and more above.
“There’s this surf shop called Heritage on the East Coast of the US, it’s one of our really good accounts, and they asked us a while ago if we could make an exclusive board model for them,” says Jon, when I ask him how the board came about.
“We’d never done that before, but we said, ‘yeah, sure, let’s try it out.’ We have this one board called the Happy Twin that we’ve made for years and years, and my whole team really likes it. We never really marketed it or tried to do much, but everybody that I’ve made it for really likes it. My rep on the East Coast wanted to combine that with a kind of fishy, wider nose — he suggested something like the White Tiger, one of our grovelly speedy little boards. Basically we kind of married those two together to make the Tiger Twin. Most of it is from the Happy Twin, and then the front end of it is a White Tiger nose.
“We made the board and they were super happy with it. We just started doing it for them exclusively. I don’t know how many we sold, but it wasn’t many. It was just for that one shop. But then everyone was really happy with them, so we made ’em for Japan too. You can kind of do those things in Japan that don’t cross over into America — just have models that are individual to different areas. We kept getting great feedback on it, and finally were just like, everyone’s who has ridden it is fired up, let’s make it available for everyone.”
As you’ll see via Finn McGill’s session, the board comes with a third finbox — despite the ‘Twin’ moniker.
“The original board, the Happy Twin, was a two-plus-one. Originally it came kind of from looking at those Bob Hurley boards, those eighties twin fins. They have a pointy nose, just like an old school kind of twin fin.
“But then for the Tiger Twin we decided to put another box in there so that you can have a stabilizer fin, like a little two plus one situation. To do that, we set the fins back.
“It’s made to be a twin fin, but then you can throw a trailer in there. Jack Freestone was into it. Tyler Wright loved the board. A bunch of my team riders in California, and they would ride it as a thruster. So you can kind of go both ways with this board too. It’s kind of a big jump from being a thruster guy to riding a twin fin, and I want people to feel like they can ease into it. Having that back box gives you a little bit of reassurance.”
Click here to get yourself one.
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