How To Order A Surfboard In 2025

Most of us surf just well enough to delude ourselves, but not nearly well enough to deceive anyone else. Least of all the people who make our boards. These artisans have evolved, through necessity, the ability to perform a 180-degree internal eye-roll while maintaining perfect eye contact, listening to your every fantasy and fabrication. Rest assured, none of it makes it through their bullshit radar.

Custom boards are expensive courtships. The right match can bring bountiful returns, but the wrong one can leave both your surfing and your wallet shattered into a thousand irreparable pieces. The worst part? Unlike Mikey February, who has the luxury of saying a few kind platitudes about a board he hates and Homer Simpson-ing into a nearby bush, you’re stuck either reselling it or trying to convince yourself that it’s just a weight distribution issue and you’ll figure it out eventually.

While we drown in information, opinions, reviews, tests, and the unsolicited pontifications of friends and parking-lot bystanders, our judgment and expectations cloud easily, adding to the anxiety of not botching the one chance at finding a perfect match for our aquatic excursions. As Damien Fahrenfort tells us: “We’re all one board away from our best surfing.”

So Stab spoke to three of the most interesting minds in contemporary surfboard manufacturing, who happen to embody the boutique (small), established (medium), and mega (large) surfboard brand categories:

Boutique: Donald Brink, the EAST co-winner who shapes, sands, and glasses every board by hand and demands a music recommendation from each customer to guide the design’s aesthetic;

Established: Chris Christenson, one of the most versatile shapers alive, waltzing through the conventional and the alternative, from small-wave boards to big-wave guns, while discreetly running operations (and a cult following) on most continents;

Mega: And finally, 2x SITD winner Jon Pyzel, who began shaping custom orders in a little shack after moving from Ventura to Oahu, including those for a prepubescent kid named John who went on to become one of the greatest surfboard-moving engines the world’s ever seen.

Or in Darren Handley’s words, “[Pyzel] was kissed on the dick by a fairy.”

Read what Brink, Pyzel, and Christenson have to say by joining Stab Premium.