Watch: Albee Layer and Huckleberry Surf Company!

Don’t you just love the entrepreneurial spirit? Are we entering the dawn of the Rider-Owned Age, a small-minded surf industry comprising myriad upstart brands not unlike skate culture’s broad spectrum? 

This week Albee Layer threw his flat-billed cap into the ring, alongside Dege O’Connell, with Huckleberry Surf Company, a new hardware brand making what’s being flaunted as environmentally friendly fins with a bit of Maui Wowie flair—fins out of hemp and mushrooms. 

Their Hemp Tech fins use hemp fiber and Super Sap bio-resin, with carbon fiber bases and cork cores. Then the boys went deeper down the rabbit hole. 

“New to the Huckleberry line are our revolutionary Mushroom Tech Fins… we asked ourselves how we could at least match the radness, sustainability, and performance of our oriinal Hemp Tech fins. We were quick to come up with sticking mushrooms into the cores of our fins…”

Hold the phone. What now? We’ve enjoyed our fair share of sparkly psilocybin afternoons, but mushroom-core skegs? *Scratches head*

“We can’t take all the credit on all these natural wonders. Our friends over at Ecovative Design are the ones responsible for growing this crazy idea into a reality, literally. The cores are grown using Ecovative’s mycelium technology. Mycelium? It’s a natural fungus/mushroom that Ecovative grows in a medium derived from agricultural bi-products that produce the sheets we cut our cores from. Some fins are glassed with standard polyester resin, while others are available glassed with Entropy Resin’s Super-Sap plant-based carbon epoxy. The end result is one of the lightest, springiest, and most sustainable fins out on the market that we know you will be stoked on.” 

Trippy. 

Albee’s got a good squad of underground guys and gals (Kaimana Henry, Kalani David, Monyca and Ola Eleogram, Luke Shepardson, Hank Gaskell, Sierra Lerback) running the skegs. They do a full line of both Men’s and Women’s fins, which you should peruse, with signature fins from Albee, Kalani David, as well as Maui shaper to the stars Sean Ordonez.