Australian shaper Hayden Cox has, for the past 30 years, been making surfboards. But for the past 20 of them, his company, Haydenshapes, has been mostly known for just one: the Hypto Krypto.
The Hypto arrived in 2007. Cox designed it as a high-volume shortboard with his patented FutureFlex tech, a novel approach in which the board’s traditional center line instead wraps around the board’s edges. Nine years later, surfer Craig Anderson helped catapult the board to international fame when a photo of him on it in huge Indonesian surf appeared on the cover of The Surfer’s Journal.
The board became popular among mortals, too. It won multiple design awards, scaled up in length and volume, and became a reliable seller for retailers. But not, perhaps, for the reasons Cox might have anticipated.
“We always carried that board because it was like the best for, ‘Hey, I’m a big guy and I’m trying to surf Florida, I need to squeeze a lot of volume into a shorter board,’” said Cheyne Cottrell, co-owner of Island Water Sports in South Florida.
“That was basically the one customer and the one (Haydenshapes) board we carried. All the other boards didn’t really get us that excited, and we never carried the rest of the fleet.”
For Cox, the Hypto’s success had become something of a double-edged board, so to speak.
“I’m forever grateful to have a board like the Hypto,” he said. “The challenge that comes with having a board model that dominates perception as a brand is that people forget about everything else that you do.”
But over the past couple of years, Cox has begun to shift that perception with a few bold decisions and an intentional new approach. First, after years of partnership with a global distributor, he took over his own distribution for the U.S., Europe and Australia, which allowed him to work more directly with retailers.
Then, he replaced his existing sales reps with a new team that has focused on high-level service and grassroots marketing. And finally, last spring, a Haydenshapes board won Stab Magazine’s popular Stab in the Dark series, in which pro surfers try out boards from a range of shapers in a blind test.
Crucially, Cox’s winning board was not the Hypto Krypto, but the DarkNoiz. With that win, plus new faces, a new approach and start-to-finish ownership of operations, the brand is now starting to enter a new era.
Regaining Retail Trust
Cox’s decision to take over his own distribution came after a long partnership with Global Surf Industries.
“I learned a lot from having a great partnership like that, but I knew that long-term I wanted to control my own destiny and have full control of the brand globally,” Cox said.
The decision was not without its hurdles. First, he had to buy his own boards back from his distributor and try to sell them himself. To help move the inventory, he discounted some of his stock online. That move drew ire from retailers, who were already soured on what they perceived as a one-board brand.
“Haydenshapes would get really aggressive with markdowns,” Cottrell said.
That approach disincentivized him from carrying as many Hyptos as before, even though the board was the store’s old standby.
Next, Cox replaced his American sales team with a younger, less seasoned group. Again, the move was dubious.
“I thought it was a horrible decision,” Cottrell said. “They went from tried-and-true reps who had been in the industry a long time, that we had a good working relationship with, to these groms.”
One of those so-called groms was Tanner Gudauskas, now Haydenshapes’ brand manager and a former pro surfer who for years worked with Vans and Channel Islands. He and two others on his team have spent the past year and a half or so helping to change perceptions, starting with pricing.
“The whole new thing has been no (surprise) online sales, especially anything available in retail,” Gudauskas said.
The team has also focused on strong communication with retailers around special events like Black Friday.
Rebuilding Relationships in Person
Another big push in changing brand perception has been reinvigorating relationships with retailers the old-fashioned way: in person.
“We’ve had little meetings of the minds on a lot of these accounts,” Gudauskas said.
“We weren’t getting a door in the face necessarily, but it was like, why are the sales not turning over here?”
So he and his team set about forming, and sometimes rehabilitating, relationships between retailers, their staff and the brand. That work ranges from educating shop-floor staff with demo fleets to getting them on the boards. Jack’s Surfboards was one account where those conversations and intentional communication made the difference.
“When I took the job at Haydenshapes, Ron (Abdel, Jack’s co-owner) was super short with me, essentially saying, ‘Hayden’s super hardball on the pricing. We’re not going to do business with you anymore,’ and that was kind of it,” Gudauskas said.
“But Hayden came to town, and I coordinated a meeting with Hayden and Ronnie. They just had a good chat, and I felt like they were seeing eye to eye.”
Coordinating a summit of sorts is just one example of how Gudauskas and his new colleagues are working to rebuild relationships, one store at a time.
Cinnamon Rainbows Surf Company owner Dave Cropper (left, in sunglasses) and Haydenshapes brand manager Tanner Gudauskas (center) with the shop crew in New Hampshire.
“Coming in as a brand manager, I think of my role almost like a Swiss Army knife,” he said. “It feels like a little bit of team management, a little bit of marketing, and a little bit of sales.
“These first 12 months have been a really good lesson of getting involved and working more on the sales side, so that the retailers can see my face and to trust us, and know that if you have any feedback, hit me up directly.”
So far, that approach is working.
“There’s already been such a quick turnaround in trust, and I think people are genuinely excited about the effort that we’re putting towards it,” Gudauskas said. “I think they want the best for us. I think they’re leaving the door open for us to become better.”
That’s not just new-guy hyperbole.
Cottrell has seen the change firsthand. Despite his initial misgivings about the new sales team, he has come around.
“I’m now happily eating my words because I was wrong,” Cottrell said. “They definitely made the right call.”
Stab in the Dark
“If boards aren’t out there on shop floors, and if boards aren’t out there at beaches, it doesn’t get seen,” Cox said. “And when it doesn’t get seen, it doesn’t get heard about, and that’s a massive challenge.”
So goes the vicious cycle of marketing surfboards, or anything, for that matter: you can’t sell something that no one knows about. But no one will know about it if it’s not selling.
For years, that stoke-to-shop-floor conundrum was yet another factor that kept Haydenshapes in a one-product corner. That changed last May, when pro surfer Ethan Ewing chose the Haydenshapes DarkNoiz as the best of the bunch in Stab Magazine’s blind board-test series, Stab in the Dark. Suddenly, a board that was not the Hypto was the new cool kid on the beach.
“Having a Stab in the Dark-winning board in the series that Ethan Ewing put on and the level of his surfing and how well it was put together, it attracted a lot of attention,” Cox said. “That excitement and that attention has allowed me to drive demand from that consumer-level marketing, that has then allowed retailers to buy into that demand. That’s something you can’t manufacture.”
While not every board buyer follows surf media closely, Haydenshapes made the connection between the Stab win and the product on shop floors impossible to miss. According to Cottrell, as soon as the winning video was live, the DarkNoiz was available on the shop floor, each board with a sticker labeling it as a Stab in the Dark winner. That rollout of physical product combined with a narrative connector, he said, was key.
Hayden Cox and Tanner Gudauskas with the Haydenshapes DarkNoiz.
Getting People on Boards
The final connector for the brand has been, perhaps, the most important: getting the wider Haydenshapes quiver to the beach. For Gudauskas and his fellow brand reps, that has meant showing up with demo boards anywhere and everywhere, and letting the boards speak for themselves.
Nick Haase (holding a board overhead) with the Warm Winds Surf Shop crew in Narragansett, R.I.
For Cottrell, that has meant watching a top local surfer start riding a board other than the Hypto Krypto and then talk it up in the parking lot.
“Even before the Stab in the Dark win happened, one of our team riders, Tanner Strohmenger, was starting to ride the (Haydenshapes) Nova, and he was claiming it pretty hard,” Cottrell said.
“So as soon as one of the best surfers in the water down here is riding a board, then it just becomes contagious.”
For Cox, the power of parking-lot promo is unparalleled. It is part of a winning strategy that began with reclaiming control of his company. Controlling operations, product direction and, ultimately, company culture is one of the most important lessons he’s learned over the years.
“We’re not afraid to be different,” he said. “We’re not afraid to innovate, to design differently, to have a unique point of view within our industry.”
The DarkNoiz is buoyant proof that boldness, in both design and business, is paying off again.
“I’m just stoked that I’m seeing another board that I truly believe in, and the design work and the refinements I put into it over the last 20 years,” Cox said, “has found its way out there into the world.”
