Santa Cruz Startup Swellcycle Boosts Surfboard Sustainability with 3D Printing

Athletic equipment is such a ripe area for the additive manufacturing (AM) industry, if only because there are just so many different sports in the world. The factors that drive sporting goods manufacturers toward AM are similarly diverse, with suppliers using 3D printing to enhance performance, safety, comfort, and all sorts of combinations of the three.

We can add sustainability to the list of advantages that are compelling sporting goods companies to seek out AM: Swellcycle, a company based in Santa Cruz, California, is 3D printing surfboards from PLA filament, which is biodegradable, and printing the boards, of course, also helps reduce material waste. This is especially relevant for Swellcycle’s target market, with CBS News citing a survey that claims that “the vast majority of surfers feel a personal responsibility for the health of the ocean.”

As the outlet also points out, the conventional method for making surfboards, in which board shapers cut the finished product out of giant blocks of foam, results in 40 percent of the material going to waste. Considering how much landfill ultimately ends up in Earth’s oceans, Swellcycle is directly addressing a major aspect of the surfboard supply chain that conflicts with the customer base’s core values.

In addition to surfboards, Swellcycle also leverages its 3D scanning capabilities to produce other objects, including sculptures like a 1/8 scale replica of a blue whale skeleton. The company even offers live courses where customers can learn to print their own boards.

In a CBS News article about Swellcycle’s 3D printed surfboards made from recyclable material, surfer Tyler James, a Swellcycle customer who is now also an ambassador for the brand, told the outlet, “The ocean is so powerful. It holds such a good place in my heart. When you’re out there, it’s just you and the ocean, and there’s something so special about it.

“It’s so important for surfers to understand that if we want to keep surfing, that we got to care about our oceans, we got to care about the process that’s making our boards.”

This all certainly highlights AM’s potential to make manufacturing processes more sustainable. However, it’s a masterclass in product-market fit.

Consumers generally claim they care about the sustainability of the products they purchase, but (unsurprisingly) more than half of consumers also think that products marketed for their sustainability are too expensive. This doesn’t mean that highlighting sustainability is an ineffective marketing strategy; instead, it means that it is likely to work well in certain contexts and not work at all in others.

As Swellcycle has realized, surfboards produced sustainably seem to represent an ideal fit between product and market. Moreover, sustainability is only the beginning of the story; AM also enables the company to tap into relevant consumer preferences like the desire for aesthetic customization and DIY culture.

What Swellcycle is doing for surfboards isn’t so different from what Zellerfeld is doing with sneakers. It’s also impressive that Swellcycle has multiple other angles to its business model, like works of art and artifact reproduction.

Meanwhile, the company has put the horse before the cart, so to speak, when it comes to sustainability: Swellcycle has created a winning business model in the first place, which gives its sustainability goals the right conditions in which to thrive.

Images courtesy of Swellcycle