So let me drop some logic.

I’m one of many, many former U.S. factory employees. There were a lot of us this time last year. By Easter, a facility that used to have twenty to thirty highly-skilled, full-time employees had laid off everyone but the shipping boy and outsourced production completely to Thailand. Yes, Thailand, not Taiwan, not China (though they did experiment with some factories there that never yielded a quality product fit for sale much less an experienced surfer). Thailand. Shortly after, Australia closed down as well, laying off another fifty or so employees who worked in laying-up the blanks, etc.

Sounds like I should be bitter right? Not at all. I still ride FW’s to this day. Most of us former production employees actually have a pretty good (though limited) relationship with the remaining corporate staff. Why do any of us lay-off victims bother to maintain a relationship with the corporate guys? It’s simple: because we still believe in the product, it’s performance, and the impact these boards have had on our own surfing (and a lot of us have been surfing in a lot of places over a lot of years). Firewire has introduced a technology and a materials set to the market that are heads and tails above the old PU game. Sure, they have and have always had their quality control issues when getting boards out in new phases of developing their tech game. That has nothing to do with EPS, epoxy, sandwich construction, or “future shapes technology” (also known as a composite sandwich before the FW marketing team perverted the original terminology).

The reason they have had and continue to have product failure (and honestly, it is very limited…out of production runs of thousands of boards, VERY FEW have failed or had issues outside of cosmetic blemishes) is because their corporate heads have always demanded higher production numbers at lower production costs than any of their existing factories could put out. When you’ve got mediocre businessmen screaming down a factory manager’s throat to produce more or else, you can bet the operations manager is going to let a few lemons slide by. That said, the guy who runs Thailand isn’t some Asian slave-driver with an engineering background, but rather an avid surfer who has been surfing and building boards since the single-fin era, living in dozens of countries and residing on classic surf breaks around the South Pacific and Indian Ocean. Oh yeah, did I mention that he probably rips harder after half a century of water time than most spoiled North County beach break punters? Yeah, he does. I have faith in his running of that factory, albeit on Asian soil, and the integrity of the final product.