Welcome aboard, Patrick!
I am excited and honored to formally welcome Patrick to Cedrus. Patrick and I began working together in 2021, after he called me as the first prone foiler to recognize the stiffness and value of Cedrus masts. At that time, many brands continued to claim they were “engineering flex,” and Patrick wasn’t buying it, even competing on a Unifoil-branded Cedrus Classic at Dukes in 2022. We started talking about opportunities for Cedrus in the prone foil world, while I was heavily focused on wing foiling as the industry was shifting from kite power and many of the masts weren’t holding up to the loads of bigger foils and boards used with hand wings. I’m not a surfer, and never have been. While wing foiling is almost half the value of the $300M foil market, it pales in comparison to the size of the $4B surf industry. There’s going to be a lot more growth as surfers transition from planing to foiling boards, and I needed help designing the right product. Fast forward to 2023 when I conceived the Evolution Mast Series; I listened to Patrick’s needs when designing Evolution Surf. The faster turning due to shorter chord length and better glide at low speeds are directly opposing the design considerations for the mast I wanted to ride: Evolution Wind. But thankfully I listened, because Evolution surf outsells Wind 4:1.
Cedrus has been primarily direct-to-consumer (DTC) since we started out of my garage in 2017. This worked well for a while, as we partnered with a local manufacturer and did not have the overhead of a small factory. Didn’t sell a mast, didn’t make a mast. I was able to weather the storms and volatile market demand from COVID and constantly evolving industry trends. But DTC doesn’t scale. It works really well when you sell from your garage, but not when you have overhead and employees. We need stable sales to stay in business, to cover utilities, payroll, and rent. Cedrus is not just me anymore. Patrick will help us navigate a transition to more wholesale based sales, while also being the more knowledgeable point of contact to support our direct customers as a pro-level foiler with experience riding pretty much every brand.
I’d really like to thank our dealers to date, MacKite and The Foil Shop, for all the support and flexibility as I did my best to manage sales. I know I wasn’t very good at it, and I know you’ll enjoy working with Patrick. We have minimized our dealer network due to limited capacity and margins. But we have worked hard over the last year to bring our finishing time down which reduces costs and increases throughput. This allows us to do more business through dealers. Dealers want to carry Cedrus for a number of a reasons, not the least of which is that it allows them to buy one mast and service a number of brands’ foils. This reduces/eliminates the likelihood of ending up with mismatched mast/foil quantities and necessary discounting or lost sales.
You don’t eliminate the middleman, you become it. Sure the DTC margins look nice in a spreadsheet, but they ignore a lot of hidden costs. The time I spent emailing perspective customers, managing sales, promoting on instagram, fielding demos. This has been a valuable lesson. I never really understood why the industry had such a deep supply chain from dealers to retailers, but now I understand it is to maximize volume and to reduce volatility. Increasing DTC sales requires marketing and advertising budgets that would otherwise be handled by your dealers; those costs eat away at margins. Finally, I am simply not good at sales and marketing! I naively believe that the best product should sell itself, but this is not true in any industry. For reasons such as price, awareness, brand identity and culture, there are some amazing products out there in every industry that no one knows about thanks to the noise on social media or lack of exposure. I do not want Cedrus to be in this category anymore, and we can’t afford to be.
Customer service is eating me alive. I’ll be honest, 99.9% of our clients are simply awesome, and some have become legitimate dear friends that I ride with. Two have even become employees! But with thousands of masts in service now, we spend a lot of time engaging even with satisfied customers, and like all brands, are faced with challenging customer service issues. It all requires a lot of time and mental and emotional capacity to manage, which takes away from my ability to design and manufacture the best products, which is what I am good at and what I want to do be doing with my life. I have experienced some extremely challenging situations over the last 8 years, like people not returning demo equipment, not paying invoices, and I even had a customer file chargebacks on his credit card for “defective items” that he used all summer and then resold on the forums for a profit. Yes, that happened. I hate asking people to pay, and it’s hard for me not to take things personally when buyers are disappointed with something I designed and built with my bare hands. I've gotten better at accepting the feedback without emotion, but Patrick will now manage these tickets, and relay important trends and information to me, while better addressing customer questions and concerns.
We have spent basically $0 since inception on sales and marketing. To be honest, it’s actually quite amazing that we’ve gotten as far as we have. Cedrus has sold itself thanks to happy customers and good performance. Our goal has always been to make the last mast anyone ever buys, and we’ve succeeded in that! Many of our Evolution Customers are Classic riders, and it’s time to reach the 99% of the market that doesn’t know about us. When I’m on the beach in La Ventana, I get so many questions and comments. People literally do not know about Cedrus. I’m not disheartened, I’m excited: once we start trying to increase market awareness, I know we will be successful.
With all this said, we don’t want to be the biggest foil brand; we want to be the best. We’ll never compete in volume or price with the OEM masts from brands who manufacture overseas, and we don’t want to. My team and I genuinely enjoy using our hands (and robots) to make things, but by nature of the business and where we operate, will have to limit our scale. We want to remain small and nimble, and we need to in order to be competitive in this extremely fast moving, dynamic, and competitive industry. With Patrick on board, we will will work to scale in a way the does not compromise the quality, service, value, and performance that Cedrus is known for. I consider myself extremely lucky to be working with the team we've built: Kurt, Scott, Stasi are now some of my best friends and the most talented, skilled, and hard working people I've worked with. Thanks to all who’ve supported us so far; we’re so excited about who we meet next!
Kyle
