Shaper In Residence 001 - Diogo Martins

Cliches are called that for a reason, but they often ring true.

While pondering whether to move forward with a shaping bay in our main headquarters, we found ourselves throwing some around. Probably to convince us that this was, above all, a good idea.

“Build it and they will come,” was the one that got us buying buckets of blue paint and spending several hours doing laps at the hardware store.

Two months in, Diogo Martins, a young surfer/shaper from Sintra, climbed our small stepladder into the bay. His shaping output is still somewhere in the triple digits, but we’ve seen enough to know how his boards behave under his feet.

His silky, precise approach is better evidence of the level of refinement he puts into his rails, contours, and outlines than we’d care to explain in words.

To back it up, a generation of his peers are also doing great things on his unmarked, logoless boards.

He’ll probably hate to read this, but Diogo is, in the best sense, a bit of a nerd. He hunts down secondhand boards (from different shapers and different eras) at the end of their lifecycle, rides them, studies them, and turns them over in his hands to understand what makes them work, what makes them special, and how he might integrate those lessons into his own creations.

A while ago, we heard someone say: “Make sure your shaper can actually surf.”

You can decide for yourself.