Postby Mossy 757 » Tue Nov 03, 2015 4:42 pm
Foilboarding is a niche inside a niche; kiteboarding itself is not a profitable industry for the most part, and many of the big gear manufacturers are heavily diversified into SUP, Surf, Windsurf, and Soft-Goods segments to help their businesses turn a profit.
Some of the major manufacturers are racing to the bottom end of the freeride market and most of the smaller single-product-companies are racing to the top end of the course racing market.
I think Dave's right, there's probably 100-200 active foilboarders on the east coast, probably about 25-30% more on the west coast and probably a few dozen in Hawaii. I'd guess there's well less than 1000 riders in the US and her territories, probably about 1k-2k abroad. Not necessarily a robust market segment. If I were interested in starting a business enterprise in this space, I'd expect to do it with one of the following goals:
1) Create the fastest racing foil and supplant Spotz/Taaroa from their current rankings with no expectation of turning a profit. Good luck with that, lol.
2) Do it for the love of the game and hopefully sell enough of your gear to friends/customers to help offset the sunk-cost of developing your own designs...basically just do it for fun and make enough profit to make it worth while.
3) Become a reseller of as many brands as you can without creating a sponsorship conflict of interest and focus more on lessons, training, and expanding the sport while it leaves its infancy headed towards its adolescence; I think the turning point for foiling will be in the wake of the 2017 Youth Olympic Games when the IOC and ISAF/IKA get together and decide if and what formats the adults will compete in at the 2020 games in Tokyo. If adults don't get to ride foils in a course racing discipline at those games, the sport will probably end up being a non-olympic discipline for quite some time and will likely focus entirely around the KFGC for the foreseeable future. That means you need to have the fastest gear out there to enter the racing space since it will likely remain developmental/open class rules.
I think a good case study in this kind of gear is the slalom snowboarding market...within the world of snowboarding, downhill boards have always been a novelty. I think foils are along those same lines right now, of course it's not a direct 1:1, but I'd want to read as much as possible about the infancy of downhill snowboarding before I launched a company that addresses a niche market segment within a niche industry.
Plus, and I hate to be a Debby Downer, kitefoiling is still VERY dangerous and while alpine sports are no picnic, nobody ever drowned on a ski slope because they got knocked unconscious in a crash.