Lundquist Surfboards

Blake grew up around surfing but didn’t fall in love with it until he was twelve. A summer of riding with friends — Max Putnam, Sean Watson, Jacob Trask — turned into everyday sessions and the kind of obsession most surfers recognize from their own first year.

His older brother Mitch, seventeen years his senior, took him out almost every morning of 8th grade, picking him up before school and driving to Salt Creek. Mitch had surfed the North Shore, charged big waves when called for, and knew how to put a younger brother in a spot to catch waves he’d otherwise have sat out on. That year of early mornings — learning positioning, being pushed into sets that felt too steep — shaped Blake’s read of the water more than anything else.

At fourteen, Blake took his first job at the Ripcurl outlet in San Clemente. Most of what he made went back into surfboards and wetsuits. By sixteen, he’d restructured his high school schedule to finish classes at noon so he could work a shift, surf in the same day, and still get sleep before doing it again.

The Ripcurl years taught him the retail side of surfing — what customers ask for, what gets returned, what actually works in water versus what looks good in a display. He also started flipping surfboards on the side: buying beat-up boards at a discount, cleaning them up, getting dings repaired, reselling them. He’d flipped over 450 boards by the time he started shaping. Most of the shapes in our catalog are boards he’s personally ridden in some form before committing to a production template.

At eighteen, Blake spent two years serving a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Boise, Idaho — teaching in Spanish across Boise, Meridian, Rupert, Twin Falls, and Sun Valley. It was two years of early mornings, long days, and work with people from every background. No surf, no boards.

He’ll tell you it was the formative experience of his life. The discipline, the Spanish, the repeated practice of showing up for people when you didn’t feel like it — all of it carries into how we run Lundquist today. Most of what happens at the shop, from the detail on an order card to the way we talk to a first-time custom customer, traces back to what those two years taught.

After the mission, Blake landed at BYU Hawaii in Laie, on the windward side of Oahu, twenty-five minutes from his favorite waves on the North Shore. Between classes and working at Seven Brothers, he was in the water every break.

The first board he built was for himself — a longboard, shaped and glassed start-to-finish under the guidance of Arthur “Toots” Anchinges (@mr._t00ts), a local shaper who walked Blake through the factory, showed him the pieces of the puzzle, and shared the small things most shapers guard — which blanks to pour flipped, which glass schedules hold up in Hawaiian conditions, how to read a foam’s density before you commit a cut.

The second board was for Sara, now his wife. Friends started asking next — a longboard, a twin-fin fish, a glider, a mid-length. Every one was researched, ridden, and critiqued. That’s the model that’s carried through every model we’ve made since: build it, ride it, revise it, ride it again.

Blake and Sara met at a friend’s wedding reception in Huntington Beach in the middle of a Christmas break. Blake’s best friend Jacob Trask had tried to introduce them — she’d already left by the time they arrived. They met at her house that night instead.

They saw each other almost every day for two weeks before Blake skipped his flight back to Hawaii to stretch the time a little longer. Engaged in May, married in August, living at Sunset Point in Oahu within a year.

She’s the reason the second board ever built exists. She’s the reason we surfed the Gordie tandem the morning of our wedding. And she’s the reason the Lundquist shop in San Clemente is also the Pacific Jewel shop — two brands, one space, two people running them with their kids in the back room.

When the pandemic started locking things down, Blake and Sara made the call to leave Hawaii and get closer to family. They drove back to San Clemente with what they could fit and started over.

What had been a side practice — building a few boards for friends — turned into real demand as people around them started reaching out. Blake was working full-time building pools, selling cars on the side, and trying to deliver custom boards that rode like custom boards should. It didn’t all fit. Something had to give. That something became the turning point: the shift from shaping every board by hand to building a process that could hold up at real production volume without giving up on the details.

A board that leaves our shop has passed through five people. Each of them is the best at what they do, and each is part of the reason Lundquist boards ride the way they do. Blake (Founder & Designer), Steve (Machine Cut Operator & Factory Manager), Jack (Shaper & Finisher), Daniel (Design Collaborator), and Greg (Laminator).

We could keep it quiet and tell you the boards are “hand-shaped by the founder.” Most shapers do. We don’t — because it isn’t true, and because naming the team is a better story anyway. Every one of these people has spent years, in some cases decades, mastering a specific phase of the build. The board rides better because of that specialization. Telling you who they are is how we earn your trust — and how we pay respect to the people whose work you’re actually riding.

What we’re building is bigger than a single season’s lineup. We want Lundquist to be the brand people remember not just for boards that rode well, but for how the brand treated them when they ordered — the conversations before the build, the detail on the order card, the honesty about process, the fact that someone picked up the phone when they called.

Most of our orders come from people who know someone who ordered before them. That’s the business we want to run. We’d rather build one board a customer loves and tells their friends about than ten boards that were fine.

The family started in the water. We’re still in it. We just get to build the boards now.