I love board sports. Once I got the hang of the glide I couldn’t let it go.

Buying boards is so hard though. Specially when you are a beginner. So many brands, so many shapes, so many camber profiles, so many riding styles.

I think the majority of the time when selling/marketing boards should be spent educating the customer.
I find buyer’s guides pretty useful. But they usually only go over the general details of the gear.

When buying gear you also want to be able to understand the specifics, what is the difference between these and those bindings, what makes this board special.

When I bought my snowboard gear I found The Good Ride’s content to be stellar. The Angry Snowboarder is also very good. Snowboarding profiles is good as well.

I like how these independent content creators go into the details about how each piece of hardware is special, where does it shine or not. All the gear I bought could be mostly attributed to the great advice from The Good Ride. So I think the importance of these content creators is definitely underrated.
In contrast, I think most videos from online shops look like video marketing brochures of the gear. It is nice to look at the gear but you don’t learn much from it.

The other hard thing about buying a board is choosing the right size. I almost bought a Jones board and I really enjoyed going through the comments on the page and seeing their staff give advice to interested customers regarding which board size they should pick. Lib Tech also does a pretty good job at guiding customers through the process of picking a board.

All this came to my mind because I’m looking at getting a surfskate board for my quiver and realized how harder is to buy a surfskate board when compared to a snowboard.
So this post is part wishlist/outline of what I think a great sales/marketing mix can look for selling boards:

• buyer’s guides
• detailed reviews of every board
• forums to answer to customer’s queries or to build a community
• cool videos of people riding the boards
• optional: opportunities for people to do test runs for the boards