It’s hard to say where our family ends and the surfboard business begins, so we have stopped trying. The surfing way and making boards is such a big part of our lives that it has swept our family along since Finley was born in early 1999. I met Margie thanks to my surfing! When I first came to Noosa in 1998 Margie, then a morning radio DJ, interviewed me over the film tour of Siestas and Olas. It was love at first sight and we didn’t muck around – married with a son, in just one year.

We registered TWS on April Fools Day 2000 (fully aware of the irony) when Finley was just a little 10 month old baby. So we always think of the business as having grown up with Fin. By the time Sunday was born in mid-2002 we had moved to the Cooroy farm and set up the factory. The business was growing with the family!

We have not been in a rush to establish ourselves in business. Patagonia chief Yvon Chouinard, in his book “Let my people go surfing” talks about having a 100 year business plan. This makes sense to us. The business has grown as our children have, allowing us time to be with them, time to surf, time to work on our farm and time to innovate.

In 2007 with both children in school, Margie has been able to join the business full-time and we are now able to expand a little. We have a few, very select, distributors who sell our boards in just a few countries. These shops are leaders in surf retail and understand that making our boards is a craft that cannot be manufactured for mass production and we appreciate their patience and their support.

We remain, and have always been, focused on our custom orders and strive to give our customers personable, first class service, even though we may never meet them face to face. We are very grateful that surfers around the world have put their faith - and their hard-earned money – into us. It is a leap of faith to pay for a board you haven’t seen and have it flown around the world to your door however we have a 100% track record on delivering boards.

It has been a privileged journey to see inside the surfing lives of so many people from so many different places. We have sent boards to Japan, Italy, Hawaii, Brazil, Scotland, England, New Zealand, Taiwan, France, The Netherlands and all over the US and Australia. We have met many nationalities of surfers. Many surfers and their families have been through our humble Cooroy factory. It is these people - customers, friends, dealers - that have made our journey most enjoyable and it these relationships, some fleeting and some lasting, that continue to reward us.

In our lives family and business remains blurred. One has not existed without the other and we are grateful for it all. The dog is Hart. He is family too.