Fireside Chats - Ellis Ericson
Halfway between a surf edit, podcast, and an episode of The Office. True Ames’ new fireside chat stabs at the coals of more long form content, allowing us to dive deeper into conversation with our favorite surfers and board builders.
Ellis Ericson
Who better to kick off our series than Ellis Ericson, former competitive surfer, turned craftsman and shaper, known for pushing the envelope in experimental, yet high functioning surf craft. Recently Ellis has been blazing through the surf stratosphere with his revolutionary design, the Lite Kite, seen surfed throughout the piece.
Board Building Roots
Ellis explains that surfboard building was essentially baked into his upbringing. As a kid, he spent a lot of time in the factory environment, surrounded by boards, materials, and the day-to-day rhythm of shaping, as his dad navigated the board building career.
In his coming of age, Ellis eventually burned out on competition and stepped away from surfing, moving out on his own and exploring life outside the water.
The turning point came Matt Chojnacki, well known for his deep immersion in the history of surfing and board design, gave Ellis access to the archive of boards at the Bennett Factory.
Riding old displacement hulls, transitional shapes, and a different designs was humbling, and gave Ellis a deeper understanding of how boards actually work.
A curiosity was cracked, and Ellis found himself back in his dad’s shaping bay, this time with intention. He maintained focus on older design eras (especially late-’60s transitional shapes), started shaping more seriously, and used trial, travel, and repetition to understand how different designs worked under his own feet.
Ultimately, shaping gave him a deeper relationship with surfing itself.
Instead of chasing scores or performance metrics, he became more interested in feel, design, and the interaction between board and wave.
That shift reignited his interest in surfing and marked a formative period that has guided the last 15 years of his approach. Ericson surfboards re-ignited.
George Greenough and Edge
When Ellis first encountered George Greenough’s edge concepts he had enough experience with tools and technique to understand what he was seeing, but it still felt radical. The edge, lifted and sculpted out of the bottom, looked almost impossible to deconstruct at first, yet he was far enough along in shaping where he could mentally reverse-engineer it and attempt his own versions.
Actually riding Greenough’s boards was even more confronting. They felt other worldly with their extreme rocker profiles, unusual bottom contours, and a very different way of generating speed and direction.
Early sessions were filled with awkward moments and loss of control, but there were flashes (brief, high-speed sensations) that hinted at something deeper. Those small breakthroughs were enough to spark a lasting obsession with the concept.
Greenough’s design intent is really speed and length of ride, rather than the modern emphasis on tight turns and performance surfing, which helps explain why his boards feel so different, they’re built around a different goal. The challenge was, and is, translating those ideas into something more accessible and functional for contemporary surfing without losing the essence of the concept.
Ellis describes his own approach as existing somewhere between Greenough’s extreme vision and practical application. He sees Greenough’s ideas as seeds: core design concepts that can be adapted across many types of boards.
Edge, in particular, becomes less of a rigid formula and more of a flexible design principle that can be scaled, softened, or integrated depending on the board and intent.
Ultimately, Ellis frames Greenough as being “light years ahead,” with decades of experience informing his designs. Taking those seeds, Ellis focuses on an ongoing process of refinement - surfing, shaping, and iterating daily.
Through that feedback loop, the edge design concept is evolving into something personal, a continuously tuned element shaped by feel, experimentation, and the natural flow of the shaping process itself.
Lite Kite and the Feathers Quad
Ellis explains that the Lite Kite came from trying to merge two worlds: the lift and glide of edge-based designs with the responsiveness of more performance-oriented, multi-fin boards.
The goal was to get the entire board working together, front-end input feeding into the fins, so the bottom contours, edge, and fin cluster act as one system.
The Lite Kite blends flatter centerlines with more performance-oriented rail lines, using the edge to manipulate rocker feel and control how the board engages through turns.
The four-fin setup is central to the design. Rather than just adding fins for hold, the goal is to make them functional and efficient, minimizing drag while maintaining engagement.
The fins use a relatively neutral, elliptical template for predictability, then layer in subtle design features (like inside concave foil) to keep water “pressurized” and flowing cleanly.
The result is a balanced, cohesive feeling where the fins don’t fight the board, they reinforce it
On the wave, this translates into a very distinct feel, which Ellis describes using the dirt bike analogy: you’re not just passively gliding, you have your “hand on the throttle.”
The board allows for constant micro-adjustments, where you’re subtly loading and releasing energy, ready to accelerate at any moment. Instead of forcing turns, you’re setting up pressure and then engaging it when the wave presents an opportunity.
It creates a feeling where you can access the full wave more easily: staying active, maintaining speed through flatter sections, and then fully “unloading” when the pocket appears.
"Wild Life" by Wild Things Gallery
Watch Ellis, in the new 'Wild Life' edit by our friends over at Wild Things, where he's pushing this same design in some proper shreddable waves.
