A kite only a mother could love...

This week the race orientated kiting company ASV Performance announced that they’re offering custom colours on not only their kites, but in their boards too! They’re the latest company in a recent scramble of manufacturers to offer their customers unique and personalized kiteboarding equipment. Could this be the way of the future?

Kiteboarding gear works very much in the way of the typical retail store right now. You walk into a shop, buy your kite off the rack and maybe chose from one of three colour schemes. Boards are usually pretty rigid in their colour-ways, with most board manufacturers changing colours per size, and not offering any choice apart from board dimensions.

But will we be walking into kite shops in 2 years time, browsing through a catalogue on an iPad and selecting our very own, made to order gear? The rest of the retail world seems to have gone this way, with it becoming normal to wait a week (or sometimes even months) to get a product built just the way you want. Why not kites! Interesting times to come for sure.

For years Ozone have been offering a service which sews in company logos to their kiteboarding kites and paragliders. While expensive, it wasn’t cost prohibitive and lots of companies took them up on the offer. Then came the companies like Griffin who started screen printing graphics onto kites, the cheaper alternative meant kite schools started popping up with branded kites, take the Jeep kites from BWS for instance. This was alright for the shops though, but what about consumers!

Ozone again came to the party early this year, offering a neat little flash tool on their website which allowed customers to pick their own colour layout from any of their available fabric colours. The response was particularly positive in the racing scene, due to the extremely limited options for race gear. You’ve probably seen the photos of beaches lined with green, blue and yellow Ozone Edges and North Dynos in recent years. For the small upgrade price of 75 euro you can have your very own, and you have to choose from their pre-determined colours.

Fast forward to now, and ASV have gone the extra step and are offering true custom colours. They’re doing the same as Ozone with the pre-determined colourways on the kites, but for boards you can choose ANY, and we mean any Pantone colour you want on their XR70 and XR-F raceboards. They’ll paint ‘em up, ship them out and your one-of-a-kind board will be on your doorstep in a matter of weeks.

Will this be the future of kiteboarding equipment? Or will it be like trying to read an Italian restaurant menu with too much choice, and then realizing you ordered the wrong thing after seeing someone elses plate being delivered.