Portland company Push Fins connects skateboarding to its surfing roots and helps both industries go green in the process
Text by Travis Hancock
Images by Ashton Morgan
“Sidewalk surfing” was born in the 1950s, when a few resourceful and wave-starved surfers strapped roller-skate wheels to wood planks and began carving down the streets of Southern California. As the fad evolved beyond wave-riding mimicry, repurposed skates and scrap planks gave way to modern skateboards made with the pliable, durable wood of maple trees from the Great Lakes region. Unfortunately, the byproduct of this evolution was a lot of defective veneers that went to the chipper, or worse, the dumpster.
Christian Sellers got the idea for Push Fins four years ago, when he made a replacement surfboard fin from a reclaimed skateboard deck.
Holed up in a garage-workshop in Portland, Christian Sellers is a bit like the guy who throws starfish back into the ocean one by one. A lifelong skateboarder from Seattle, Sellers is on the path of many aging skaters, transitioning into the less abrasive art of surfing. Unlike most, he has found a way to take his skateboards with him. He glues factory-rejected veneers together as if making a skateboard, and then trims and sands them into shark fin-shaped surfboard rudders, giving skate industry waste new life by putting it in the ocean. This salvage mission is the foundation for Sellers’ company, Push Fins.
Using fiberglass scraps leftover from surfboard production and defective plies of wood discarded by skateboard manufacturers, Sellers makes a higher-performing and more sustainable product.
The Push Fins idea started four years ago when Sellers was living in Lake Tahoe and working for a surfboard company that used a new, eco-friendly bio-epoxy in its manufacturing process. When a friend asked Sellers to replace his broken surfboard fin, Sellers grabbed an old skateboard deck. “I don’t really know why, other than that it seemed like an obvious performance-based material—light, strong, flexible,” he says. Then the surfboard company closed down, leaving behind piles of fiberglass too small to use for surfboards, but perfect for something the size of a fin. “I just had this theory that with this bio-epoxy that isn’t nasty to work with, with maple plies, and this scrap fiberglass, I could make a higher-performing, dramatically more sustainable surfboard fin,” he says.
When Sellers moved to Portland four years ago, he found a supportive community that has helped him to grow Push Fins.
After much experimenting, Sellers found a way to divert waste from the sister sports into a new, quality product. World-class surfers have told Sellers that his fins deliver a unique slingshot effect. When the surfers dig into waves, the maple cores spring back, driving them through steep and flat sections of the waves.
Sellers attributes some of Push Fins’ success to his 2014 move to Portland. “Everyone tends to be very generous with their skills and contacts,” he says, “so it’s easy to find what you need here for making, building, designing.” He knows it will also take a community of support like this to make larger, lasting changes to the wasteful models of surf and skate industries. “I am super aware of who is starting to push that big, mossy rock in the right direction,” Sellers says, “and I want to be a part of that.” When that rock gets going, like a surfer down a wave or a skater down a hill, Sellers wants Push Fins there to help guide it in the right direction.