It was nearly 11 o’clock on a Thursday night when the text came through: “I’m here”.
Scotty James had already gone to bed. He’d spent months trying to arrange this meeting — a round of golf that never happened, a factory visit that kept getting pushed, a tee time that came and went without its most important player. Now, headlights were sweeping across his Balinese-style villa perched on the upper Nerang River, and Kelly Slater was standing outside in the dark.
“From there, we just got chatting,” says Scotty. “He’s here a couple of hours and told me everything he liked about surfboards and everything he liked about mine. Man, it was amazing story time. We were talking about everything: life, travel, golf, family. We just didn’t stop talking for two hours. It was bloody amazing.”
Next to the fireplace inside Scotty’s Queensland home, stand two finished surfboards. They’ve been there for a while now. One is white, clean as its blank is fresh. The other is carbon – black with gold logos, built for the points. Kelly Slater ordered both of them. He’s meant to collect them today. Or tomorrow. With Kelly, you learn to be patient.
“It still doesn’t seem real at all, when I tell you the story,” Scotty laughs, shaking his head. “It’s so weird.”
For a 47-year-old Dunedin boy who spent two decades on his knees laying carpet and vinyl, weird has become something of a recurring theme in this business. Scotty James Surfboards, or SJS Custom to his 24,000 Instagram followers, has spent the better part of fifteen years quietly building one of the Gold Coast’s most distinctive small shaping operations. Premium glasswork, bevelled rails, inserted spiral concaves, twin fins built for surfers who’ve been riding waves their whole lives and aren’t willing to compromise on quality. Boards that end up on walls. Boards that end up in the hands of 11-time world champions.
Two weeks after Kelly came by, Chris Hemsworth texted asking for a board.
“I asked him, ‘Was it because of Kelly that you bought my board?'” Scotty recalls, grinning. “And he goes, ‘Well, to be honest, it wasn’t. But I did see that you met Kelly. I had already seen you myself and then this board popped up and this is what I do – I’ve got a terrible addiction to buying surfboards online.’ I said, perfect mate, I’m your man.”
Scotty pulled a carbon Rock & Roller out of the van. Chris’s reaction was immediate.
“He goes, ‘Dude, this thing’s sick. I need one of these.'” Scotty laughs. “He came out with his Ugg boots on, trackies and a beanie, eating a bowl of cereal. No pretentiousness at all. I couldn’t believe he even let me in his gate. I thought he’d want to meet me at the beach or something. He goes, ‘Come on down to my place. I’ll give you my gate code.’ It was unbelievable.”
None of this was the plan. The plan, if there ever was one, was just to get out of Dunedin.
Scotty James grew up at St Clair, one of few second generation surfers of his era. His grandfather built a house at 49 Cliffs Road, and his father Malcolm and uncles Steve, Richard and Wilson surfed Seconds Beach, which they could see from a bedroom window. At the end of the vegetable garden a short track delivered them through the bush to the surf.
Scotty says the sand and the car park at St Clair raised him, though he was made to wait a few years before he was allowed near the latter, such were the strict rules of the older surfers.
“It was such a hardcore crew of surfers back then,” he says. “You didn’t really see anyone else at the beach – just surfers. There weren’t the cafes and the whatnot. It was just surfers and local families, which was cool. It was really old school. Everybody looked out for everybody.”
He shaped his first board at 14 in the laundry at home, borrowing a book from local shaper Graham Carse. Carsey would let him hang around the workshop after school making cups of tea and being, as Scotty puts it, a pest. Scotty’s first board got sold through local surf shop HydroSurf.
He moved to Australia at 17, made three more, then didn’t touch a blank again until he arrived back on the Gold Coast as a 34-year-old with five suitcases, a family, and a fresh start.
The move wasn’t about surfing. It was his wife Sharee’s idea.
“She has these 10-year plans,” Scotty explains. “That was the end of 10 years in Dunedin. And she said, ‘Look, let’s go to Aussie.’ Dunedin at the time was pretty grim. It was after the recession – 2008 through to about 2014 was pretty challenging. There wasn’t much keeping us there at the time.”
They sold everything – motorbikes included – and landed in Casuarina, Northern New South Wales, with Sharee, Scotty’s stepson Xavier, and their son Phoenix in tow. Scotty went back to what he knew: carpet and vinyl laying. He was good at it. He hated it.
“I was just fucking unhappy doing that,” he says flatly. “I never wanted to do that. It wasn’t very creative. I was just sick of it, tired of it, sore of it.”
The turning point came through a philosopher, of all things.
“I remember listening to an Alan Watts lecture. He was talking about the 10,000 hours theory and how you can turn anything into a job. As long as you’re good enough at it, then you can either make money from people buying whatever you’re making, or teaching those people how to do what you do. You’ve created two sources of income through putting in enough hours. So I just did both.”
The opportunity to shape again came through Sam Parsons – a Sunny Coast shaper with connections stretching back to Scotty’s first stint in Australia as a teenager. Sam’s brother Nat had lived with Scotty in Dunedin. When Scotty arrived on the Gold Coast, Sam offered him the use of a bay in his factory.
“He said, ‘If you ever want to try your hand at it again, I can rent out the bay and you can come in and hack away at a few if you want,'” Scotty recalls. “Because that’s the hardest thing for most people – getting the area or the space to work in.”
Scotty started making boards for himself and Xavier. Then Sharee’s cousin put in the first custom order. Then somebody at a barbecue asked if he made surfboards. Then someone else did. Word spread the way it always does in surf communities – quietly, then all at once.
“Everybody you meet goes, ‘Oh, you make surfboards?’ And then, ‘Oh yeah, what do you charge?’ And they’re always so cheap back then when you’re learning. So everybody jumps on it. It’s quite easy to sell them when you’re charging $400 bucks. That’s the cost of the materials pretty much.”
He worked out of a pop-up tent in his garage. He shaped after carpet-laying shifts. He put pictures on Instagram — not as promotion, just because he’d made something and wanted to share it. Hey, I made a surfboard. Do you like it? Give us a like if you think it’s cool. By the time he’d made 150 boards, mostly for friends, he was good enough and fast enough to start putting the price up.
The business moved slowly. Then Covid hit, and everything changed.
Six months before Covid, Scotty had knocked the flooring on the head, selling his tools and going all in on boards. When the world shut down, he admits, he panicked.
“I went, oh shit, what have I done? I’ve sold all my tools and now I’m left with a surfboard company that’s not actually a business. It’s so small.”
Then the phone started ringing.
“They started locking down and the only place you could go was the beach or the golf course. The activity sector went nuts. I only made two or three boards a week at that stage. I’m like, I’m going to have to start making boards faster and better to keep up.”
Orders piled up. Instagram went “bonkers” – everyone at home, scrolling, clicking, spending government stimulus money on things they actually wanted. Scotty was selling boards for $750. People were getting $700 deposited in their accounts each week. The maths worked perfectly.
“I ended up with 46 orders at its peak — that’s about four months work for me. It just went nuts.”
He’d moved into a rented commercial shed by then, co-sharing with another shaper who wasn’t full-time. They had just made it into a proper factory. The orders didn’t stop.
But Covid brought everyone to the market at once. Blank manufacturers sold out. Resin became impossible to source. Prices rose. New Instagram shaping pages launched every week. The saturation came fast, and when it did, it came hard.
“It peaked and then just plummeted off the side of the earth,” Scotty says. “It was way oversaturated, with under supplied materials, all the prices went up. It was like an explosion in the end.”
The shapers without a following fell away. Scotty had 10,000-12,000 followers by then – ten years of organic growth, every post made himself, every caption written in the bay. It was enough to hold on. Enough to rebuild.
“You can’t cheat at it,” he says, of social media. “It’s a grind.”
What Scotty James makes now is not what you’ll find in a surf shop. He shapes three to five boards a week, depending on complexity, and complexity is where he’s planted his flag. His signature work involves bevelled rails, flat decks, inserted spiral concaves and channel bottoms – design ideas developed slowly over years of Friday afternoon experiments with second-quality blanks, shaping just to see what would happen.
“On a Friday arvo, I’d usually have all my work done and I’d have seconds blanks stashed,” he explains. “I’d grab one out of the roof and whack it on the shaping stand and just start shaping straight out of my head. Sometimes I’d do an asym and have two different boards on each side – two different designs going on at the same time. Just to get it into a form where I could see it, feel it and look at it.”
The big factory brands don’t want to go near what he does. That’s precisely the point.
“I could shape one of their preshapes in 15 minutes. And one of mine will take an hour and a half to do a preshape and more like three hours to do a handshape,” he says. “Why would they do that? It makes no sense to them. It comes down to time and the skill set of the people in the factory. Half of them don’t want to do the hard stuff. They’re all paid per piece. If you give them the board that’s got all this extra stuff to figure out, they’re not making any money. They don’t want anything to do with it. So that’s good for me. I’ll do what they don’t want to do.”
His premium glasswork – cutlap glass jobs in burnt orange or deep red wine, high-polish finishes that turn boards into objects – is what gets him noticed. They are, he says simply, pieces of art.
“They sell themselves. People who get one connected to it want another one. But a different model, a different colour. They build a quiver and they become connected to this collection. And then they won’t buy any other boards because they’ve got this collection. That’s what it’s all about to me – to make something so good that people love it, then they want another one.”
Roll back to October last year, and the chain of events that changed everything … the sprinkling of “Kelly dust” as Scotty puts it.
A Christchurch mate, Dan Warren, had taken delivery of a new SJS Custom. He posted a comment on Scotty’s Instagram photo of the board, tagging Kelly Slater. Dan doesn’t know Kelly at all. He just thought it would be funny – come check out Scotty’s boards next time you’re on the Gold Coast, bring your clubs, and we’ll add in a round of golf.
Kelly Slater commented immediately: “Sounds good. Let’s do it.”
“I was like, ‘Holy shit,'” Scotty recalls. “So I jumped on Instagram and I DM’d him. I said, ‘If you’re serious, I’d love to make you a board. Let’s do it. That’d be awesome.’ And he got back to me. He says, ‘Yeah, I’m keen. I’m not back till March, but let’s do it when I get back.’ And he proceeded to write everything he liked about my designs and about what he likes about surfboard design. We got chatting about surfboard design for like a week.”
What followed was months of almost-meetings. Tee times booked and missed. Factory visits arranged and cancelled. Kelly’s wife was pregnant and he had a 14-month-old. His Gold Coast visit stretched from three months to four.
Then one night, at nearly 11pm, the text came: “I’m here.”
Scotty describes the visit the way people describe moments they’ve replayed many times in their head – slightly disbelieving, precise on detail. Kelly checked out every poster in the factory. Pulled his phone out and showed photos from surf trips. Showed Scotty a photo from Cloudbreak, a 15-foot section breaking directly behind his board, the moment before he nearly drowned. “I nearly died on that one,” Kelly told him, as casually as you’d mention a missed bus.
“He’s very knowledgeable — you can tell his brain is working overtime all the time,” Scotty says. “He looked at everything. He’s really open and friendly – normal like that. But yeah, to be Kelly, you’re not normal.”
The collaboration was genuine. Kelly told Scotty he didn’t come to get boards he already rode. He wanted to try three-stage rockers, swallow tails, designs outside his usual repertoire.
“He said, ‘I like continuous rockers, but I see here you’re doing three-stage rockers and I want one of those because I don’t usually ride those.’ He’s trying to find new things still in his mid-50s – new feels and new designs. He did literally take my designs, gave me the things that he doesn’t like in a surfboard, and then said, ‘You do your thing.’ Which is as good as you can get. It’s quite surreal. It still doesn’t seem real at all.”
Scotty shaped the boards, discarded two pre-runs he wasn’t satisfied with, started again. He never did manage to get Kelly’s thoughts on the spray he’d been considering — a recreation of the old arrow design that featured in Kelly’s 1991 film Kelly Slater in Black and White. No reply to the text. He went with clean white, and the carbon board with gold logos.
I ask if Kelly will pay for them? Scotty laughs at the question.
“I don’t think he’s ever paid for a surfboard in his life. So I don’t think he’s going to pay for mine. But I’ve already had enough of a payment out of it. A little Kelly dust and you’re off. It’s amazing how he changes things in people’s lives.”
The boards are still on the table when I leave. Kelly’s coming to get them. Maybe today. Maybe tomorrow.
In the meantime, Scotty James has boards on order, a pitch and putt course that ends at the river, a golf game on Fridays, and an Eat, Sleep, Shape business venture to get off the ground. Sharee and Scotty plan to have guests come to stay at the villa, spend a few days making a board from scratch, then leave with it under their arm. The property on the Nerang River was chosen specifically with this in mind. Three quarters of an acre, factory on site, no need to go anywhere.
“The customers are so stoked,” he says. “They would never imagine that they were going to leave with such a good board.”
After fifteen years of grinding – from the laundry in Dunedin to the garage tent in Casuarina to the rented factory shed to here – Scotty James can see the light at the end of the tunnel. He still finishes everything by hand. Still runs every Instagram post himself. Still does what the big factories don’t want to do.
“It’s been a grind,” he says. “But we’re starting to see the light.”
The boards on the dining table look like pieces of recently collected art. Gold logos on black carbon. White foam, clean lines.
Kelly’s coming any day now. He said so.