THE CREATORS.
CLINTON FILEN
We caught up with Clinton Filen – the man behind Airush and AK Durable Supply Co – in Muizenberg earlier this year. He’s a fascinating guy with a lot of great insights about kitesurfing, so we followed up with some questions and the insights kept on coming…
CAN YOU TAKE US THROUGH YOUR JOURNEY IN THE INDUSTRY? YOUR BACKGROUND WAS MORE IN MEDIA RIGHT, AND YOU ‘FELL INTO’ PRODUCT DESIGN AND THEN INTO OWNING A BRAND?!
Ultimately, I think it started when I was in my early teens. I had two close friends, the one became a photographer and the other a product designer, and with liberal parents, we just did so much cool shit. We would play music, race BMX, windsurf, surf, and skate together. But we were already makers, I mean it was Africa, so if you saw something cool in an international magazine, you often needed to start from scratch or modify something. It was great fun building tracks, bikes, boards, sails, vert ramps, and taking photographs to document our antics.
Getting into the industry, I was studying advertising management and copywriting a few years after I finished school, and competing in windsurfing. I started building my own boards as I had a few ideas and didn’t have enough money to buy them straight up.
I knew of a pretty legendary South African waterman, Jonathan Paarman, who was shaping at the time. I had made a few boards as a kid with friends, but they were not great, so I hassled him to shape a few blanks for me. Then I hassled him to let me use his factory to build them and proceeded to ask him a million questions! I remember that he didn’t give me much advice at the time, but he did give me a lot of shit when I screwed things up. I must have been pretty annoying, but it was the perfect place for me to learn. Anyway, I slowly started making some pretty nice lightweight boards that I’d sell to my friends when I was done with them.
There was a European windsurfing company working in his space, and they asked if I would like to help with product testing and they started supporting me when competing. I was completely obsessed with windsurfing and would spend every
