This article is (and when published, was) a highly revisionist take on Clark's impact on the surfing industry, and on the portion of surfboards made and sold by

This article is (and when published, was) a highly revisionist take on Clark's impact on the surfing industry, and on the portion of surfboards made and sold by individual shapers. Board shops in SoCal were already selling mass-produced surfboards in 2005 using cheap mass-produced (non-Clark) foam blanks. I learned to surf on one of those boards. Clark's customers (mom-and-pop board shops) asked him to make improvements to his blanks and his process so they could compete with the mass-produced boards and he refused. He started losing business to cheaper, better competitors and decided to just break all his toys and go off into the woods instead of changing how he did things. This caused a relatively small disruption to the supply of surfboards, because cheap mass-produced boards were already available in many stores and high-end boards never used his foam to begin with. This really just affected the middle-tier mom-and-pop shops that had based their supply chain around his foams. Luckily for them, the market for boards is highly seasonal (even in SoCal), so they were able to find replacement blanks by the time the 2006 surf season began.