Bruce Jones Surfs His Own Wave of Success by Don HamiltonCopyright © 1998 Don Hamilton. All rights reserved. Bruce Jones is making a lot of money selling surfboards over the Web. When we talk about surfing the Web we generally don't mean with a surfboard, but in Bruce's case we do mean with a surfboard. Make that 2,000 surfboards. He hand-shapes 2,000 surfboards a year and sells thirty to fifty percent of all his products on the Web. Bruce has a well-known surf shop in Sunset Beach. Each board costs in the neighborhood of $500, so with some simple math we know he's doing a cool million in boards. That's not counting wet suits, wax, watches, clothing, and all the other paraphernalia that surf shops sell. With a little bit more math, we can make a quick estimate and see that at a minimum, he's taking in, on surfboards alone, $300,000-350,000 per year. So does he think the Web is worth it? YES! WWWiz: When did you first start surfing? B.J.: In 1960 when I was 15. WWWiz: Where did you surf? B.J.: I lived in Huntington Park which is up in L.A. The first guy I ever went surfing with needed gas money and he took me to Trestles and Uppers. I was just so enthralled by the whole thing! We grew up camping with my family, and the camping and surfing thing just clicked. From there it was straight forward and no stopping. WWWiz: When did you make your first board? B.J.: I made my first board when I was 15. As soon as I made it somebody wanted to buy it and it just happened like that. It all started in my garage. I've been making them nonstop since then. WWWiz: Do you still surf? B.J.: Let's just say I surf with my son. He surfs all weekend every weekend. I drop him off at Seal Pier in the morning and pick him up every afternoon. WWWiz: Does he help you with design and testing? B.J.: Yeah, him and his friends. We have a whole junior longboard team. They're on the Team BJ page on our Web site. (http://www.brucejones.com/) They're great at that age, 13 through 17. No ego problems to deal with, just straight-up people who'll tell you what they think. They're a lot easier to work with than older surfers and older pros. WWWiz: How do you get your boards on the Web site? B.J.: We have an area at the shop where we can drop a couple of black backgrounds made of 15-pound felt. I wait for a cloudy day or for the shadows to be right. I rent the digital camera from Pro Photo Connection in Irvine. For fifty bucks a weekend you just rent the camera and start shooting. I usually shoot 20 boards at a time, front and back, plus a couple extra shots for product. I just take the camera home and download them into PhotoShop, and then crop them as required. I do some work with the contrast, and then create the image and then a little HTML and I have a page. WWWiz: Do you write the HTML or use a program? B.J.: Sometimes I use Front Page Editor, not the whole program. I hate the whole program. The Editor is pretty good, but not the whole program. If it's really tedious work like loading boards I'll use Front Page because it's just quick; you can just cut and paste and bam-bam-bam you're done. WWWiz: How big are the digital images you start with? B.J.: I usually shoot them at 300 dpi, and they're equivalent to 8x10 in the camera, but when I finish they're 72 dpi and 4x5. WWWiz: So how do you go about collecting money over the Web? B.J.: Unlike the mall people, where someone collects all the money for you, we're just out there by ourselves in cyberland. We take credit cards by email or fax and there's an easy way to find out if the cards are okay. We have a card reader and we check to see that the billing address is the same as the ship-to address. We usually have some emails back and forth to confirm the shipping and prices and then the deal is done. They pick the board from an inventory list, or custom design, depending on their needs. The Web will take a bad day and make it a good day, and take a good day and make it a great day from the additional sales off the Web. WWWiz: What percent of your sales come from the Web? B.J.: Well they were 50% in February, and generally we do at least 30% off the Web. I've been the top salesmen lately just because of what comes over my computer. I print it out at home, bring it down to the shop and say "Here you go, guys. Get this one ready to go." WWWiz: How many boards do you make a year? B.J.: I would say 2,000 per year total output of the shop's new boards. We sell trade-ins and used boards also. We sell everything you need to go surfing; we do three different major wet suit lines. By the way, we're having trouble with one of them. One of the major manufacturers wants us to take it off after three years of being there. We're going to fight it. WWWiz: Why do they want off your Web site? B.J.: They're afraid that everyone will do the same thing with the result of to-the-bone pricing. I don't see it going that way. If anything, I can see them skipping me and selling their own stuff on the Web. They just got a new sales manager and he doesn't surf, so he has no knowledge of what's going on. I'm supposed to get a letter from their lawyer, and I don't plan to take it off the site, so we'll see what happens. In fact, I added another wet suit manufacturer this weekend, and I asked them, and they said it was okay to sell on the Web. Maybe when they see each other on the page we'll have some change in their position. WWWiz: Are they concerned about price? I know Levi at one time didn't want U.S. prices shown to Europeans because they charged much higher prices there. B.J.: I don't know about that. I know that with exchange rates it's difficult to sell internationally, but when you use a credit card they handle all that and it becomes an easy transaction. The exchange rate is determined when the transaction is done and you're paid in dollars. Tariffs increase the cost of goods in any country. Europe is expensive. Some companies export boards to Europe but they're unfinished. There's a company in Europe that finishes all the boards. That way they can import them as unfinished plastic goods which is a lot cheaper duty than finished plastic goods. WWWiz: What does it cost you to have your Web site? B.J.: Practically nothing. I was one of the first people on with Earthlink. When I started, there was Internet-in-a-box and you had to pay a setup fee, most places, of $50. I called Earthlink in Pasadena, and the guy who answered the phone turned out to be one of the bigwigs now so I still stay in touch with him, and they had also signed Surfer magazine so I got to advertise on it. I started out with a $19.95 site that was a shared address. They kept changing the server and every time I put an ad in the magazine my address would turn out to be wrong. Surfer magazine tends to sit on coffee tables for years and the address would be no good, so I finally got a domain name. Solved that problem. I have been at $19.95 forever. Earthlink takes good care of me because I was one of the first people on with them. WWWiz: How many people hit your Web site? B.J.: You mean how many people hit index.html? WWWiz: Yes. B.J.: A couple of hundred each day. Some people will talk about 5,000 or 50,000 per day when they are talking about bytes downloaded or numbers of files, but we have a couple of hundred people each day. The percent of business created for each log-on is high. It's well worth it for the price of the Web site. WWWiz: How about your time? How much time do you spend working on the site? B.J.: Two or three hours a day at night or early in the morning. WWWiz: Seven days a week? B.J.: I can't keep off it. WWWiz: So you spend 20-some hours a week keeping the Web site going? B.J.: The email is constant questions. I answer them all because that's the way you get a sale. We have a bulletin board where you can post a message that everyone can see. People besides me answer it and everybody jumps in. That's been real effective because we get questions about everything involved in making a surfboard. All it takes is an answer, and then you have a loyal visitor to your site and soon he'll buy something. That's the key: to answer every question. It only takes a minute to answer one question. If you put it off you're snowed, but if you do it every day it's easy. WWWiz: When you say it doesn't cost anything to maintain a Web site you're not being completely honest, because you spend a lot of hours on the site and your time must be worth a lot! B.J.: Yeah, I don't have to pay anybody; that would be a real cost. Sometimes if I get to something that's real hard I'll swap with a guy. I give him a surfboard for x amount of dollars' worth of work. He's a real savvy guy about things like shopping carts. Shopping carts are way beyond me and more than I want to learn. He put the shopping cart together on the site now. It's easy; they just put all the products they want in the cart and then decide if they want to include the credit card or fax it separately. I got a couple this morning. A secure server isn't a big deal, but I've been told that I don't know how many sales I'm missing without it, so I'm letting him go ahead and put one together. It won't be on Earthlink, because you can have that part on another server. WWWiz: Do you use Java on your site? B.J.: No! It crashes some browsers and I don't want anyone to have a hard time getting into our site. I'm basically staying at the middle-of-the-road difficulty. There's a lot of older stuff out there. Not everyone has the latest equipment. I have an old 486 with a 14-inch monitor that I use to check out the site. WWWiz: So you work your site in the morning and evening at home? B.J.: Yes. Each morning I go to our shop in Long Beach for about an hour, then I go to the factory and work all day. At the end of the day I go back to the shop and answer any questions that might have come up. The guys up there have it pretty wired. When I go home at night I work on the site. I have to sneak onto the computer because my wife gets so upset. WWWiz: Is your family on the Web? B.J.: No. They will be soon. WWWiz: What kind of browser do you use? B.J.: I'm a Netscape loyalist. Used Microsoft Explorer, and I changed all my icons and my system and they constantly crashed, so I took it off. We run our sales computer at the shop on DOS. WWWiz: What is the most popular size board? B.J.: We make a full mix. A few years back it was definitely more longboards. In the 90s, people use a wider variety of shapes and sizes. A lot of people go to Huntington and some salesman sells them a 7'4" thruster, and that's fine for the salesman, but for a 200-pound man it won't work. We get more business out of people that come back upset because they bought too small a board. What we do if the guy isn't sure, is we have a rack of demos and we put him out on a demo board to test which size is best. We have everything from 8-0s to 10-5s. We have a lot of people that haven't surfed since they were teenagers and they remember what they had then. Well, most of them need to change to a different kind and size of board. You see people that have put on 50 pounds, and some as much as 100 pounds. They have to look at the age factor, the weight factor and all that, if done right, leads to the enjoyment factor. The enjoyment factor is more important for these people because they have less time to surf. If our 100-pound teenagers are on 9-0s and ripping, then what size does a larger person need? We have some information on this subject on our Web site. The site explains that volume is important for flotation. A 200-pound guy needs a lot more volume to have as much fun as a 100-pound surfer. If you double the weight of a person, what are you going to do with a nine-foot surfboard? It's going to be dang big! If you take an 11-0 to San Onofre and you weigh 200 to 230, you'll have so much fun that people will be looking for you on the beach to find out what you're riding. We don't just sell to young diehard surfers; we sell a lot of boards to people that have bought the wrong board and have a lot of money, and want to have more fun and make it easier. WWWiz: Buy a bigger board and have more fun. B.J.: We don't stop people or argue with them if they want a board that doesn't seem right for them. Whatever the customer wants is what he gets. We'll trade it in if it doesn't work. WWWiz: So you take trade-ins? B.J.: Oh yeah, but we're good negotiators. WWWiz: You don't have any trade-ins from the Web do you? B.J.: Oh no. That's one of the great thing about the Web. You have money up front with Web purchases. Everything about the Web sales are better. We deal with adults and they may not have the street knowledge to find a great deal, but what's most important to them is having it done right and done quick. WWWiz: If I order a board from you on the Web how long will it take? B.J.: No longer than a month unless it's in stock, and then about a week. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Original source: http://wwwiz.com/html/cover.html - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -