You're currently one of two managing directors at APM Marketing GmbH, but you're often seen at trade fairs or events on the beach. Are you obviously not just sitting at your desk in front of Excel spreadsheets?
We have split that up. Loisi (editor: Alois Stadler) is purely a salesman and my tasks include marketing as well as administrative matters and commercial management. And ultimately, I'm also the one who sets our corporate strategy. I always say: if you don't have your eyes, ears and nose on the market, then you don't know what's going on out there. That's something I miss in some of my colleagues and it's also one of the reasons why we've been very successful in recent years.
Can you imagine sitting exclusively in the office?
No, certainly not. I got into this industry as an athlete. I've been a skier since I was a child, was then involved in the ski club, was a racer, in the regional squad, which was practically the level before the national team. But that wasn't quite enough due to injuries. Then I took up windsurfing relatively early on. When the hobby becomes a profession, the hobby fades into the background, then it's suddenly just a profession, but the important thing is the passion for the sport - and I still have that, which is why I always want to be out there and see what's happening.
What do you think were the milestones in your career?
I first came into contact with windsurfing in 1972. My uncle had bought a TenCate in Holland, the famous board with the wooden boom. I stood up on the board and first went backwards for three days because I didn't know where to stand. After leaving school and my time in the army, I started studying civil engineering and in winter I started working as a ski instructor. In 1982, I qualified as a state-certified ski instructor and worked in the management of a large ski school and trained ski instructors. This gave me a relatively lucrative winter job and I thought about what I could do in the summer because I realised that studying civil engineering wasn't the right thing for me. I practically grew up in a hotel on Lake Walchensee and we had an old boathouse next to the hotel, which was perfect for building a nice windsurfing shop and surf school in. I did that in 1983 and the following year I was accepted into the VDWS windsurfing teaching team. So I had pretty cool jobs for the whole year. 1985 was a very decisive year. The company Mistral commissioned me to organise events for them, such as the surf festival on Fehmarn, and in 1987 I went one step further and was appointed to their test team. I became a test partner of Charly Messmer, who had ended his active World Cup career at the time. It was an interesting job because there were some really controversial discussions about the material. And also because I realised that I could keep up quite well with World Cup riders.
A regatta career didn't appeal to you?
I went to the first Euro Funboard Cups, but I realised that I had spent three days on Lake Garda - without any wind - and returned home without having achieved anything. In the meantime, I had to pay extra surf instructors at my surf school. That's when I cancelled the regatta. Perhaps also because I had competed in a lot of skiing competitions in my youth and my need for sporting competitions was more or less covered.
But you were able to savour the good 80s like this?
I spent many years testing on Maui, because after my time at Mistral, the company Hifly hired me as a tester. That was in 1989/1990, when I got more and more involved in the actual product development and practically developed the entire range for Hifly. At that time, Hifly was building thermoplastic boards and it was important to me to polish up Hifly's image. That was then my job as marketing and sales manager and I actually managed to turn Hifly's image around.
How did you achieve this?
I had very sporty boards built. Hifly was the first established brand to have so-called "semi-custom boards" built by Cobra back then. This is what is now standard and what all brands do. These were slalom and wave boards with which Andrea Hoeppner and Christopher Rappe achieved success in the World Cup and guys like Jason Prior and Sean Ordonez competed successfully in wave contests.
But Hifly was not your final destination.
In 1995, Mistral poached me again. At that time, the Mistral brand was already owned by the Jacobs Group, known for Jacobs coffee and Jacobs Suchard chocolate, i.e. Milka Lila Pause - which everyone knows. I became Managing Director of Mistral Sports GmbH. At that time, the entire company was making a huge loss and I had the task of reorganising the company. The main deficit came from the board division, and we worked very intensively on this - streamlining structures and restructuring the entire company. Mistral had lost the glamour of its early years and at the time was the absolute market leader in the F2 board sector. The guys were based in Austria and did a good job. That was the challenge for me. I grew up as a ski racer, as a competitor, always with the will to win. Back then, I set out to become number one and I think I managed that after two years. The turnaround was achieved. Christian Ewert and I were then appointed Managing Directors of Mistral Sports Group GmbH. In addition to Mistral, the group also included North Sails and Naish Sails Hawaii, plus we had distributors in France and America and a production facility in Sri Lanka. The whole thing belonged to the Jacobs Group based in Zurich. Back then, we had to travel to Zurich for the shareholders' meetings, which was called "reporting". The discussions with Klaus Jacobs were always very interesting. He had sold Milka, i.e. Jacobs Suchard, to Philip Morris for 2.2 billion Swiss francs - something the Swiss resented for the rest of his life. At the time, he was one of the richest people in the world in terms of cash assets.
What kind of world do you suddenly find yourself in, coming from the rather tranquil windsurfing industry?
1996 was the Olympic Games in Atlanta. At that time, the Mistral One Design was the Olympic windsurfing class. Klaus Jacobs had a holiday home in Florida and came to the competitions with his family to watch "his" class. Afterwards, we were able to fly back to Germany across the Atlantic in his private jet. When you sit in a jet like that, in a white leather chair with white Alcantara on the walls and gold-plated buckles on the seat belts, you feel like you're in the wrong film.
You can probably turn it down a bit?
You are forced into a role. I was co-managing director of the Mistral Sports Group from 1997 onwards and if I add up all the employees of all the subsidiaries (including Fanatic Sports GmbH, which was taken over in 1998, and the seamstresses in Sri Lanka), there were around 400 to 450 employees back then. That means you miss out on sport, you're wearing a suit rather than board shorts and you're working day and night as a manager. And that also means that you sometimes neglect the human side of things. I once said, "I was an arsehole at the time".
I don't know you as being particularly arrogant, but maybe it used to be different?
Perhaps the term is an exaggeration. But you have to make decisions that are unpopular and decisions that you make more with your head than with your gut, and you can't let that get to you. Emotions must not play a role here. Restructuring always involves decisions that you may not personally like, such as cutting staff and closing companies. Negotiations with partners such as the Naish family were not easy either. It was the case that boards that were developed in Hawaii didn't always work perfectly for us. They performed very well in Kailua Bay, but when you were out and about here on Lake Garda, you could tell where the shapes came from, just as surf magazine ultimately discovered in its tests. I tried to bring in the experience I had from years of testing and product development. I think I had a feeling for what the market needed. Those were discussions that were not always pleasant. Of course, Robby always wanted the best products for his application. Robby always wanted to be at the forefront. That's what he still wants today. A person who grows up competitively will always have this competitive gene, it doesn't get lost. But then we got to a point where we found a common path, a common goal. We had already come closer. When I was invited to stay with Rick and Carol, Robby's parents, in Kailua Bay during one of my visits to Hawaii, we ended up getting on very well. There it was life in boardshorts again. And when I came back to Europe, I had to get back into my suit to conduct negotiations with Klaus Jacobs.
You mentioned magazine tests. How do you deal with poor results?
Basically, you have to be critical of your own products. If a product is not good, you have to say so. Or you get told. Of course, there are different philosophies for all products. I can still remember the manufacturer weeks at the surf test in Langebaan, where we spent days and hours discussing test criteria because some industry representatives were determined to push their products through, exactly as they had imagined. But sometimes they were simply wrong. There were simply products that were not good.
You have a lot of products in the catalogue. Do you really need them all?
From an international perspective, yes. Because the requirements in Australia, for example, are different to those here in Germany. In Australia, they sell hundreds of some wave boards, whereas we sell maybe one a year. Starboard's aim is also for all team riders to use standard products. Philip Köster, who now rides Severne, only uses standard boards in the waves, and Sebastian Kördel also only rides standard boards in slalom. Of course, this means that the range is very wide.
How do you see the trend in the shop landscape, as there is a change between shop and online?
For me, it is very important that there are still shops. On-site advice is very important. There are still between 30 and 40 windsurfing shops in Germany. It is absolutely in our interest to maintain this shop landscape. There are far more shops in the SUP sector, e.g. pure SUP shops, kayak retailers and full-range sports shops. However, as the target group for stand-up paddling is much larger, specialised retailers are also needed here. As with all other sports, sooner or later there will be consolidation in the SUP market. In my opinion, sales channels that need a high speed because they work with low margins - such as discounters or DIY stores - will then get out of the business again. Specialist retailers will then continue to assert themselves, also because the sport of SUP will certainly have a certain consistency.
Is windsurfing sometimes considered almost dead by outsiders?
I don't see it that way. The VDWS figures are very constant, over 30,000 basic licences are sold every year. That includes people who stick with windsurfing but don't buy their own board. You can also see that the rental centres have become bigger and bigger. There are over 300 boards at a Rene Egli centre on Fuerte.
Is this perhaps a general trend towards sharing - borrowing instead of owning?
That is certainly a trend. I once spent three years in the ski industry as managing director of a ski brand. The ski market is huge, but even there you could clearly see that the trend was towards hire. In some cases, more ski boots are sold than skis. Because people want a boot that fits, but they hire skis for the conditions. Sometimes one for deep snow, sometimes one for the piste.
You do a lot of other things besides your job as managing director. Some people estimate that you work 60 to 70 hours a week? There's the VDWS, boot Düsseldorf, the mountain rescue service, all things that go beyond the actual business. How do you manage that?
On the one hand, it's important to keep as fit as possible, even if you work extremely hard. Sporting activities are sometimes neglected, but perhaps I am also blessed with a relatively high resistance to stress. Of course, my private life sometimes suffers. But if the work is fun, if it's positive stress, then that's okay. And when I go on a SUP course and train instructors, for example, it's almost like being on holiday. I'm completely away from the business mentally.
Do you have a business guide?
There is a very interesting model. The model with "important" and "urgent". If you take these two terms, you can divide them into four boxes. There is a box that is important and urgent, there is a box that is important but not urgent. There is a box for urgent but not important and there is a box that is not urgent and not important. If you try to divide your activities and work into these four areas, you can organise everything very well. You can also see some of this principle on my desk.
The final building block of your career is APM. How did you get into it?
After the takeover of F2, which today would be called a hostile takeover, and a difficult time full of disagreements with the shareholders, I decided "now I'm switching from suits to board shorts again". As a first step, I started importing Canadian skiwear with a small company. I got in touch with APM through old connections in the industry. At the time, APM was a subsidiary of Cobra and imported Starboard. APM Managing Director Rainer Ramelsberger also managed the coordination and production control at Cobra for all other brands. At some point, Cobra came under pressure from some of the other brands as Starboard continued to grow and, as a competitor, could potentially gain an insight into their technologies in this way. So this connection was dissolved. This left APM with only the distribution of windsurf boards. And that is not enough to keep a company busy for twelve months. On the other hand, my company only sold ski clothing in winter and that's how we came together. Right from the start, the aim was for Loisi and I to buy APM from Cobra at the turn of the year 2007/2008. That was my start.
That was not a time with growing numbers in the industry and presumably not so easy in the start-up phase?
Our order situation was consistently good, both in the windsurfing board sector - Severne was still the absolute underdog in the sailing sector at the time - and with the Karbon ski clothing brand. But what really got us was the banking crisis in 2009. Because the banks said "Oh - windsurfing isn't one of the top ten sports. We have to minimise the risk." That's why the banks cancelled our lines and loans. And a sales company that can no longer buy is naturally finding it incredibly difficult to sell products. Our sales then collapsed faster than we were able to reduce costs. That put APM in considerable financial difficulties.
How did you get out of it?
We had two options. One option was to go to the local court and file for insolvency. Or a reorganisation outside of insolvency. I told Loisi at the time that it would be an extremely difficult and rocky road and that it would often lead to you lying on the floor at home and crying. Nevertheless, we decided to take the second route. And in 2008 we also started importing SUP boards in Germany. Nobody took us seriously. In 2009, we were the first exhibitor at the canoe trade fair in Nuremberg. Many people asked us what we were doing there. Standing on the boards and paddling? My circle of friends asked if I was now too old for windsurfing. But I had seen SUP as the first sport in a long time that you can do as soon as you can stand and swim and that you can do as long as you can still stand and swim. That really was a card I was betting on. I don't know how many years I spent travelling around the country with test boards to make SUP known in Germany.
Was SUP like your lifebelt?
In any case, the increasing sales of SUP have helped us on the one hand, but on the other hand we have never forgotten our roots - windsurfing. If you ask me today what the windsurfing market will look like in ten years' time, I think I can give you a relatively good picture, even including figures. If you ask me today, what will SUP look like in ten years? - Difficult. What will the new sport of wingsurfing look like in ten years? Difficult.
The fascination for windsurfing therefore remains unbroken.
I like to compare it to winter sports. Everyone is looking for a powder slope. And if there's only one track in it, then that's shit. If you're at a wave spot somewhere, then every wave is a new powder slope and you're the one making the tracks and nobody else is ahead of you.
Foil windsurfing is sometimes viewed ambivalently. How do you feel about it?
For me, it's an additional category. There are windsurfers who will never go into the wave, who will never surf an 80-litre board. For those, windsurfing on Lake Garda is travelling back and forth. Then there are those who only ride the waves or the freestylers. And there are foilers. Foiling has simply added another wind range to windsurfing, where previously you only cruised across the lake on longboards. Now you can have that gliding feeling again with a foil in two to three wind forces. This expands windsurfing in the low wind range enormously.
You started at APM with a company that wasn't particularly big. Svein Rasmussen started from scratch when he founded Starboard in 1994. Do you have anything in common?
That's really interesting. When I joined APM in 2007, I spoke to Svein on the phone and he said: "Yes, we've known each other for quite a long time, back then you were the boss of Mistral, the biggest brand in the windsurfing business. We met in Langebaan at the surf magazine manufacturers' week and you were the only one who spoke to me." I replied that I found it fascinating at the time that he, as a newcomer, had dared to completely change shapes. He was the first to say that we had to go even wider, we had to become even shorter. I had developed perhaps the most successful training board at Hifly. I actually wanted to go even wider back then, but I just didn't dare. That was in 1992, when Svein Rasmussen did it with the Go. That was Starboard's first board and laid the foundation for the brand's success. I was really interested in it back then and Svein never forgot that.
You said you could answer where windsurfing will be in ten years' time. What can young windsurfers look forward to?
In any case, the wide range will remain. Of course, there will be small changes to the products, but if you look back over the last few years - a product that worked well ten years ago still works today. You can also see that at the spots, where some of the older boards are still around and people are still having fun. The level in terms of unit sales will remain relatively the same and the level of how many people describe themselves as windsurfers will also remain the same. According to a study I read a few years ago, people can call themselves windsurfers if they windsurf at least ten days a year and there are still a lot of them. Strictly speaking, that's two weeks' holiday.
Did you take a wrong turn at some point in your windsurfing development?
They probably didn't make one big mistake, no "big bang". In my opinion, there were a lot of small mistakes and sometimes the material development process wasn't straightforward - which sometimes led to confusion and uncertainty among consumers. As a magazine, you have tried to educate people, but you have also contributed to the serpentine course that has been taken. If you look at wingfoiling now and the associated magazines, if I look at the covers, then we're already at a point where I say to all the magazines, friends, make sure you don't just show the air show. Because that's something we did in windsurfing too. If you look at very old surf magazine covers - longboard windsurfing was there with nice photos. But at some point, there were almost only photos on the covers where you couldn't see any water at all. That's what I mean by an air show. And that's already happening with wings. And I think that puts people off more than they find it cool. It certainly depends a bit on the target group, but you always have to make sure that the sports remain accessible to the grassroots. For example, it's incredibly difficult for us in marketing to close the gap between Philip Köster and his world champion image and the windsurfer base. We can fill this gap a little with opinion leaders and national team riders. Sometimes we have moved too far away from the grassroots, not only in terms of how the sport is presented, but also with the material.
Is wingfoiling a new competitive sport?
The curve for windsurf foils, which has been on the rise, has actually taken a slight dip this season. Especially in the foil freeride sector. I think some people are taking up the new sport because it's hip right now. But that alone will not replace windsurf foiling.
What are the arguments in favour of windsurfing?
That it is easier for windsurfers to learn. A windsurfer who can loop surf and ride a harness will be on the foil within an hour at the latest. With wingfoiling, it takes at least three days before you can ride back and forth reasonably well. And when windsurf foiling, if you can't do the jibe on the foil yet, then you let the board come down, do the jibe as usual and start again. With the wings, there's only the crash. And you can always dip back with the windsurf board when the wind drops and don't have to swim.
Your sons are now also starting their careers. What do you give them?
It's very important that you enjoy what you do. I enjoy coming to work here every day. I enjoy seeing my employees and colleagues. I enjoy the products. That's what I can recommend to everyone. Do something that you enjoy.
