A WINNING HISTORY

Fanatic celebrate 40 years in business in 2021 with a history of producing iconic boards and a team that has delivered multiple PWA world titles. Their brand manager, Craig Gertenbach, gives us an insight into the roots and workings of the company and the riders and moments that helped shape the brand and make it the success it is today.

- Craig Gertenbach

Craig (left) and Klaas (right) blasting in Lake Garda. PHOTO Ronny Kiaulehn.

ROOTS

The brand was started by Udo Schütz, who was an industrialist based in central Germany close to Frankfurt. He was a successful motor racing driver, actually a test driver for Porsche at the time. In the beginning Fanatic was very much a German company, very focussed on technology. They had their own moulds and produced all their own boards using materials right from the start that were pretty high-tech, like a lot of honeycomb materials that Udo sourced with his industry connections, and they were able to put a lot of value into the boards. They were building production boards by literally putting in raw material at one end and it would go over a fully automated production line. The last couple of steps to sorting out the rails or doing a few things were done by hand, but otherwise it was really automated to produce huge volumes of high quality boards. Obviously back then moulds were really expensive, but the philosophy of the brand was to really spend a lot of money on technology to give the product a very unique selling point. It was really high-end technology, and from my point of view, the first time I ever saw any Fanatic boards or owned any Fanatic boards, the graphics were always a little different to what everybody else had, a lot more colourful and risky, edgy colours instead of the classic corporate design, so I think that is something through the 40 years to even today we have managed to adhere to.

Craig (left) and Klaas (right) testing new and vintage Fanatic boards back to back. PHOTO Ronny Kiaulehn.