THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS

Change is progress. The research and development process has changed more than almost anything else in our sports over the past 20 years. Just two decades ago, the formative factor in development was a board shaper or sail or kite designer who gave shape to ideas. But then digitalization changed all of our lives - and also the development of Duotone products. Thanks to the new communication possibilities, all Duotone developers and production facilities are now networked in real time. Products are designed digitally on the computer, discussed in video conferences and data files are exchanged worldwide. Collaboration between Maui, Oberhaching and production in Sri Lanka has become so much closer, faster and better. 

Of course, development has also become much more complex in recent years. Calculations and simulations are carried out on the computer for all products, board and sail, kite and bar, wing and foil. The proportion of engineering in development has increased, while manual work has decreased. Prototyping has also shifted. Whereas prototypes used to be built by hand on Maui, they are now manufactured in the production facilities - and are therefore much, much closer to the final product at an early stage. 

And finally, a very important component of the more recent development period: materials sourcing. Material innovations have become much more important for decisive innovations. New materials make new designs possible. But using new materials requires an understanding of these materials. And this understanding does not happen on the product itself through trial and error, but in advance in the laboratory: what is the stretching behavior of the new material in all directions, how can we process it - and finally, in which product and where does it make sense? This database is incredibly important, because the great art is to know how a material influences a shape. This is how the findings from the Boards & More laboratory are put into practice and the designers work with this data on the product. 

As always in all processes, people are the decisive factor. Kite, wing, sail and board designers on Maui stand for their decades of experience - decades of development work for Duotone - their incomparable intuition and their pulse on the times in this water sports nucleus of Hawaii. At its headquarters in Oberhaching, Boards & More not only bundles laboratory data and patents, but also the development expertise of just under a dozen engineers, which is probably unique in the wind and wave board sports industry. A team of developers with very individual skills, each of whom stands for crossover know-how transfer. Kiting inspires wings, wings inspire windsurfing, windsurfing inspires the development of wingfoil boards, wing foiling inspires innovations in prone foiling.