Planning Begins!

Within the last week, we made several important steps in the development of the very first Altus Longboard! First, we decided to make the board a drop thru design. This is good for two main reasons. First, it makes pushing and commuting on the board much easier and energy efficient. Second, drop throughs are ideal to learn basic freeride and sliding on. Although many people shift to shorter wheelbased topmounts later, you can always just topmount your trucks on our board! (Or purchase one of our later topmount designs). To aid in the cruising and commuting aspect of the board, we decided to make the board a microdrop design (1/2") to make it even lower on the ground for pushing. I decided to use foot pockets to aid in the microdrop, as well as really lock your feet in during the slide. I advocated for this design during group testing because of my experiences with the foot pockets in my Landyachtz Switchblade 38", my first freeride board.

We've come to a somewhat informal decision that the first board will not have a graphic on the bottom, rather the natural wood finish and our logo. We collected money this week and we're ordering and buying all materials necessary, and we go to work on the press this Wednesday!

Progress Update: 10/4/13

Altus Longboards has made noticeable progress since our last post. We've accomplished several major things:

1. We have decided to make our first board good for cruising and slow freeride. We decided this for several main reasons. Firstly, it is the most appealing to the vast majority of our potential customers in the community. Second, honing in on one style creates clear goals for us to gauge our success with.
2. We have created a list of initial materials and a budget for acquiring these materials. So far, we have come to a total cost of 200$ to manufacture the first four 'practice' boards, including the initial press, which can be reused. This means that each group member will have to contribute a total of $50 dollars to the board.
3. Takaaki Sagawa spent hours designing our steezy logo. It looks great and we plan to have it on the bottom of our first few boards as the graphic design.
4. We have been thinking about a vague marketing strategy of making stickers for Altus Longboards and distributing them, as a way to spread the word in the community about our company. No final verdict yet.

We're all pretty stoked to start building the boards. Here's a picture of the logo:

Stay stoked!