History
The History Of Slingshot
Slingshot was founded 1999 by the Logosz brothers, Jeff and Tony. In 1998 One of Jeff’s friends was calling him to talk about a guy he had seen riding upwind with a kite and wakeboard, something no one ever had done before! The name of this guy was Lou Wainman and he is probably the main reason to why kiteboarding began to evolution to what it is today.
By this time Tony Logosz already had a company that were designing kiteboards so taking the step into designing kiteboarding gears became natural. The two brothers didn’t want to interfere with Tony´s own company, so they decided to form a new company solely aimed for kiteboarding gear, the name was Slingshot!
Many of the windsurfing companies saw the potential in kiteboarding why they also started to manufacture kitesurfing kites. These windsurfing companies already had an image and a legacy reputation that they had to honor. Slingshot was formed solely as a kiteboarding brand that could do whatever they wanted since they had nothing to lose and they had the freedom to create their own image.
Slingshot became an innovative and creative company that wasn’t afraid of doing any mistakes that could hurt their brand. For example they were the first company that actually put some graphic on their kites in the form of flames, suddenly some sort of coolness was added to kites.
The first kite that Slingshot designed was the “Stealth” kite, a full size kite that literally sucked which they also were honest about. Stealth was a megaflop, but Slingshot learned a ton on this lesson and from that time sort of become obsessed with the quality of their products. They started doing massive changes to their kites and the R&D team were constantly testing prototypes. If something wasn’t top notch then they had to fix it!
The company grew from zero to one of the global kite companies and Slingshot has definitely helped the sport to develop to what it is today! With the popular C-kite “Fuel” Slingshot targeted a new small group of extreme hardcore freestylers. The Fuel is a kite that makes it possible for riders such as Ruben Lenten to go crazy with insane kiteloops, he simply needs this super high performance kite that it is.
After Fuel came RPM, a kite that once more made Slingshot the emperer on the market!
Slingshot has always had a drive for making the kiteboarding sport better, safer and still more extreme! The technology behind many sports such as golf, tennis, bicycling etc. have been developed so that perfomers have been able to achive better results. This was not really the case for kiteboarding gear. The wakeboards that were released on the market around year 2000 were the same old crap that were designed 15 years earlier, just in a new costume. Slingshot was the first company that started to design boards with flexibility which added pop and made landings softer. The same drive to improve their products also mirror the kites. Slingshot has released some great products year 2012, but don’t think they have reached some kind of plateu. Kitesurfing is a sport with endless of opportunities and it will continue to grow. Slingshot will keep pushing the limits and bring safety to the equipment!
Stay tuned for the 2013 products that soon will come!
