Creative, active and with deeply engrained principles, I've dedicated my life to doing what I believe in. Flama is the natural result after my different passions acumulated over a lifetime –surfing and the waves, the mountains and nature, woodwork and industrial design, music, environmentalism– merged into one..

I was born by the Mediterranean Sea in Barcelona, Spain, in 1974, and I've been involved in surfing for more than 20 years. In 2002 I quit my job as a graphic designer and moved to a lost valley in the Spanish Pyrenees with my family, where we opened a backpacker hostel. Living in a low budget style brought me to discover a new passion: woodwork. There I rehabilitated a house, built a kitchen, bunk beds or whatever was needed, and with the gained experience I got to build start to finish a two storey wooden house.

In 2009 I built my first wooden surfboard with agave wood. I really enjoyed the project, but having to fiberglass the board at the end seemed to ruin the envirnomental factor. I had read about the magnificence of paulownia wood, but it wasn’t until I met Tom Wegener during his European tour that I could witness its real possibilities. Right then I decided to fully devote mymself to building a 100% organic surfboard.

Flama was finally presented to the surfing world in the Salinas Longboard Festival 2011 in Spain, after two years of trial and error. An innovative technology –now called FlamaClassic– that allowed us to eliminate almost 100% of contaminating chemicals that have been used in the surfboard industry since 1950. By using this simple technique we can build hollow wooden blanks to be shaped the same way than a foam blank. And when the shape is finished, the board only needs to be oiled or varnished. That simple.

This system allows us to get back to the roots of surfing, when surfboards were made out of wood and people lived in perfect harmony with nature. The Flama concept stands for a “natural surfing evolution”, in which practicality, simplicity and the minimum use of resources, become the pillars that mark this enterprise.

I always found that experimentation is the most enjoyable part of the business, and besides building blanks and shaping wooden boards for the past five years, I’ve also managed to keep my brain well entertained. I’ve been testing new materials and I’ve built surfboards using different techniques, from solid wood tow boards to chambered guns and classic surfboard replicas.

In 2014 wooden surfboard guru Grant Newby invited me to the Wooden Surfboard Day in Australia, where I got to meet some shaper legends such as Bob McTavish, Paul Joske and many other openminded surfboard builders. The experience was the final push I had been wainting for, a crucial turning point in terms of selfconfidence. Beeing born and raised in the Mediterranean, a place without any surfing background and away from any shaper’s influence, I was affraid the whole Flama story was only a freakish brainstorming. But things just went the opposite way and all I got there was encouragement and congratulations from everyone. The words pronounced by Bob McTavish will remain engraved in my soul forever: “I wish I had known you back in the old days”. At that precise moment I knew Flama was a dream come true.

It was Grant Newby himself who pushed me to trying his technique of paulownia skins over Expanded Polystyrene (EPS) foam core. Although not as clean and organic as the FlamaClassic system, this technique allows to make superlight high performance boards, which was actually one of the down sides of my hollow technology. A few months and some personal improvements later FlamaEvolve was born, introducing a new range of high performance boards to our catalogue, and opening a new path towards the same final goal that started it all: building 100% organic surfboards.

Sergi Galanó
Flama Manager