About the Founder: Neal Sumner
Hi. Thanks for checking out Little House Surf! Surfing has been
my obsession since my 8th birthday. My first board was a hollow
Hansen 5’1” Stratoglass. I’ve lived, eaten and breathed surfing
since then. It’s an integral part of my DNA and I’m stoked when
I see others enjoy it as well. Everyone I surf with says I make every
session more fun.
When I was around 20 years old, I started a small surf shop in
Burlington, NC. The bank thought I was nuts because we were 4 hours
from the beach. This was 1980 just before the sport’s popularity
started to take off. And so did my shop. It was the craziest thing. Big
department stores came in and said “I don’t know if you know this or
not, but the kids won’t shop anywhere else within a hundred-mile
radius of your store.” We expanded to 5 stores and lived large in
that decade.
That was when I started trusting my inclinations and thoughts, like when I started wearing Uggs with my shorts in the mid to late 70s and still sport them every day. I ordered my first pair from Australia from an ad in SURFER magazine and then carried them in my shop at a $150 a pop, even back then
After hearing so many times during a swell or lack of, ‘I wish I’d brought my other board’ on almost a daily basis. I set out on my quest to solve that problem every surfer has. I first invested a ton of time and research on the hull’s design to make it better than anything else. If it’s not, then why make it? It had to make surfing easier for so-called kooks and allow seasoned surfers to perform even better. I cracked it with an overall convex hull (“V hull”) with twin concave channels hidden inside (“double barrel”).
I always admired Cheyne Horan’s surfing but his performance was limited with his unique V-shaped boat hull design. It limited his speed and drive which led him to be runner up to Mark Richards four years in a row. I realized that if I put two concaves hidden in that same hull, it would automatically provide the drive and speed he was lacking. If he’d had this design, he could have taken a couple of those championships. It is truly magic in the water.
In 2016, I used my industry connections to get my design in the hands of the very best, Kelly Slater himself. I’d given Shaun Tomson a 4’9” version of the board for his son and asked if I could give that one to Kelly to ride. He advised me to give the 11-time world champion a brand-new board. Bill Johnson helped me glass it overnight. Mark Price and some of the team riders gave it high marks. It then went to Kelly where it sat unridden for two years.
I called Travis Lee to express my appreciation and asked for the board to be sent back since it looked like Kelly wasn’t interested in it. Much to my surprise, he told me Kelly rode it two days prior at the Ranch and was ripping even beyond his norm and I wouldn’t be getting that board back for a long time.
In 2019 Firewire launched a similar shape, the No Brainer. In 2024, Slater Designs launched the identical hull in the S-Boss, Boss Up Midsize and are now adding it to their high performance shortboard, the FRK. Dan Mann has said he can't get enought of this hull design and it's working incredibly. I’ll admit I was naïve to share something revolutionary without protecting my interests and take it as both a compliment and validation for what I’ve created. But I couldn't be happier that my design is now considered one of the best hulls in the world.
With the hull design being straightaway one of if not the best, the remaining task ahead was engineering an all-in-one modular version of the four main board categories: performance shortboard, midsize, funboard and a longboard. I tried vastly different approaches and nailed it in 2024. Yes! Along the way I also designed a fun new fin design that seems to lift and drive like nothing else ever designed and holds into the face like crampons on ice. Think Pipe. There's been absolutley nothing like it in 80 years of fin design. Yet another evolution for surfing from Little House Surf.
Little House Surf is my dream and now its coming true.
“; /~</ NEAL
