As Jase Bennett pulled into his friend’s driveway, a skateboard crushed beneath his wheel. The skateboard owner, a young boy, stood crying in disbelief. “I felt like the worst person alive. I was too cheap to buy him a new board. So I built him a new one,” said Bennett. From this accident, Bennett built a new career and an international business. Bennett is the founder and co-owner of Jaseboards. “I started researching videos looking it up and started making some demos out of my garage trying to replace his board for him, and all my friends would come into the garage and be like, ‘Dude.’ ‘Sick.’ ‘Look at these boards. I want one, I want one, I want one.’ And they all started wanting boards.” As demand for boards increased, Bennett used his business license to get a wholesale contract with a skate warehouse and began building and improving his board designs. Bennett and his wife moved to Laie in 2003 and opened a small edited video store. In addition to this store, Bennett ran a real estate company for over 10 years. “When the real estate did well enough, we shut down the video store,” said Bennett. He continues to work as a real estate broker while running Jaseboards. “In the beginning, every time I’d close a deal I would take 10 percent or more and put it on the side to put into the skate company. Now the company provides for itself,” said Bennett. During 2008 and 2009, Bennett worked out of his garage in Laie, making what he wanted to be the best quality boards. Eventually, Bennett was introduced to Kevin Castle, who connected him to some of the biggest skate manufacturers. Bennett soon had boxes of decks he started testing and sending back to the manufacturer until he had what he wanted. Jaseboards runs its headquarters in Kahuku at the sugar mill and has a distribution center in Arizona. The long boards have boomed in demand around the BYU-Hawaii campus, the nation and around the world. “Sales quadrupled in the past year,” said Bennett, “I didn’t expect it but that was my goal.” Jaseboards is now selling long boards through Costco after a year and a half’s worth of hard work. The company will be promoting its brand in Costco stores around Hawaii and will debut in Utah in December. Bennett hopes to be one of the top five long boarding companies in the nation and spoke of Jaseboards selling boards to 44 different countries such as France, Australia, Panama, Germany, and Dubai. He said customers have expressed their appreciation for the boards across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Jaseboards has five different designs of boards, such as The Drop, The Kick, The Grom, The Surge, and The Nimbi. A new design for a board is in the works as well called The Castle, which is named after the other co-owner of the company. “It gives it a sturdy and unbreakable name,” said Bennett.The boards are made with a maple interior and a bamboo exterior. Andrew Monahan, who is a sponsored skater for Jaseboards and a student at BYUH, said, “Their design is genius especially for Hawaii because we run into a lot of issues here with humidity and a lot of other boards will warp out, and with the kind of riding that I like to do, it is easy to break your boards. But Jase designed the boards so they won’t warp and they won’t break because there are layers of maple on the inside and on the outside there’s bamboo. This prevents warping to the maple, which is like the spine of the board and the bamboo makes stability and prevents weathering. They also picked the highest quality of bearings they could. They’re made in Switzerland. They’re high-performance ceramic bearings, so no rust. If you just maintain them a little bit, they will last forever and they’re so smooth.” Monahan met current Jaseboards manager Daniel Ryan at BYUH three years ago before his mission. “He really didn’t know much about long boarding. He knew I could do tricks and stuff, but that was the end of it,” Monahan said. After returning from his mission at the beginning of Fall Semester, Monahan received a call from Ryan saying he was the new manager of Jaseboards and told him they were looking for skaters to sponsor. He remembered he had long boarded before and asked he they could go riding the next day. “So we went riding, and the same day I signed a form to be sponsored and here I am today loving it,” said Monahan.“It’s funny because whenever I got sponsored, my life didn’t really change a whole lot. I just started getting paid for what I love. Whenever Jase says, ‘Lets go filming,’ I throw down whatever I’m doing and we go filming. We take photos for publicity for the website video that will be coming out in the future, and I just wear Jaseboard stuff as much as I can.” As part of Jaseboard’s advertising strategy, there are a series of videos demonstrating the quality of its boards. In one video, they continually run over a board with a minivan. “I want to show people, including parents, they are buying something that isn’t going to break. I have to film three more YouTube videos in the next two weeks,” said Bennett. “I have no reservation saying get a Jaseboard. You won’t regret it, and I have said that to a lot of friends and family and they have got them and they love it,” said Monahan. Jaseboard’s success comes from Bennett’s business skills and dedication. “Jase is the right guy for this company,” said Monahan. “He personally backs it with a heart full of passion and a lot of love for what he does. And I think another reason that I love working with him so much is it’s contagious the love that he has for long boarding and for his company....Also, I admire Jase. He still holds to this day a personal record of never having to clock in for a job in his life.”
Writer: Alec Barney~Multimedia Journalist
