Shaping surf on her own terms.

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By contributor Aemilia Madden.

In the middle of preparing her debut collection of surfboards in collaboration with Free People, artist-turned-surfboard shaper Rachel Lord was hit with a setback. She severed a nerve in her hand while cooking, leaving her stitched, bandaged, and unable to work or surf for months. But, it wasn’t long before she was back in business — crafting her signature bold, printed boards. Now, her exclusive styles are finally available to shop.

Behind The Collection

Lord was first approached by Free People via DM, and knowing the brand, was attracted to the creative flexibility of creating boards for a global audience. “Normally, I mostly do customs so I have a very good sense of where the board is going to be used and by whom,” she says. “This is an opportunity for me to make a line thinking about a more general use, and I really wanted to go all out in the art.” The self-taught shaper wanted to make sure the boards represented her artistic vision.

That meant playing with color theory while also approaching design through a fashion lens. In this case, it meant creating new techniques to get the desired effects. “I invented a foam stain technique using squirt bottles and clear resin. Usually the technique is used to create swirly abstracts, but I was able to refine the foam staining to create some graphics within that abstraction, throwing in things like cats, daisies, and the name of my company.”

Lord’s Surfing Origins

Lord may have come to surfing later in life, but after she “fell in hard,” the painter and sculptor wanted to find a way to bring together the apparently disparate aspects of who she was. “I’d been seeking a way to join my art career and my artistic practices with my surfing so that I could, instead of being in all these different boxes — here I’m Rachel the painter, or here I’m Rachel the surfer — I was looking for that umbrella, and the boards were obviously that. They’re sculptural objects, they’re painted objects, they're a physical tool. When I started making boards it was this beautiful chemical marriage.”

Shaping boards, much like surfing itself, has largely been an art dominated by men, but that has begun to change in recent years, with Lord helping to pave the way. “When I first started, I got a lot of ‘wait you made this, no way!’ — that kind of a response. I always chose to take it as a compliment, but that was definitely a choice.” She explains that while being a female shaper is marketable, she doesn’t want to do it just for visibility, but to be the best designer she can be.