We are Anton, Christopher, and Mario, three enthusiastic windsurfers (sometimes also wingfoilers) who together founded the Wind Lounge have launched.
This probably makes us the youngest surf shop around, and that's exactly what we embody. We want to bring a breath of fresh air to our beloved surfing scene and give our customers what we ourselves want on the water and on land.
Before we tell you how the Wind Lounge came, we would like to briefly introduce ourselves. Because even though we all come from windsurfing, our stories couldn't be more different.
Anton is 25 years young, comes from Hamburg, and taught himself how to windsurf. After his first experiences gliding in Denmark, he quickly moved on to the rough North Sea with his waveboard. In addition to his steep career in the waves, Anton completed training as a media designer and worked for many years as a graphic designer, cameraman, and editor.
We owe not only our entire backend to these skills, but also our beautiful website with all its features!
Christopher is the oldest of the three founding members and is already 28 years old.
He learned windsurfing on the Baltic Sea together with Mario, whom we will come to in a moment. Christopher prefers to ride a freerace board and has not yet had much to do with waves. Which is probably better for his health.
In the Wind Lounge Christopher is responsible for finances, logistics, and customer service. With his calm manner, he knows how to handle any situation, so pretty much everything that comes up ends up on his desk!
It all started with the idea of dropping out of college to focus on his YouTube channel. The foundation he laid not only brought together thousands of windsurfers, but also the founders of Wind Lounge.
In terms of age, Mario is in the middle of the pack at 27, although mentally he fluctuates between 14 and 75. He has tried his hand at all disciplines on the water. However, since he has failed miserably at freestyle and wave surfing so far, he is content with Fins, Slalom and race foiling!
Mario takes care of marketing, consulting, and new ideas that the Wind Lounge drive forward.
The idea of Wind Lounge came about through a series of coincidences. Originally, we wanted to start our own fashion label. Jibe Wear get it up and running. Fashion for windsurfers—no one had done that since Chiemsee, and we were up for it. In contact with all the customers who bought a sweater or shirt from us, we realized that we could just as easily make mast extensions and Baseplates could sell. The target audience would be the same as for Jibe Wear and through Mario's YouTube channel we could communicate something like that really well too.
But just a few Baseplates Selling ... it's not that easy. You need contacts with manufacturers, you have to have goods in stock, and you have to deal with a whole different level of logistics than with "just a few T-shirts."
But then something happened that we hadn't anticipated. Mario lost his sponsors Avanti-Sails and Future Fly, as they had also lost their importers for the German market due to the coronavirus pandemic. At the same time, Joki, a passionate windsurfer from the Frankfurt area, contacted us. He wanted to financially support Mario with his YouTube projects, so Mario naturally told him about his sponsorship problems.
Then Joki expressed the idea that ultimately led to the founding of the Wind Lounge launched: "Why do you make Avanti sails and Future Fly Not just in Germany itself?.
These were dimensions we hadn't thought about before. How do you import sails from China? Or boards from Vietnam? Are we going to start a surf shop now? Do we need accessories now too? How much money do we need to start up, and where will it come from?
Answering all these questions here would go beyond the scope of this article. But together, with Joki's help, we not only took the first steps, but also launched the Wind Lounge into being.
A few months after the idea came up, Anton finished building the first website, Christopher figured out how to import sails and boards, and Mario was bursting with ideas for marketing and took care of finding new suppliers. It all took on such proportions that after the first year of founding the company, we were completely exhausted, but we had also accomplished a lot. We were now actually selling fewer and fewer T-shirts and more and more windsurfing equipment.
The Wind Lounge lived, we were overwhelmed by the feedback from our customers and, little by little, we fulfilled our dream of turning our hobby into a profession. You'll find out everything that followed another time!
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