Construction on the Tower S-Class Start Series is a notable change for Tower. Each board in the S-Class series has a Tower logo with a subscript “S” trailing the “r” in Tower. The “S” signifies it is part of the S-Class Starter Series, which is made with fusion construction. While it’s not the same double layer, hand glued construction Tower Paddle Boards is famous for over the founding decade of our existence, we believe it’s time for Tower to introduce an even more economical board into the market as a “Starter board”. While it’s more economical, it’s not a low quality board. It's NOT like the single layer iSUPs flooding the market. This is a quality starter iSUP, just sold direct to consumer so you save huge.

Founded in 2010, for over a decade Tower produced only inflatable paddle boards using double layer, hand glued construction, which is the gold standard and most expensive construction in the inflatable stand up paddle board industry. The truth is our cost efficient direct to consumer only distribution strategy allowed us to do this and still have some of the best prices in the industry for close to a decade. We specialize in affordable luxury.

Over time, however, all sorts of fly-by-night SUP brands popped up trying to mimic Tower’s high profile success in the inflatable paddle board market. But they did this by selling far lower quality paddle boards and trying to spin them off as equivalent quality, often employing excessive amounts of advertising, affiliate marketing, or fake reviews on Amazon. It confused consumers in the market to the point that today, something like 90% of consumers are duped into purchasing a single layer inflatable paddle board, the lowest quality and lowest cost construction on the market. Even most of the better known and respected brands in the industry sell fusion boards, like our new S-Class Starter Series “Economy line”, as the most premium construction they offer. They’re decent, but they are not on par with double layer, hand glued construction.

Our Tower S-Class series, produced in fusion construction is our first foray into a more economical production process. We do this to give first time buyers and more economically focused buyers a better option than buying a disposable single layer board.

When we started Tower in 2010 with our (somewhat pioneering at the time) direct to consumer strategy, we were selling paddle boards at $499 while the competition sold them for $1200 to $1600. Pretty much all the paddle board brands sold into the retail distribution channel at the time where boards were sold face to face, so low quality boards weren’t an option. Everything was decent quality or better. With the competition touting “you get what you pay for”, it took 2 years of slow growth for consumers to come to understand that our Tower inflatable SUPs were not only the same or better quality, but you could reach us on the phone while you couldn’t with the other brands. Our service was better. Our prices were half. And our quality was as good or better. With time, we became the biggest brand name is SUP and still hold that title today in quality inflatable paddle boards. Soon, we became one of the fastest growing companies in the nation. Then we were one of the first paddle boards to sell on Amazon - Jeff Bezo's even name dropped us in one of his annual letters to stockholders. Our success was noted, and there have been dozens and dozens of imitation attempts.

As we launch the S-Class Fusion construction boards in 2022, the market has changed dramatically. The market today is dominated by two factions. Today, the market is infested with the lowest quality boards possible from an unending number of here today, gone tomorrow brands. And good luck with customer service! I've seen FaceBook groups dedicated to customer service complaints on one or another SUP brand that have hundreds of members.

Faction #1: On the low end is disposable-quality, single layer inflatable paddle boards sold by the hundreds of thousands a month by a dizzying array of fly-by-night brands and Chinese non-brands, mostly on Amazon, driving the quality of iSUPs and the quality of customer service lower and lower as they fight with each other for pole position on Amazon and give Amazon half the revenue when revenue share and advertising fees are factored in.

Faction #2: The other faction is the heavy advertising brands that typically sell fusion construction boards (and many also sell single layer boards), and try to pass them both off as the highest quality construction and price them even above Tower’s double layer, hand glued construction boards. Many of them are finding success in growing revenue because spending millions upon millions on advertising is pretty effective at hoodwinking consumers. Nonetheless at the end of the day, the advertising platforms are efficient monopolies so their cut of what consumer’s pay grows and grows by the year to near half the price. Most of these brands spend more today on advertising and commissions to the channel to sell a single board then they do on producing that board. So really, the biggest ticket item you are paying for today in the SUP world is to be advertised to. Not the product. It's shocking! As such, the paddle board industry has ironically come full circle back to retail with 50% margins being absorbed by the channel, Amazon, monopolistic ad platforms, or all three. Consumers once again are getting screwed.

Thus in today’s market, Tower’s challenge is not just to prove that our prices are so low on the highest quality boards because of our direct to consumer only strategy, but also to illuminate the reality that most boards being hawked as quality today are anything but quality, even from brands that claim to be the “best selling sup brand worldwide” or the “#1 SUP brand” or “Premium boards at non-premium prices” or whatever nonsense claims they can conjure up. Our challenge is to illuminate the fact that ad heavy brands are charging you more for lesser boards than Tower sells because they have to spend millions in advertising. We’re back to retail. Tower is one of the few paddle board brands out there that sells direct to consumer ONLY, and critically doesn’t sell wholesale, or thru excessively heavy ad spending (we've spent less than 3% of revenues on ads over the past decade, where many brands spend more than 30%!), or by giving retail margins to Amazon and driving quality to the basement in order to make all these schemes work.

The introduction of the Tower S-Class Starter Series is Tower once again showing SUP consumers that the best value is (and always has been) buying from Tower, with our direct to consumer ONLY business model.

And if you are interested in something more premium than this starter board, our Premium and Elite Series are also the best value you can find on the most premium construction boards out there:

Tower | Premium Series - 2 Year Warranty
X-Class | Elite Series - 3 Year Warranty