If you’re a fan of Moana Waterman’s carbon-fiber freediving fins, you needn’t worry that future iterations of those fins will no longer be available, because Headhunter Spearfishing just completed the purchase of Moana literally right before the 2018 Blue Wild Ocean Adventure Expo.
Which, if you think about it, it’s kind of fitting, seeing as Blue Wild is where Moana pretty much got its start back in 2013.
DeeperBlue.com got a chance to briefly chat about the purchase with Headhunter President Brad Thornbrough at this year’s Blue Wild Expo.
Thornbrough said:
“Moana is a fin blade that several years ago, everyone loved them, they had a huge following, selling thousands of pairs a year, and they kinda disappeared.”
What wound up happening is that Moana’s founders had been making the fins part-time and didn’t have the time to pursue it as a full-time business, something Thornbrough could sympathize with, since he ran Headhunter for over a decade as a side job before going full-time.
“They’ve spent a lot of time, a lot of energy making a really fantastic product, they just didn’t have the additional time to make a business out of things. People still want the fin, its got kind of like a cult-like following, but they just didn’t have the time to keep up with it, so [J.D., Moana’s CEO] reached out to me and we just spent that last three or four months just kinda going over the thing and figuring it out.”
Thornbrough noted that the Moana fin is a relatively easy product to make, it’s just very hard to make well. And with his company’s background in composites, he said that gave Headhunter a good understanding of manufacturing composite-based products.
“And they [Moana] had figured that out, they had the recipe, and we were growing pretty quickly as a brand and it seemed like a good fit, so we both kinda reached out to each other at the same time. It was a good fit for everyone involved.”
For a trip down memory lane, check out the video below that Moana made for the 2014 Blue Wild Expo.
