Brand Story Text

The VADATEK® story begins on a River in South Georgia around the turn of the century.  A sixteen year old kid with a 1976 Tri Hull Runabout called Little Joe and a healthy obsession with wakeboarding. The obsession turned to a lifestyle, the teen and his bro’s spent every waking hour not in school towing each other up and down that river with that boat. They even went as far as to steal the fireman’s pole from his brother’s tree house and bolt it onto the boat to get the tow rope higher. Over the next few years, they built all sorts of sliders, kickers, and features. Wakeboarding was life. Any day on the water was a good day. They became intimately familiar with Dawn dish soap and getting in and out of old school wakeboard bindings. 

The teen moved to Florida. One day while living on Captiva Island, FL and driving across the causeway from Ft. Myers to Sanibel Island, he saw a guy wakeboarding with a big parachute and instantly knew he had to get in on that action! This was kiteboarding and it was in it’s infancy, and again he had a new obsession. Kiteboarding was life. Dawn dish soap and old school rubber wakeboard bindings were still the standard equipment. Although, this time getting in and out was even more difficult with the kite pulling him all over the place.

Then, as is too often the case in life, it was time to grow up – and he went off the college and followed job after job farther and farther away from the water. One day 15 years later he woke up and decided enough was enough. He was still obsessed with wakeboarding and kiteboarding and wanted to get back to water. So, he picked up his family and moved to the Outer Banks, NC.

When the quest for new shred gear began again it was pretty shocking that boots and bindings hadn’t really changed that much in 15 years. The new boots were still super difficult to get into while kiteboarding and all the lacing and unlacing at cable parks was ridiculous. Why had no one solved this problem?

There had to be a better way. He spent a year thinking about how to make a step in binding. The original concepts were pretty complicated and had lots of clips, springs, cables, and moving parts. As he continued to experiment, he realized in order for anything to hold up in water and still work in the mud and sand, he had to eliminate all those moving parts. 

The basic design that he came up with 2 years ago worked amazingly well and he started riding with his home-made set-up all the time. Immediately, people started to notice and ask if he would make them a pair. The only way to safely make these boots and bindings for others was to commercialize the whole process. So, patents were filed, designers and engineers joined the team, and VADATEK® was born. 

We literally started from scratch, designed and built everything. Since we weren’t confined to any existing manufacturing process or framework, we were able to build, ride, and revise over and over again until we perfected all the critical elements. We are busy adding the finishing touches and are looking forward to the unveiling of the VADATEK SYNTAX™ coming spring 2019.