Women's Outside Magazine, Fall 1998
"You Incorporated"

Yearning to ditch the day job and transform your play into your work?
These women already took the plunge. Shannon Payne-McIntyre If
obsession is a prerequisite for entrepreneurial success, San Diego
surfboard shaper Shannon Payne-McIntyre has that part all sewn up.
Scouting undiscovered wave breaks off the coast of Sumatra three
years ago, she got stranded, bobbing in and out on the tide for three
interminable days after her boat's engine died. Finally back onshore,
she immediately rented another putt-putt and headed out again.
"we found a perfect right-hand barrel," she says, segueing into breathless tales of razor-sharp reefs and poisonous sea snakes encountered during pilgrimages that have taken her from South Pacific atolls to Bali.

At 24, Payne-McIntyre is arguably the first woman shaper in the custom surfboard biz, a venture she dived into in 1996 with customary alacrity after her husband, Shayne-a talented shaper himself-suggested she shape and decorate a board for her college art final. Local surfers who came to the student exhibition gravitated to her shortboard, tricked out in purple flames and yellow glitter, and a word-of-mouth business had begun. In its first year, Shannon Surfboards has sold about a hundred boards, mostly to young women just starting out. Her favorite part of the two-day shaping process is painting bright acrylic images-mermaids, devil girls, floral patterns, ocean scenes-onto a board before sending it off to get fiberglassed.

While sales keep rising, Payne-McIntyre admits that launching a company with only a few hundred dollars in saving and no business plan has made cash flow tricky. But rather than follow the path of many shapers, who design models for computerized mass production, she recently hatched an unconventional plan that she hopes will buoy her nascent enterprise and subsidize her taste for exotic surfing at the same time. In July, she started as a part-time flight attendant for American Airlines, a carrier carefully selected for its Southern Hemisphere ports of call, in particular Trinidad and Tobago.
"The money isn't quite there yet, " she says. "But I feel very rewarded.
If I can Keep shaping-and surfing and painting and traveling-all my life, I'll be happy."

By Susan Enfield