Jason Thelen founded Little Bay Boards in Petoskey in 2017. Today, the company handcrafts paddleboards using natural materials sourced from Michigan and around the world.
Enjoying the afternoon at Good Harbor Beach in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore with his wife and two daughters, Jason Thelen borrowed his brother-in-law’s standup paddle board. After paddling out two miles on placid Lake Michigan waters, he sat down to quench a Corona.
“I really liked the simplicity of being by myself,” Thelen says of his summer 2011 memory. “I sat there for a half hour; it was super peaceful being on the water without hearing anything.”
A sixth-generation Petoskey native who’s related to Chief Ignatius Petoskey of the Odawa tribe, as well as a water enthusiast, Thelen says his brainwaves shifted into high gear.
“I knew I wanted to have a standup board myself, but the ones on the market were expensive, made out of toxic materials, and there were no used boards,” Thelen recalls.
A carpenter who’s worked with wood since age 8, he spent a year checking out a variety of boards. Following extensive conversations with Paul Jensen, inventor of the hollow-wood surfboard, he adapted concepts Jensen uses, and modified shapes and sizes for standup paddling.
After three months in his father’s garage woodshop, Thelen unveiled a standup board as a present for his 9-year-old daughter, Shawni, which coincided with the Fourth of July in 2012. Although he was satisfied with Shawni’s reaction, Thelen didn’t realize the ornate woodwork would pique public intrigue.
“If we were stopped at a light, people would roll down the window, and ask, ‘Hey, where’d you get that board?’ ” he says. “At Good Harbor Bay beach, over a dozen people would always come up, ‘Where’d you get that? Where can I buy one?’
“I was coming out of the grocery store and there were a handful of people at my truck. I thought, Uh-oh, someone must’ve hit me. But they wanted to ask about the board.”
Fast-forward to 2017, when Thelen founded Little Bay Boards. He rented a 2,500-square-foot room in a cabinet shop on the banks of the Bear River in Petoskey, and was making five boards a month.
Word spread and orders picked up. Customers could choose from a custom board or a standard model beginning at $1,900. The elaborate construction and shape exude a rare artistic flair.
“We have the ability to be as artistic as we want and can customize to the clients’ wants and needs, limited only by their imagination,” says Thelen, who now works in a 10,000-square-foot space with a handful of employees. “We use red and white cedar wood, Colorado aspen, and walnut, cherry, and mahogany. We use the best wood possible. We’re bringing sustainable wooden boards to a foam-dominated industry.
“We have a lot of dialogue with our customers,” adds Thelen, who introduced surfboards last year. “We’ll go back-and-forth, sometimes for a couple months. We want to understand how they want to use it. They’ll send us pictures so we can be specific in the layout.”
