Stiffness is the key to a good paddle boarding experience. This is precisely why inflatable paddle boards went from less than 1% of the SUP market to over 70% in about five years when Tower introduced its first 6” iSUP to the market in early 2012. Prior 4” thick models had been on the market for 5 years and never caught on. Tower’s introduction to the market increased rigidity by 325% and suddenly inflatable paddle boards were not only on par with hard boards, but better in most all respects. Today, the inflatable paddle boards make up over 90% of the market. From less than 1% just a decade ago.

Now Tower has introduced the X-Class Elite Series iSUPs that are 8" thick, which makes them 800% more rigid than the original 4" inflatable paddle boards.

Our X-Class Elite Series construction use the same foundational double layer, hand glued construction that has made Tower Paddle Boards a household brand name known for quality iSUPs over the past decade, but produces in in an 8" thick drop stitch material. Just like when we took the industry from a 4" thick iSUP to a 6" thick iSUP, producing an 8" thick all round iSUP at 10'4" long and 35" wide represents a major jump in inflatable paddle board rigidity. It's 240% more rigid than our 6" thick iSUP, which are already some of the most rigid iSUPs on the market. The 8" thick iSUP is 800% more rigid than the original 4" iSUPs on the market. It’s a jump in production costs to achieve, but well worth it in our mind as it serves two audiences. The first audience is performance riders that won't settle for anything less than the most rigid iSUP out there. The 2nd audience is larger riders that just want massive floatation for themselves or tandem riding. The Tower Xtreme iSUP paddle board has unrivaled rigidity.

Because a rider on an 8" thick iSUP sits slightly higher above the water, the center of balance is slightly higher. For example a 6' rider's center of balance might be 40" on a 6" thick iSUP, where it would be 42" on an 8" thick iSUP. To account for that, we slightly widened the proven outline and rocker profile of our 10’4” x 32”Adventurer 2 iSUP, from our Premium iSUP Series, and made it 3 inches wider. Stability on a paddle board is all about the width of the paddle board. From the exterior look, the profile outline is a subtle difference.

With the added volume of this 8" thick, double layer, handle glued construction, this inflatable paddle board can support up to 550 lbs. It comes in our popular white with blue stripes deck design with a faux teak boat decking look to the deck pad, which was first introduced to the market with the Chris Craft x Tower collaboration that was named the #1 SUP worldwide by the prestigious Robb Report.

While nearly the entire inflatable stand up paddle board market seems to be a race to the bottom in terms of quality and service, Tower Paddle Boards is raising the stakes on quality and service. Our 3 year warranty on our X-Class Elite Series iSUPs is one of the best warranties in the industry, and more importantly it's from a brand that been a trusted name in the industry for well over a decade so if you ever need to use your warranty you won't get the run around which is all too common in the industry. Many of our original inflatable SUPs, always made with our Premium Series double layer, hand glued construction are still running strong with over a decade of use on them. And we've quietly been making 8" thick iSUPs since 2014 with our unique 14' Xplorer model, the fastest iSUP in our lineup... due to it's rigidity.

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.

No brands are going where we’re going with our Tower X-Class Elite Edition, where we’re intentionally increasing our production costs with an 8" thick inflatable paddle board to serve stand up paddle enthusiasts that will accept nothing less than the best.

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 low prices were so threatening to the status quo and so disruptive that some of the established SUP brands and some SUP factories were essentially price fixing and attempting to block our production capabilities. Our service was better. Our prices were half. And our quality was as good or better. With time, we became the biggest brand name in 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 very public, and there have been dozens and dozens of imitation attempts since over the past decade.

As we launch the X-Class Elite Series 8" thick inflatable paddle 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. It's that bad.

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. Consumers have largely adapted to just accepting buying disposable everything to save a few bucks. This isn't great news for landfills.

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. This is why Google, Amazon, and FaceBook have become some of the first trillion dollar companies in mankind's history. Most of these heavy advertising SUP brands spend quite a bit more today on advertising and commissions to the channel to sell a single board then they do on producing that board. To us, that's sad. It's a sad reality that the biggest ticket item you are paying for today in the SUP world is to be advertised to. Not the product. 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, and completely left out of the biggest benefit of globalization, the fact that things cost way less to make.

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. The world is 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. We do sell on Amazon, but at prices 20% higher than our site and we don't advertise there or even focus there. We just offer our boards on Amazon as a convenience to customers that are willing to pay Amazon's extra toll.

The introduction of the Tower X-Class Elite 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 more importantly that this value can be at any level of quality – it can be on starter boards like our newly released Tower S-Class iSUPs, on our Premium Series iSUPs