About Us
Ride Engine started with a Santa Cruz waterman, his creative ingenuity and a deep reverence for the ocean as Mother Nature’s greatest playground. Coleman Buckley graduated from Stanford In 2010 with a degree in biology before returning to Santa Cruz to reconnect with his roots and evaluate his future … and to surf..
As the months blew by, Buckley, an avid tinkerer, started experimenting with designing kitesurfing harnesses. No harness on the market met the expectations or demands he and his friends had, so he set to work creating one himself. In a makeshift lab in his garage, Buckley experimented with several Frankenstein designs, dissecting various harnesses, stitching together their components and bringing them to life in the sunny California breaks.
With collaboration from friends and pro riders, it wasn’t long before Buckley had created something genuinely revolutionary: the Armor harness. The buzz about the hard-shell, fully customizable form-fitting harness spread quickly, and Buckley unexpectedly found himself a busy business owner and designer, struggling to meet the demand for his sought-after products.
In the fall of 2014 Buckley joined forces with 7 Nation, a board sports company based in the Pacific Northwest. With significantly more resources and collaborators from multiple industries at its disposal, Ride Engine quickly had the ability to branch out and develop new product lines crossing over to other action sports. Ride Engine launched three models of highly-refined Armor harnesses to international markets in the summer of 2015 and followed with a full line of wetsuits the same season.
With a mantra of innovation through intimate rider-designer collaboration, Ride Engine continued to branch out, and quickly connected with top riders and innovators in the wake industry to develop a line of high-end wakeboarding accessories that also entered the market in the summer of 2015.
Collaboration with the best has always been at the core of Ride Engine, and as the company moves forward that concept will remain integral to how it operates. Ride Engine works with and relies on the most elite athletes in their sports to design top-quality products that help connect people with the activities that make them happy. And with those fundamentals at heart, the future is wide open.