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If you were at the recent UK Championships then you might have seen them whizzing up the hill, or around the streets, or even just on YouTube. They’re the latest tech in the mountainboard world and with more and more people now getting eboards - are they the future of our sport?

APEX Boards are a young, up-and-coming electric skateboard movement who from their very beginnings have tried to be an innovative manufacturer of high performance and lightweight Electric Mountainboard parts. The company was started in 2020, (during the pandemic!) and consists of Ben Brown, Queron Williams (Q) and Lee Wright. Currently they’re not full time and sacrifice a considerable amount of their collective spare time trying to fulfil a dream of being able to do this full time in the future. You can find them over at www.apexboards.co.uk

Over the last few years they’ve had the pleasure of working with lots of brands through Lee’s YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/c/LeeWright) and realised they needed more options. Feeling things were a little stale they wanted to disrupt and push the market, so Q and Ben joined, both bringing a lot of ideas to the table; Ben was already small-time producing parts for the electric street board DIY market anyways and Q was drawing and showcasing a lot of stuff. After they got together they realised a lot of the impetus was wanting to make stuff to ride for themselves, stuff that didn’t exist, so they needed to make it.

Starting up the company and making high performing parts and boards has been a huge challenge, with the whole process being very expensive. First there’s the huge time-sink getting a design to a point that’s able to be prototyped. After that it’s a large cash investment to get a short run prototype batch made and then take what’s been learnt and commission a larger revised prototype batch to be made. These then get distributed to a core network of trusted testers & riders, such as our very own ATBoarders team rider and APEX chief tester - Beiran Martlew, to be ridden and pushed to its limits over a long period of time. If you’re lucky (and B’s not broken it!) you might not need to revise anything, and it can go to manufacturing but it’s quite likely you will have to fix and test anything you found from the wider testing pool. Then its onto manufacturing and they have the rule that they do not sell anything they don’t already have in hand at APEX HQ. Then after financing the manufacturing costs entirely and only once the parts have arrived and been inspected, do they announce and list them for sale. They’ve always agreed on growing organically so this process (that is followed for all of their parts not just full builds) is capital, resource and time intensive. This keeps the growth slow and manageable but means they need to keep moving.

While, Lee didn’t personally know mountainboarding existed before he found electric skateboarding, and Ben and Q had only had a brief dalliance with it many years ago - but it really wasn’t until they started riding electric mountainboards, 12 months before they started APEX, that they learnt about mountainboarding. APEX feel like electric boarding has a large part to play in the future of mountainboarding. With fresh new ideas being pushed in the electric scene comes an obvious technology transfer to the "gravity" scene. A great example of this is the APEX Air Trucks, Andy Brind has been riding them on his mountainboard since they were released. There hasn’t traditionally been a lot of choice in trucks for mountainboards but since the release of the Airs there has been a renewed effort from the other manufacturers in this area as well. Additionally APEX are seeing people who initially found electric mountainboards first are now beginning to transfer to riding their human powered counterparts. Some of these riders are phenomenal and are forcing some of the old guard to up their game to stay competitive. A great example of this is Mark Bishop and Jeff Bond (ATBoarders Team Riders) both are fantastic riders who originally found mountainboarding through a love of electric. If these two trends continue this can only be good for mountainboarding as a whole.

APEX don’t just carbon copy ideas from other manufacturers, they like to try new and innovative things to improve upon what already exists as well as develop completely new ideas. A great example of this is the newly released APEX Jump Drive – a steel helical gear drive that’s incredibly compact and features innovations in many areas. Are they the first company to produce a steel helical gear drive? No, but they are the first company to produce a steel helical gear drive with integrated thrust bearings, paired gears, fully external adjustment and a super-innovative push fit wheel adaptor that takes a standard fully inflated wheel (sounds impressive) – this means for the first time ever you can carry a fully inflated spare wheel that can be changed quickly to keep you riding. Sometimes they’ve founds reasons to not innovate, when needing a deck, why go to the trouble of making their own when they can work closely with arguably the best and most successful mountainboard manufacturer of recent times, Haero Boards. It’s a balancing act for sure.

Competition is coming from mainly two areas. Firstly, there are electric mountainboard manufacturers that have been around a lot longer than them and this makes them obvious competition for each other. That doesn’t stop the pure banter with the lads who they get along with well! The second area of competition comes from the Chinese manufacturers, especially recently they are seeing Chinese manufactured boards shift more and more towards electric mountainboards. Is this a bad thing? APEX certainly don’t believe that it is, a rising tide lifts all boats and they have an advantage of being able to offer community, support and help to the customers that are supplied.

APEX have been steadily growing since their inception and, as more and more parts are released, they should hopefully continue growing to the point that the three of them are full time and can quit their respective day jobs. In addition they’ve just got the keys to their first premises! A fairly sizeable unit that will be moved into in the near future and this will further enable growth into the next phase of APEX Boards. They’ve also just sponsored their second rider, Adam Barton. Adam is a phenomenal rider that’s going to help promote the company (and sport) in directions they’ve not been able to explore before which is incredibly exciting. Hopefully they’ll be adding to that roster of riders again soon with another sponsorship deal agreed with another guy that you might know!

APEX would like to give a big shout out and thanks to all their customers and supporters that have had given faith and support as they’ve grown, this has been incredibly valuable to them and it’s something they certainly don’t take for granted. Also, a big shout out to ATBoarders of course, at APEX they’re incredibly stoked about them starting again and happy to support! (Brings a tear to my eye)