A Red Ride Out: Reflections

Robyn Dawson, Marketing Communications Manager at Red, gives an insight into how the recent Red Ride Out came about and how it’s been a real passion project and dream for the team for many, many years.

When I first joined Red Paddle Co back in 2017, overall, the outward image projected of the SUP community was very different to how it is today.

We were regularly contacted by adventurers showing off their epic, gnarly SUP expeditions - from paddling down the Yukon River to heading off on an ultra-SUP adventure or sailing with their inflatable SUPs exploring the tropical waters of Trinidad and Tobago. Of course, they were all very inspiring and looked amazing, but seeing these types of adventures again and again in some ways felt unrelatable and unachievable.

The industry was predominantly made up of experienced male paddlers from a hard-core surf or windsurf background including some very capable water sports people. And while they were undoubtedly skilled and had impressive accomplishments, these kinds of adventures just didn’t feel accessible to the everyday paddler like me and most of the newer recruits in the Red team. For us as a team, this was not the type of paddle boarding we were doing on a regular basis.

Of course, we would have all loved to quit our jobs and hit the road in a campervan across Australia or circumnavigate Rapanui Island like many of the stories we were reading online and in SUP magazines, yet we felt there was a need to actively support and seek out the everyday adventurer.

It was increasingly becoming obvious that many of our customers were female, almost 50% of our boards were being bought by women but we suspected it was even more that were ultimately using them. However, the representation in our marketing campaigns and the wider industry was not representing this reality. And with this, potentially not projecting an image of SUP and adventure that other women and our wider community could connect with.

Fast forward almost 5 years, we are now a team of 9 people in our marketing department at Red, with 6 of us being women. Overall, the marketing landscape has changed. It’s not been an overnight shift but slowly and surely, we have chipped away, and the representation of SUP and the general outdoor industry positively mirrors what is happening in the real world. While the epic expedition emails still trickle through to my inbox, the outlook on “adventure” and the everyday paddle boarder looks quite different.

Over the years, I’ve always been passionate about shining the spotlight on the amazing women I was meeting time and time again, who were gradually carving out their own course in the outdoor industry. Almost daily we were having conversations with incredible women who were doing awesome things in their jobs and spare time. It was really refreshing and very inspiring. I wanted to give them a platform and create an event exclusively for women to confidently share their stories to hopefully inspire others. We also wanted an excuse to meet all these incredible women and go paddling with them!

‘Women in Watersports' was the first working title many years ago, yet as time has passed, the early discussions we had as a team about a lack of representation of real female paddlers had begun to shift. So much so, that when we came to choose our theme for the most recent Red Ride Out weekend, we took a step back and looked at how far we have come and even questioned if it we should run a female-only event at all.