Sailor, kayaker, kitesurfer, SUP racer — and the man who built one of the world's most respected hydrofoil brands from a garage in Aotearoa. Image by Georgia Schofield.
Born on the Water
Armie Armstrong did not simply grow up near the ocean — he grew up on it. For the first three years of his life, he lived aboard his father's sailboat, learning to walk somewhere in the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean. By the time the family eventually settled in New Zealand, the sea was already in his bones.
His heritage is one of craft and design as much as adventure. His grandfather was a boat builder and architect; his father, a prominent New Zealand architect, passed down an intuitive understanding of form, function, and the way materials behave under stress — principles that would, decades later, shape Armstrong Foils' engineering philosophy in profound ways.
Growing up in Aotearoa, Armstrong was immersed in a culture that treats the ocean as an extension of everyday life. Sailing was not a hobby — it was how the family spent their time. Vacations unfolded on the water. The rhythms of tides and wind were simply part of how the world worked.
From River Rapids to Open Ocean
Long before he became known in the foiling world, Armstrong was a competitive whitewater kayaker — training at the national level during his school years on New Zealand's wild interior rivers. It was his first experience of reading moving water, of trusting instinct and committing to a line at speed. Skills that would, much later, translate directly to downwind foil racing.
At university he pursued a science degree while working part-time as a whitewater raft guide — balancing academic study with the kind of hands-on physical engagement that would define his career. He transitioned into windsurfing during that period, drawn to the intersection of wind and water that would become a lifelong obsession.
The shift to kitesurfing came around 1999, when Armstrong witnessed Lou Wainman's legendary demonstration on Maui. The impact was immediate and irreversible. "Within six months," he later recalled, "we had all sold our windsurfing gear and were happily getting trained." He became a dedicated kiteboarder and, in doing so, encountered for the first time the kite foil — the technology that would eventually reorder his entire life.
SUP racing entered the picture when the discipline arrived in New Zealand, introduced by importer Jeremy Stevenson. Armstrong was immediately captivated. He competed in the Battle of the Paddle, the Maui to Molokai (M2M), and the iconic Molokai to Oahu (M2O) — the world championship of downwind SUP, which he described as "the most rewarding, as it presents a challenging channel." His first trip to Hawaii came as the prize for winning a race in New Zealand: a board, and a ticket to the big leagues.
The Moment That Changed Everything
In 2013, Armstrong stood on the shores of the Waitematā Harbour in Auckland and watched something unprecedented: Team New Zealand's AC72 catamaran, flying on foils during its America's Cup campaign, skimming across the water as if gravity were optional. It was the moment that reoriented everything.
He had already been experimenting with kite foils — discovering how they transformed kiteboarding into something that felt, in his words, "like a proper sailing sport." But watching the AC72 in Waitematā crystallised a conviction: foils were not a gimmick or a niche adaptation. They were the future of water sports, full stop.
By 2015, Armstrong was deep in experimentation. When kite foil components broke during sessions — which, in those early days, happened constantly — he stopped sending them back for repair and started rebuilding them himself, improving on the originals each time.
Eventually, he took a set of broken kite foil parts and fabricated a complete SUP foil system from scratch. He began making custom boards in his own home. These were the first products to carry the Armstrong name — the family crest pressed into service as a logo, a detail that speaks to both the personal nature of the venture and the seriousness with which he approached it.
Building Armstrong Foils
In late 2015, Armstrong partnered with Rob Whittall — one of the world's foremost kite, wing, and hang-glider designers — to build something more ambitious than a personal project. Together, they set out to manufacture a foil system grounded in yacht engineering principles: rigorous, over-built, and designed to last in conditions where lesser equipment fails.
The commercial venture formally launched following the 2017 M2O event. From the outset, Armstrong rejected the race-to-the-bottom logic of competing on price. Instead, he pursued deliberate premium differentiation: titanium-core fuselages, stainless steel components, top-grade carbon construction. "I'm not a pro myself," he acknowledged with characteristic honesty, "but I need material that makes me look as good as a pro."
The A+ System — Armstrong's proprietary connection architecture, featuring a quad C-beam carbon composite mast, titanium-core carbon fuselage, hexagonal front foil connection, and trimmable stabiliser — formed the technical foundation of everything that followed. This foundational design has remained largely unchanged to this day, a testament to the quality of the original engineering.
Engineering as a Practice
For Armstrong, foil design is never finished. His process — define the purpose clearly, determine key parameters, prototype extensively, test across varying conditions — mirrors the rigour of aerospace or yacht engineering more than typical boardsports product development. He has built a team that includes world-class fluid dynamics experts, yet the benchmark remains visceral and personal: how does it feel to ride?
The CF1600 — Armstrong's first production foil — gained global attention when professional rider Kai Lenny used it in a viral WSL video, a moment that put the brand on the international map without any conventional marketing.
"The main driver is always trying to make a better foil than we previously achieved." It is a design culture that reflects his background: someone who spent decades in pursuit sports where equipment failure is not an inconvenience but a serious risk. You build things properly, or you don't build them at all.
The Stripes and Their Story
Armstrong Foils' signature striped aesthetic is one of the most recognisable visual identities in the foiling world — and its origin is as unexpected as it is specific. The design was inspired by Armstrong's childhood memories of Jacques Cousteau documentaries, in which horizontal stripe patterns were presented as shark deterrents. The image lodged itself and never left.
Years later, working with visual artist Juliana Duran, Armstrong developed the brand's distinctive double-tapered stripe — a design that functions simultaneously as identity, story, and ocean reference. It is exactly the kind of detail that separates a brand built on genuine passion from one built on positioning: the stripes mean something to the person who chose them.
From Garage to Global Podium
Armstrong Foils' growth brought Armie into the orbit of elite sailing and watersports. Among the athletes who have collaborated with the brand are America's Cup stalwarts Jimmy Spithill, Blair Tuke, and Pete Burling — as well as Olympic gold medallist Jo Aleh. These are partnerships built on shared performance demands, and they reflect the technical credibility Armstrong Foils earned through a decade of obsessive refinement.
Armstrong himself has continued to compete. In 2023, he completed the Maui to Molokai downwind race before moving directly into preparation for the subsequent Molokai to Oahu. His connections to New Zealand's elite sailing community run deep, and the values that community prizes — precision, understatement, relentless improvement — are legible in everything Armstrong Foils produces.
Still Learning, Still Building
More than a decade into the foiling revolution he helped shape, Armie Armstrong remains genuinely excited by what the sport still hasn't figured out. Foiling, he believes, is "so fresh and exciting" — a technology with most of its development still ahead. His prediction: foils "will simply get better and better for each foil sport," becoming smoother, easier, and more intuitive for riders at every level.
Armstrong built a globally respected brand from broken components in a New Zealand garage. He did it by combining the technical instincts of a composites engineer, the competitive drive of a multi-discipline athlete, and the visual sensibility of someone raised in a family of designers.
He did it, above all, by treating the foils themselves as the only brief that mattered — not the market, not the competition, but the thing itself, and whether it was better than the last one.
"Armstrong is powered by passion." It is the brand's motto. It is also, by every available account, simply a description of the person who built it.
See the full range of Armstrong foils here at Stonker Boardsports in Torquay, Victoria.
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