Episode #147 - The Exit Watersports story with Kieran Sammon

On this episode of the Foil Life Podcast, we sit down with Kieran Sammon, founder of Exit Watersports — Irish kiter, 2006 national amateur freestyle champion, automation engineer by day, and the person who turned a broken kids’ trampoline into a wetsuit hanger.

He talks Rhodes 2002, a January lesson in 4°C Irish water, building the IKSA, bringing the KSP Wave Tour to Achill with Aer Lingus and Hertz, a cancer scare in 2010, and why he still prefers boosting and smacking waves on a kite even as he chips away at winging and foilable swell. Then he walks through the products that grew out of not being able to dry a suit properly: the wide hex-cut XRail, the SUX suction mount, the 70-litre oval BUX change bucket, the XTEND windchill layer Hannah Whiteley called a game changer, plus Mavericks, Dry Bell, and what’s coming next.

Kieran covers the path from a second-hand Whipica LTR to a shed prototype in 2014, finding industrial designer Rudo Enserink, launching in late 2019 just before COVID, and the retailer feedback that one product is not a brand. Luc covers multi-day van trips, Thule boxes that never dry, and why a hanger that actually stands off the wall (or the car window) matters when you’re camping, commuting, or trying to get a suit dry before the next session.