Making the Trifecta of board sports a reality in the tropics

AT DAWN on Saturday (Oct 28), Singapore’s newest sports and lifestyle attraction called Trifecta will throw open its doors to the public.

Billed as the world’s first snow, surf and skate attraction, the 49,611 square-foot facility in the heart of Orchard Road is the brainchild of three enterprising individuals – Daphne Goh, 32; Alex Hsu, 34; and Terry Tan, 35 – who have spent the better part of the last 18 months to get this massive project off the ground.

The trio are also the co-founders of The Ride Side, a local adventure sports company that organises skiing and snowboarding trips to countries like Japan and Switzerland. In 2020, they expanded their scope to cover summer boardsports such as skateboarding, longboarding and surfskating.

After giving BT Weekend a sneak peek of Trifecta before its opening, Goh opens up about her entrepreneurial journey and how she and her business partners want to make board sports more accessible to all.

How did the name Trifecta come about? In the world of board sports, it’s a term to describe someone who has managed to snowboard, surf and skateboard all in one day. It’s a feat for a few reasons, the obvious one being it’s quite difficult to be in a place where you can experience winter and summer conditions in the space of 24 hours.

To do all three sports well, it also takes quite a lot of energy. So someone might surf in the morning, snowboard in the afternoon and skate at night. 

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When we thought about this, we had a vision to bring all three sports together in one place. While Singapore is in the tropics with no mountains and no waves, now you can hop from arena to arena at Trifecta and get to do all three sports.

How did The Ride Side get started? We launched the company in 2015 to organise skiing and snowboarding trips. It was born out of our love for the sport, the desire to introduce it to more people, and to provide education and access as well.

We did back-to-back trips, each lasting eight days, for three months at a stretch. That was our life before the pandemic for a good five years. We were overseas seven months a year, first in Japan and then New Zealand.

What we observed was that a lot of people tend to overpay for these trips if they go on their own, and that’s because they may not have all the information. A week-long trip that might cost S$5,000 or S$6,000; we can do it for less.

We don’t want skiing and snowboarding to be an item you check off your bucket list, and then not return because it’s too expensive or too much of a hassle. We want to lower that price barrier and also make it convenient for people.

What happened to the business when the pandemic hit? I remember it was March 2020, we were in Switzerland preparing to welcome a batch of customers. It was painful because we were there on a Friday and had to return to Singapore on Sunday. 

Like everyone else, we were holding out to see how long this would last. We did so until August, and we gave refunds to all our customers because these trips could not happen. We made the call that no one’s able to fly, so we processed the refunds immediately. However, we didn’t get that same level of understanding from our suppliers.

Were you obliged to give full refunds, though? We built up this community (of skiers and snowboarders) since 2015, and many became friends along the way. It didn’t seem right for us to say, my business is impacted so I’m sorry (that you won’t get a refund). We made that decision to do it, and in the background we would talk with the suppliers and figure out what we needed to do.

Was that your lowest point? I would say yes, but we were not unique in that situation. A lot of other businesses also felt the impact. We were thinking if we should close (The Ride Side) and look for jobs elsewhere, but we felt we should not give up everything that we had built. We tried to see how we could pivot and do things differently.

From March to August 2020, we focused our energy on our retail business. We were very lucky. A lot of people in the community reached out to offer legal advice or to help build a website. People bought snowboards from us even though they didn’t know when they could travel again to use them.

We decided to introduce summer sports like skateboarding, which was huge at the time because it was a way for people to get out of the house (amid the Covid-19 restrictions).

In 2021, we thought hard about the possibility of having a place in Singapore to do these sports, so we reached out to STB (Singapore Tourism Board) to see if there was any space that we could potentially use to try this out.

But because of the pandemic, a lot of the multi-purpose halls were being used as vaccination centres. We later got wind of this public tender (by the Singapore Land Authority, for a vacant plot of land between Somerset Road and Exeter Road), and we started to prepare our bid.

When you first spoke to STB about this project, what was their reaction? They were receptive. The idea of being able to surf and snowboard in the tropics was a novel one they were open to. Of course, everything still had to be done through the tender process and we had to get through that. We put together a 500-page deck in three months. 

I recall we were in Switzerland in April 2022 – they had reopened their borders and we had resumed our trips – and we got a call from SLA to say we were successful. We were lucky enough to have won the bid, and to get this space right in the middle of Orchard Road.

How steep a learning curve was this? There are three main things here. First, we are all certified snowboarding instructors. We have that experience doing overseas teaching and guiding seven months a year, so we probably spend more time on the slopes than any other Singaporean. Our combined personal experience helped to shape what Trifecta could look like.

Second, we have this community of people in different professions with different expertise. We could lean on a few of them. The people we brought in, most of them are surfers, snowboarders, skiers and skateboarders. And now, they can make it into a career.

Third, we are neither developers nor a construction company. We are a travel company. That was definitely the steepest learning curve. In the food and beverage space, we have done a cafe before but to have a (70-seater restaurant called Butter) is on a totally different level altogether.

Everything seems to have moved very quickly in the last year or so. We started construction only in February this year, so things were definitely escalated. The lease term is six years, so it’s quite short. We really have to maximise it. 

The construction companies we worked with have been really critical. They came in with the building knowledge and told us what could be done in the span of six to eight months. The architects had to design things in a certain way. The machines we have were fabricated overseas and brought in.

There’s a lot of concurrent work, such as getting trained to use the surf and snow machines, planning all the programmes and doing the marketing. It’s really all hands on deck.

What’s the investment cost? We had to do a round of fundraising for this, they’re all private investors. All the people who helped to make this come to life, they believed in our vision of growing the sports in the community. It helps that they are also surfers and snowboarders themselves. They understand intrinsically what we are trying to do. We were lucky to find them at a time when it was difficult for the markets, but they also believed in a much bigger picture than us.

What’s your sense of the interest in board sports in Singapore? Many people today who do these sports are working and have that spending power to travel, so there’s that exposure to not just destinations but also the culture of these sports.

Skateboarding is very much a part of pop culture, while surfing and snowboarding is already part of the Olympics. There is also a lot of exposure through social media.

Skateboarding is now a CCA (co-curricular activity) in a number of institutions. We hope with Trifecta, that snowboarding and surfing can be considered as part of a holiday programme at school, or even a CCA in the long term. That would be amazing.

If someone was born in Switzerland or Japan, skiing or snowboarding would be something they do in school when they are as young as three or four years old. They have the natural environment over there.

In Singapore, we are doing it artificially but the same principle applies –  start them young, introduce them to the sport, and whether they like it or not, or they’re good at it or not, that’s another matter altogether. 

There should not be that barrier in the first place, anyone should be able to try these sports.