When designer Anton Willis moved to San Francisco, he had to put his rigid kayak in storage because it didn’t fit in his small city apartment. After four years of design, Willis and his team developed the Oru kayak, a kayak made of a single sheet of corrugated plastic that folds and unfolds like origami.  The resulting boat is a 12 feet 6 inches long single kayak with a 25″ beam that weighs only 25 pounds and can be assembled, with practice, in about 5 minutes.   When folded, kayak in its case is only 33″ x 29″ x 10″.  Quite impressive.  When the Oru team did a Kickstarter promotion about a year ago, their goal was to raise $80,000 for the first production run.  They met that goal in the first five hours and went on to raise an impressive $443,806 from 730 backers. Here is the Kickstarter video that describes the venture:

Oru Kayak

As impressive as the Oru kayak is, I still have two concerns — cost and durability. The two concerns are related. The current cost of the Oru is $1,095.00. That is less than half the cost of a more conventional folding kayak. The Feathercraft Kurrent, for example, is a folding kayak with an aluminum frame and a nylon & urethane hull. The Kurrent is 7 inches longer, has the same beam and weighs 5 more pounds than the Oru . The Kurrent costs around $2,508.29. On that basis the Oru is quite a bargain. On the other hand, the Feathercraft is very durable and should last for many years. (From time to time, I still paddle a more than 30 year old Klepper Aerius II folding kayak.)

The Oru appears to be built from a single sheet of coroplast, which is a corrugated polyurethane sheet, sort of like a plastic version of corrugated cardboard. If the corrugation is crushed it loses strength. How long with the Oru last? What sort of use and abuse will it be able to take? Given that the boat has only been manufactured for less than a year, it is hard to tell.