By Sean Doherty
If you’re driving through downtown Ventura, California, just south of the Emma Wood underpass, in between liquor stores, lost souls and Patagonia’s Rancho Relaxo headquarters just up the road, you might drive straight past a small, nondescript white building standing alone on East Santa Clara Street. Signage is minimal and cryptic – ‘Chapter 11 TV Surf Shop’. If you happened to stop and walk in off the street and saw the proprietor sitting behind the counter, shuffling paperwork, trading shit-talk with someone out back, he might strike you as vaguely familiar.
That’s because a decade ago, Dane Reynolds, despite his best efforts, was the biggest name in surfing. He was recognisable from Ventura to Velzyland to Venezuela. His surfing, as Noa Deane described it at the time, was like “the sound of tearing metal”. He mixed high-octane surf energy with a low energy embrace of pro surfing and the surf industry… at a time when both were flying. Like most talented kids of his generation, Dane’s pathway involved the inevitable coddling of corporate sponsorship, followed by a crack at the world tour. But Dane had a special quality.
He was prized because he didn’t want to be there. He was a conscientious objector to pro surfing and that – from a counter-narrative marketing point of view – spoke to a huge and growing group of surfers who were disinterested or disillusioned by the corporate nature of the surf industry and its focus on the pro tour. Dane did a couple of uncomfortable years on the tour, his struggle with the system almost as compelling as his surfing.
Dane then did something that at the time seemed unthinkable. He walked away from it all. Along with style guru Craig Anderson, Dane bailed on his annual seven-figure Quiksilver contract, the pair starting their own label, Former. A surf-skate mashup running out of Dane’s garage, Former was cool in ways Quiksilver could no longer be. Dane bailing would have been a singularly bold and unprecedented move, if Kelly Slater – the face of Quiksilver who’d launched it into the stars – hadn’t already bailed on Quiksilver a few months earlier, eventually going on to also start his own brand, Outerknown.
By this stage several major surf brands were re-entering the atmosphere and crashing back to earth, heavy with debt. Quiksilver filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the US the year after Dane left and was bought out by a vulture capitalist, eventually finding themselves a Siamese twin with Billabong, their old nemesis, both owned by the same company.
But ‘Big Surf’ wasn’t a particular brand, it was a prevalent idea. It was an ambition for growth that belonged firmly on one side of surfing’s eternal schism – sport/lifestyle, progression/soul, business/art. When Big Money got involved in Big Surf, that schism opened wide again. It chased infinite growth in a finite surfing world and it mainstreamed what had always been a distinct counterculture.
Dane released his film, Chapter 11 the following year, which featured the monologue below, voicing a sentiment toward the surf industry that had been bubbling away amongst surfers generally for years. “But who is Quiksilver? Who do I thank? Shareholders? Bob McKnight? Guys that worked there when I first signed up or guys that work there now? Oaktree Financial? I really do appreciate my time there, and the projects we worked on, and the money they gave me, but everyone I feel is responsible has either been fired or laid off. So, let’s band together and rage against the machine.”
Big Surf was already dying. Chasing billion-dollar turnovers, it had flown too close to the sun, and despite being staffed by surfers who wanted a core surf offering, they were owned by shareholders and private equity firms that wanted core profits. That was the Faustian pact those companies had made.
In the early years, the upside of the growth had been fun. Eye watering marketing budgets paid for contests in Tahiti, they paid for webcasts and movies, and they paid for Andy and Kelly. There was a vibrancy to it. Anything was possible. But the downside soured badly and surfers around the world began to reject not only the big corporates, but the whole pro surfing model it was built on.
Enter, Dane.
The power dynamic of the surf industry flipped entirely in the years ahead. Core surf brands dug in, retreating away from fashion and back to surfing hardware. Nimble start-ups emerged. The surfers themselves started to become their own brands. With the dinosaurs no longer walking the landscape, the mammals began to take their place. Smaller, hairier, more adaptable to modern times. Big Surf was no longer. Independent Surf was taking its place.
Back in 2013 John Florence signed the richest contract surfing had ever seen, an eight-year $30 million deal with Hurley, owned at the time by Nike. But when Hurley, in decline, was sold to a brand management company, John walked away from his contract, just as Dane had done.
By that point, John’s star eclipsed not only the brands he surfed for; he was almost bigger than the sport itself. When he won the world title at Pipeline in 2017, John was watching on nearby from Pete Johnson’s backyard. The gate to the yard was locked and the WSL cameras couldn’t get in to capture the moment he officially won. John won his world title in private, in front of a group of friends, and the closest the broadcast could get was a drone shot from 200 feet up in the air. It drove the WSL nuts. They missed the money shot, the culmination of the whole season. So why did John do it? Famously private, the cameras were kept out to redraw the line between where John Florence started, and the sport stopped. And the other reason he did it was simple… because he could.
And then, like Dane, John went out and started his own brand. When you’re the biggest name in surfing, settling on a name for your brand becomes a little simpler and Florence Marine X was born. Likewise, when it came time to design a range of gear to sell, it was easy… make gear for whatever John John was into. Surfing eight hours in the tropics, surfing eight-foot Pipe and sailing to Maui (we’re still waiting on the Florence range of beekeeping suits). The brand not only carries his name, it genuinely feels like an extension of him and his surfing. Patagonia started the same way 50 years earlier. Yvon Chouinard started making gear for whatever he was into – climbing, surfing, skiing, hiking and flyfishing (he didn’t make gear for his falconry). Fifty years later that’s what they still make.
As we were pulling this issue together, Florence Marine announced a new team signing. Gone are the days of the team rider arms race, signing every kid with an air reverse. Most of the new generation of surf brands only have a handful of surfers on their roster. This signing was closer to home. John signed his brother, Nathan, himself another great study in independence.
Following the lead of fellow Hawaiian Jamie O’Brien – who years ago did away with both surf brands and the surf media and struck out alone – Nathan has become a vlogger, chasing slabs around the world, running a white-hot YouTube channel so successful he’s just about surpassed his brother’s profile. Nathan passed up a major surf industry contract to go surfing with his brother instead, which sounds like a pretty good deal.
The surf industry today is a strange landscape. Good luck making sense of it. The surf brands are all currently trying to do just that, and most of them are scratching their heads. Post-Big Surf, surf brands have all recorrected dramatically back to the surfing core, at a time that the surfing core has been completely overrun with – as Beachgrit so poignantly describes them – Vulnerable Adult Learners. It was the kook army that Big Surf sold their soul to chase, arriving a decade too late.
But the from the ashes of Big Surf, new green shoots have sprouted everywhere. It’s not just cashed up former pro surfers trying their luck with their own label. Take a drive around the Byron industrial estate and, if you look carefully, you’ll see all sorts of small, subcultural labels that have sprung up in the past decade, some running shopfronts, some running out of storage lockers. Some are pure surf, some are surf adjacent, many are side hustles for surfers with day jobs, and many of these side hustles don’t make money, certainly not billions. But they all feel like they connect with surf culture in some small but meaningful way of their own, and their owners all have hope for them. Within a hundred metres of the old Surfing World office in Byron, you had McTavish, Wild Things, Ed Sinnott surfboards, Parkesy’s kneeboards, Drag softboards, Fallen Broken Street and Noa and Creed’s jam room. Today, Ain’t That Swell, Dead Kooks and Varuna have all moved in as well, all doing their own thing. Just good luck getting a car park.
The door has also opened to new women’s surf brands. For decades, the surf industry was a room of swinging dicks, but a wild demographic gender shift has created all sorts of opportunity. We shared the Surfing World Byron office with a women’s surf start-up label, Salt Gypsy, run by the formidable-but-lovely Dani Clayton, making gear for women who actually surfed. If you drive around Byron the industrial estate – or any surf town these days – you’ll see any number of women’s surf start-ups, owned and run by women who keep three surfboards in their car at all times.
In the past few weeks, I’ve talked with several former surf industry execs and staffers who were inside the Big Surf companies when they were running hot. Having now parted ways (on good terms and bad), they’ve now either started new brands themselves, or are working with small surf brands. And while they want these new brands to succeed, they don’t want them to ever succeed like their last ones. There’s a natural size for a surf company, above which it becomes less surf, and more company.
Even surf media has undergone a total independent transition. Two decades ago, at the height of Big Surf, Big Surf Media was owned by corporate publishing houses in the city. Now the survivors of the digital apocalypse are almost exclusively all independent, with many of them – this humble title included – being run from home, in spare bedrooms, in spare time between actual paying day jobs. (*Disclosure here, my day job is with Patagonia).
Surf brands today look, feel and operate a lot differently to the way they did two decades ago. Take a crew like need essentials. Started by former Quiksilver designer, Ryan Scanlon, it’s a classic example of a post-modern surf brand. Whereas 20 years ago surf logos were so big they could be seen from outer space, need’s gear is almost totally unbranded. They don’t really advertise (their ad in this issue was donated to the Surfrider Foundation) and their marketing budget is largely spent on creating surf films. Their roster of Torren Martyn, Laurie Towner and Bryce Young have all produced stunning opuses in recent years, which have sold more wetsuits to surfers than Facebook ads ever could. The anti-brand brand is a correction back from the height of the industry, when it shouted at you. Things are done more quietly these days, but with more meaning.
Whatever the surf industry is today, it feels like there’s a better balance. It’s not as top-heavy, and there’s a cornucopia of smaller ventures out there, all paying respect to some corner of the surfing subculture, all of them with a different take on surfing, none of those takes dominant. A sustainable business is great – economically and environmentally – but it also needs to be culturally sustainable as well. It needs to give something back to surfing, in some small way. Surfers won’t let you sell it out.
At the end of the day, as a surfer you get the surf industry you support, and these great truisms all remain – support your local surf shop and shaper, support those that support surf culture, and support crew doing cool and interesting shit.
I read a Ken Collins post the other day on this subject, and there was one great line in there that I figured needs to be to be nailed above the back door of every surf shop, right around the world, so everyone who turns up to work each day looks up and reads it.
It says simply, “You owe surfing everything.”