New Wave Vision

FUEL YOUR CREATIVE MOTOR

1

If there is one thing I am certain of, it’s that I had the guts to follow my passion. It’s a tough gamble to take in any field, including in the surfboard industry, which is notoriously fickle and always has been. The margins are low, no one likes paying what a surfboard is really worth, and you can get caught up in the cycle of basically working for free. This can go on for years. Many shapers will tell you that nothing much changes, even 30 to 40 years into their businesses.

That was the world I got into when I started at 15 years old. Since then, my entire career and working life has been Haydenshapes. It’s all I’ve ever known or done. In an industry that very few succeed in, I was often asked by so-called wiser heads, ‘What were you thinking?’

Well, I guess I just loved surfboards. I had to figure out how to change the rest.

Personally, I’ve always found the word ‘success’ a strange concept because it means different things to different people. To me, success is far more than money or numbers. I’d be lying if I said they were not a factor, but they have never been the core of what drove me to start in the first place.

I’m not alone in this mindset either. I’ve heard and read a lot of stories of different types of businesspeople and their companies. Mistakes, challenges and pitfalls are usually summarised as a prelude to a story of ‘great success’. In my experience, those moments, and the emotions behind them, are central to shaping success, because you tend to learn the most from them – no matter what industry you are in or how big or small the business.

The intention behind writing this book is not to be instructional or put myself or anyone else on a pedestal, but to share insights gained through the real experiences of a young person, now 34, through nearly two decades of building something from ground up. It’s a book about creating something. I’ve built factories and teams across two continents, set up large scale production lines, innovated, patented and commercialised a technology, filed and protected trademarks, nearly gone bankrupt, launched my brand globally, worked on projects with some incredible people and companies, and have had a worldwide best-selling product. And the story is really just getting started.

In the writing of this book, I reached out to and interviewed some of the world’s most influential creators and visionaries from diverse industries and backgrounds who have also shared their stories, insights and experiences in creating innovative brands, products, and businesses: Noel Gordon, co-founder of Google Maps, Jim Jannard, founder of Oakley and of RED, Karen Walker, designer and founder of Karen Walker, Tony Hawk, pro athlete and entrepreneur, Dennis Paphitis, founder of Aēsop, and Paul Naude, entrepreneur and founder of Vissla, D’Blanc and Amuse Society.

No story in life, career or business is ever the same but I have come to learn that those who are bold enough to take risks, make moves and follow their passion are the ones who are capable of having the most impact, not to mention living happier lives because they are spending their time doing what they love. These simple traits aren’t rocket science either. I think that everyone is capable, but you have to be motivated and willing to go out and do it. It begins there.

THE TOP 5 REGRETS OF THE DYING

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my true feelings.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

5. I wish I had let myself be happier.

(as researched and written by former palliative care nurse, Bronnie Ware)

Most shapers in the industry I entered back in 1996 had their priorities sorted: surf came first, and work fitted in around it. Even now that the surfboard manufacturing industry has gone through many changes, the shapers’ situation is much the same. That approach never appealed to me.

For me, it all started in the mid-1980s when I was four years old and rode my first wave. From when I was born, my family would go for summer camping holidays at Green Patch, a three-hour drive south of our home in Sydney, Australia. Green Patch is in the Booderee National Park at the southern end of Jervis Bay, an area that picks up plenty of south swell but also contains lots of sheltered little coves into which small amounts of swell wrap around.

We always set up our campsite in D Section and headed straight for the beach. Green Patch is one of the protected nooks in Jervis Bay, perfect for a young kid to learn how to handle gentle little one-foot waves. When my big brother, Nathan, got his first surfboard, it drove me insane. I sat on the beach waiting for a go, but it was Nathan’s Christmas present and he wouldn’t give it up. He stayed in the water for ever, but I was a determined little kid and was prepared to wait for as long as it took.

Finally, having stayed in the water so long he was risking hypothermia, Nathan came in. I grabbed his board and tore straight out, with one thought in my mind: I’m going to give him the same treatment.

Sure enough, hours later, Nathan had screamed himself hoarse on the beach. I eventually came in, giving him his board back as if I was doing him a favour.

Mum felt sorry for me – or realised that one board between two sons was a recipe for endless grief. As luck would have it, my birthday was in February, not long after we got back home. For my present, she bought me what became the most prized possession of my childhood, a life-changing object and my first love: a Hot Buttered surfboard with leopard print rails. Funnily enough, the profile of the leopard print would follow a similar aesthetic feature that I later replicated in my FiberFlex (later renamed FutureFlex) surfboard technology.

With that Hot Buttered, I knew I had a cooler board than my brother. It was a Terry Fitzgerald shape with a slightly rounded square tail. You don’t know what obsessive love is until you see a kid like me with a board like that. I worshipped it.

As we grew up, we only surfed on our holidays, mainly at Green Patch and the surrounding beaches around Jervis Bay. Caves Beach was a favourite, a place of insurpassable beauty, south-facing so that a summer nor’-easter, the prevailing wind when we were down there, blew offshore, grooming the little waves perfectly and making them hold up nice and easy for us.

Nathan and I were very different in our surfing mentality. I always looked up to him as a better surfer than me at the time, and he had a sweet natural style. He was also very instinctive in how he rode a board, and the way he thought about surfing – or, to be precise, the way he didn’t think about it. He never gave it much of a thought. It was something he went out and did, with his mind switched off. He could have picked up any board in any condition and just gone out and ridden it, loving his surfing with a kind of freedom and grace.

I, on the other hand, thought about it a lot. I loved my board as a design object and got to know every inch of it from nose to tail. For Nathan, a board was just a board, whereas for me it was to be pored over, touched and cared for like a religious icon. By the time I was eight or nine, it had a few bumps and bruises, and exposure to the sun had dulled its colours. I said to my dad, ‘I want to make my board new again.’

So Dad went and bought some resin and took me out onto the driveway of our home. Together we sanded back my Hot Buttered and put a fresh hot coat on it. To me, that was like getting a whole new surfboard – and it was just the same as the old one that I loved so much!

Whenever I got dings in my board, Mum and Dad said, ‘You can’t afford to go to a ding repair place, you have to fix your own dings.’

Dad would show me how to mix up the resin and the hardener and fill in my dings. He wasn’t a surfer, but as an engineer, Dad had a very practical mind, and he was, I guess, my first teacher, giving me my taste of working on a board. I didn’t think it was work – it wasn’t mowing lawns or doing one of our long list of chores. To heal my board was something I enjoyed.

NWV

Sydney is one of the great cities in the world, with all the facilities of a modern metropolis while sitting right on top of about 30 decent surf breaks, some of them world-class points and beach breaks. It’s been the nursery of world champions from Midget Farrelly and Nat Young through to Tom Carroll, Layne Beachley, Damien Hardman, Barton Lynch and Mark Occhilupo, as well as dozens of World Championship Tour (WCT) and World Qualifying Series (WQS) surfers, junior champions and so forth. Australia has always been the world’s most influential market for surfboards alongside the US.

But as far as I knew, in my early surfing years, there was no surf in Sydney. Our family lived in the suburb of Gordon, a leafy middle-class area in the northern suburbs, a good half-hour’s drive from the nearest beach, Mona Vale. Nobody told me about Mona Vale or anywhere else. Surfing was something I did in school holidays only, and even then only in summer. In winter, we went inland, to places like Wombeyan Caves and the Blue Mountains.

Eventually we changed our summer holiday spot to Crowdy Bay, a four-hour drive north of Sydney. Crowdy Bay is inside one of a string of headlands that mark the north coast of New South Wales. Crescent Head, Diamond Head, Scotts Head, Hat Head, Evans Head and Lennox Head are some of the others, all the way up to Queensland. They generally have open, south-east-facing surf beaches on the southern side of the headland, point breaks that take wrapping south well on the northern side, and big bay beaches north of the headland, sheltered from all swell and wind unless it’s coming from the north. Crowdy Bay was, like Green Patch, a mellow kind of place for kids to surf safely without requiring adult supervision.

Nathan and I fell in with some of the local guys, who were much better surfers than we were. While Nathan was his usual free-wheeling self, I was intensely interested in what boards other people were riding. There was a guy who had a dimpled-bottom, silver slick bodyboard, and I was intrigued by that. I studied the better surfers up there, Mick and Darren O’Rafferty, who had surfboards made by Gunther Rohn, a shaper from Ballina, further up the coast, and later Darren Handley of Darren Handley Designs (DHD), who shaped boards across the border on Queensland’s Gold Coast.

The O’Rafferty brothers gave me my first link, albeit tenuous, with the world of elite surfing. I watched how they turned their boards on a wave, how they controlled their speed, stalling for barrels or accelerating to make sections, and I could almost feel myself surfing those waves as well as they did. I was intoxicated by the connection of body through feet through board to the wave, the simple but miraculous physics of it. And they had Rip Curl stickers on their boards, which to me signified that they were on another planet, almost with the status of gods or heroes.

Back at home, Mum would often take Nathan, my elder sister Rachael and me to Gordon Library. While Nathan and Rachael would bring home books, I headed straight for the magazine racks and emerged with an armful of Tracks, Waves and the rest. I don’t remember reading articles about design in the surf magazines, which were feeding what was fast becoming an obsession. I was a picture guy, pulling out the posters and sticking them on my walls, lying in bed looking at them and dreaming. Mum wasn’t impressed, but at least I was ‘reading’ something.

When I was about 10, we were taught how to write letters. Great! I wrote to the surf companies who advertised in Tracks and asked for stickers to put on my board, so I could be like the O’Raffertys.

I still wasn’t surfing outside of school holidays, but Green Patch, Crowdy Bay and surf magazines from the library were where my dreams began. My imagination ran wild. I remember the Kelly Slater ‘spider air’ poster from Waves, with the eye-catching carbon fibre strips on his board, and Occy on Straight Up surfboards. Looking back, my entire connection with the world of popular culture was through surf magazines and posters. We never watched TV, and Mum wouldn’t let it be turned to any of what she called the ‘American crap’ on the three commercial networks anyway. She and Dad only watched the staid, BBC-centric public broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Commission as it was then called. If we kids wanted to entertain ourselves, we had to go outside and find something to do. If we got bored, Mum would find jobs for us.

Because my connection with the outside world was relatively limited, I saw things in an innocent and maybe simplistic way. I was unafraid to be curious, and never grew up with a jaded view that everything had already been done before. I grew up with an instinct that the world was small enough that I could control a part of it. Specifically, the world of surfboards.

Questions plagued me. Why were some boards shaped differently from others? What made some shapes work better in certain waves? How did all the elements of a surfboard’s shape, including the fins, come together? Did varying the materials make a difference? How did all of this interact with the body shapes, the skills and the different preferences of individual surfers?

Through the magazines, I was beginning to get an inkling of all the diverse parts of the puzzle. But if I’m honest, as a kid and a teenager, I also dreamt that I could be a professional surfer, or, if not, that I could just get better and better. I didn’t visualise winning contests as such, but was inspired and fascinated by how the elite, from the O’Raffertys up to Kelly Slater, surfed.

On holidays, I began to feel the differences. I borrowed boards from other guys we camped with, and saw a whole new dimension from trying out different shapes on familiar waves. Was it the board that made those guys better surfers than me, and if so, what was it about the board that gave them an edge? To be honest, I’ve never stopped being intrigued by that very fundamental question.

That simple, naïve desire has flowed through to the present day: watching better surfers than me, the best, and imagining that I’m in their body, riding the wave I could see them ride in the photo or the video. Hawaii’s Shane Dorian was always one of the surf magazines’ favourites, and he was a long-time favourite of mine too. As a kid, when I saw Shane taking off on a wave in a poster, I wanted to be him. When I got a bit older and saw him in videos, my hero-worship intensified, because the videos revealed what the still photos had only hinted at: not only was he incredibly stylish and powerful in big waves, but he was also jaw-droppingly courageous. He was everything I wanted to be as a surfer.

My inspiration has always come from my favourite surfers. As a young shaper, I would take a trip down the south coast to Guillotines, a fast, heavy, barrelling right-hander off a rock shelf at Bawley Point, south of Ulladulla. When I was there, I would have a picture of Shane Dorian in my mind and wonder, What would he surf here? I shaped a board like Shane Dorian’s, because I wanted to surf like him. That was imitation at its best. I wanted to be that surfer. That was before I had my own identity. I was like any kid.

As my knowledge of the elite surfers broadened, I would visualise Taj Burrow, Corey Lopez, Kelly Slater or Kalani Robb (who became my new favourite), and then go and make one of their boards as I interpreted it in my mind as a surfer, seeing myself reliving the experience I’d seen of one of those guys taking off on a big wave. Kalani Robb rode Rusty Surfboards, and I dreamt of being just like Rusty Priesendorfer.

I love seeing surfers ride beautiful boards in beautiful surf. I’m a consumer like everyone else, watching videos and being influenced by how people look on waves.

That kind of inspiration would take another step when I met Craig Anderson when he was 15. At the time, I was only 21 years old and full of big ideas. The first time I saw Craig surf, it just clicked in my head: his relaxed and effortless style, the way he could generate speed with invisible adjustments, the grace and flow. In my mind, I knew at first sight that my boards were made for him. And if they weren’t, I would make them for him. It helps that Craig and I are the same size and weight. That relationship, which has grown to the point where it is now at the heart of my shaping and Craig’s surfing, was an extension of my childlike state of mind, going back through the surf magazines and videos and worshipping Shane Dorian to being a little kid with my eyes fixed on the O’Raffertys and my older brother, my first surfing heroes.

That pure love of surfing, while I can’t feed it as regularly as I like, is still my guiding light as a designer, shaper and businessman. If I ever stop thinking like a surfer first and foremost, it will be time I gave up. When I talk to Craig now about new boards, or to another of our team riders like Creed McTaggart or friends like Tom Carroll, although I know that these surfers have talent that puts them on another plane from me, I’m still thinking in my head, What do they like that the everyday surfer also likes? What do they want that I also want? I’m an example of an experienced ‘everyday’ surfer who surfs, let’s say, a couple of times a week. (In a good week these days!) So when I’m making a board for one of the team riders, I get these boards under my feet as quickly as possible, because I can be a bridge between the professional athlete and the consumer. When I’m shaping a stock board, there is always one thing in the front of my mind: This boards needs to be fun.

Building that elite contest board that only 0.1% of surfers can ride, the top elite, was only a small aspect of what motivated me. I’m not just a bridge between a Craig Anderson and the experienced everyday surfer, I’m a bridge between myself now and my inner kid, who’s as much in love with surfing as he ever was. I’ve loved what I’ve done, and everything else has flowed from that.

FUEL YOUR CREATIVE MOTOR

GREATNESS OFTEN STEMS FROM DELUSION. NEVER UNDERESTIMATE A KID WITH AN IMAGINATION.

THE BEST CREATOR IS ALWAYS A CONSUMER AT HEART AND CAN SEE THINGS THROUGH A CONSUMER’S EYES.

ASK QUESTIONS. I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN FASCINATED BY THE PHYSICS, THE DYNAMICS AND THE MATHEMATICS OF SURFBOARDS.

THE DRAWING BOARD

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GETTING STARTED, AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A HOBBY AND A PASSION

Not every business starts out with a grand plan. There are many ways to get your ideas off the ground. But I’m a true believer that the greatest businesses and ideas are birthed from a place of passion and obsession. It’s about finding that thing inside you, the idea or concept that has an edge sharp enough to cut through and become something meaningful. The path of taking something from zero to one is all on you. If you don’t know how, here’s some simple advice: Figure it out.

NWV

NO!!!

Every surfer, as they say, knows the feeling. You never forget the first time.

I’ll never forget the first time I stood up on a wave at Green Patch, the first board I sold to my first customer, or the first time someone told me that I was ‘wasting my time’ with my business. I’ll also never forget my first sensation of getting out on the open face of more powerful waves … or that sickening feeling of nose-diving into a shallow sandbank, and coming up to find that my board no longer has a nose.

NO!!!

This horrific, end-of-the-world moment took place when I was 15. It was a classic example of turning a catastrophe into a moment that would change my life and kick-start my future.

To get there, I have to backtrack a little to those days when I didn’t know there was any surf in Sydney.

My mum had grown up at Freshwater Beach, which is at the lower end of Sydney’s northern beaches, one bay north of Manly Beach. Manly is, of course, famous around the world, with a variety of breaks from the right-hand point at Fairy Bower to the big-wave bommie off Queenscliff and the reliable beachies at North Steyne and Queenscliff. Freshwater, around the corner, faces more to the south and picks up anything coming from that direction. It tends to close out most days, but when it’s working, Freshwater serves up some very juicy barrelling rights and lefts.

When I turned 12, I had a birthday party at Freshwater. I went down the road and found the beach. What? Why hadn’t anyone told me about this? There was loads of great surf right here in Sydney!

The next big revelation was that I could get a bus to the beach from where we lived.

That’s when my mum, and school, lost me.

I went to Knox Grammar, a conservative boys’ private school, 10 minutes from where we lived. Mum and Dad were obviously sending me there so I could make the most of my educational potential. A good education for me, my brother and three sisters, was a huge priority. Both of my parents were true hard workers, and that mentality was drummed into all of us growing up. They paid for private schooling for all five kids by working two jobs each. We were constantly reminded of how lucky we were to have that opportunity – and they weren’t making such sacrifices so I could spend every weekend at the beach.

But from when I was in secondary school, I had plans of my own. I fulfilled my obligation to play school soccer on Saturday mornings, and then got as quickly as possible to the bus stop, with an overnight bag and my new surfboard.

When I was 12, my trusty Hot Buttered board finally died