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Creating the essential brand for surfers worldwide.

Vice President of Design

Surfline was a fantastic opportunity to bring my love of surfing together with my passion for design. I’ve reimagined and rebuilt the design discipline for the world’s largest and most innovative brand in surfing—cultivating a culture of leadership, collaboration, and high-quality product design to deliver continual value to our +5M audience of surfers worldwide. Working with other executives, my mission was to reposition design as a pivotal competitive advantage for the business, building trust to integrate it as a core company competency, and ultimately contributing to the organization's overall success—achieving an annual subscription growth of ~26% YOY and reducing churn by 17%.

Building off our core forecasting business, we’ve imagined and designed an ecosystem of services and features, including e-commerce, apparel, gear, and travel—leading to a $3 increase in Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) and a 36% boost in customer satisfaction. Created and implemented strong design principles, processes, and systems across the product suite.

Most importantly, we established design as an essential component of the company’s success—driving leadership, strategy, and partnerships, showing its ability to meet business challenges.

 
 
 

Surfline App

 

Before joining Surfline, I was a dedicated user who saw its limitations through the lens of a product designer. I advocated for a more inclusive surfing experience, with the vision of creating a more personalized surf assistant to aid surfers of all levels. We focused on improving accessibility, clear user pathways, intuitive data displays, and customization.

This initiative resulted in Surfline's massive leap in innovation for the product experience, doubling its audience and subscriptions and fostering a robust ecosystem with e-commerce, surf travel, and content. Crucially, it elevated customer satisfaction, reshaping Surfline's image as an essential surf brand within the community.

 

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We’re building surfing’s most trusted and beloved brand by combining the rigor of science with the boundless imagination, creativity, and artistry that defines the soul of surfing.

 
 

An essential part of this work was creating a robust design system for Surfline. Conceptualizing, ideating, and refining elements allowed us to create a versatile and scalable system where components could be used and evolved with our product needs. It also allowed us to quickly spin up prototypes to collaborate directly with our customers when injecting new ideas or data visualizations.

 

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Our mission is to help surfers no matter where they are in their journey, and present the information, data, and content so that it doesn’t require a science degree or 20 years of surf knowledge.

 
 

 
 

Sessions 2.0

Sessions is a centralized hub to seamlessly capture personalized clips and surf performance inside the Surfline App—where surfers can watch their rides, share, and improve surfing. The initial experience was a five-year-old MVP that was ignored mainly so we could redesign and rebuild the core Surfline experience.

Sessions had high engagement numbers with a small but dedicated number of surfers using the feature, and there was ample opportunity to evolve it into a cutting-edge video capture service utilizing new AI and machine learning technology. This reimagining and redesign represents a real breakthrough in how surfers can track and watch their waves with more accuracy, creating an interactive loop of engagement and value.

 

Surfline x Kevin Butler Collab

 

After launching the Surfline Gear Shop, we were looking for ways to grow awareness and drive revenue in the shop authentically. Tapping into surfing’s rich culture of artistry and imagination, we developed a program to create ongoing collaborations with artists and the Surfline brand. 

Our first artist collaboration featured Kevin Butler—known for his playful and unique take on surf culture. After requisitioning specific art pieces for gear and soft goods, I designed the line with an eye for quality surf essentials and fun, bold aesthetics.

 

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Teaming up with Futures Fins for our first sustainable product let us collaborate with artist Kevin Butler to create a playful surf gear line, solidifying Surfline's reputation for quality products in a crowded space.

 

Brand Foundation & Identity

 

Differentiating Surfline from the sea of industry sameness.

This project was a labor of love—a way to express and catalyze how to carry the brand into the future, but also a bit of a love letter to surfing. I’ve never considered myself a writer, but I felt strongly to initiate and propose a vision and strategy for the brand. I believe that if we could articulate and illustrate to the company the fundamental values and goals that bring us together as surfers, we would represent the brand and its mission most authentically and genuinely possible in the market.

Early on during my time at Surfline, it became clear there was a problem with alignment about what the brand was and how to communicate it cohesively to our employees and audience. The existing brand identity lacked real meaning and explanation of the company’s motivations, values, and goals. Seeing how this deficit of clarity affected teams across the organization, I took it upon myself to write, organize, and evangelize an evolved vision for the brand to help guide the company forward in a way that spoke to who we were as an organization and as part of the surf community.

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In developing the new foundation and identity, I wanted to make sure that the beating heart of our business was the acknowledgment of the vibrant and diverse community we serve. As a result of this work, the brand was able to make decisions more quickly based on our values and traits and execute work across consumer touchpoints compellingly and cohesively.

 
 
 

Gear Shop


976-SURF & Bootleg Apparel

To boost our business ecosystem through e-commerce, we aimed for cost-effective awareness without traditional ads. We sought to infuse Surfline's apparel with humor and nostalgia to connect our rich history with emotion and merge past surf culture with modernity. Our tribute to past promotions like 976-SURF and classic films resonated with the surfing community, generating buzz and shop revenue.


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