Down To The Essentials

The pre-dawn air bites as Ryan Scanlon trudges across the frost-covered paddock, gumboots crushing grass beneath his feet. While the surf might be pumping at Bells and Winki, just seven kilometres to the south-east, he's got 100 cows to milk before school.

Through the fog, he can just make out a glow emanating from Torquay – Australia's surf capital and home to industry titans Rip Curl and Quiksilver. The same distance that takes fifteen minutes to drive is a distant world to the teenage farm boy, hands raw from manual labour.

"I'd get up at 5am," Ryan recalls of his years on the family farm at Connewarre, "walk around the cows, bring them in, milk them, and then catch the school bus to Geelong. Come home, do it all over again. 365 days of the year."

The contrast between Torquay and neighbouring Connewarre couldn't be starker. Sure, farmers greeted the day as early as any eager dawn patroller, but there the similarities end. Where one town pulses with the energy of Australia's surf industry, the other moves to rhythms unchanged since his grandfather's time.

"I saw the surf industry as a great alternative," Ryan says with a wry smile. "Much better than sitting under the arse end of a cow."

What Ryan didn’t know then, watching Torquay's radiant light from his milking stool, was that he'd not only break into that world, bearing witness to its many successes and failures, but ultimately he’d help reshape it too.

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The surf industry, for its part, was on somewhat of a tear as Ryan gravitated towards it. Ten years earlier it was all fluoro and checker print, but the eighties surf boom imploded in a neon heap, taking with it Gotcha, the world’s biggest and loudest surf company. Investors waved red flags - ‘lightning can’t strike twice’, they said. And yet the air once again crackled with electricity.

Billabong rebranded behind Jack McCoy's groundbreaking films. Rip Curl launched The Search, tapping into surfers' inexhaustible wanderlust. And Quiksilver? They signed a young Floridian named Kelly Slater and watched their fortunes soar with each world title. When they added Lisa Anderson and launched Roxy, they didn't just double their market, they redefined what a surf company could be.

The surf industry was again marvelled as an impregnable economic wonder; the founders of each company feted in the financial pages. Alan Green and John Law from Quiksilver, Doug Warbrick and Brian Singer at Rip Curl, Rena and Gordon Merchant at Billabong, the captains of a billion dollar industry - and soon to be worth much more. Their origin stories were written into Australia’s wider surf history.

That said, Ryan’s path into the industry was slightly more mundane: manning the till at the local surf shop. For Ryan, time behind the counter at Strapper Surfboards did at least provide enlightening conversation. One afternoon in 1994, Peter Troy, the legendary surfer-explorer who'd discovered Nias almost two decades earlier, wandered in and started chatting with the young shop assistant.

Troy spoke of waves that no-one had ever seen or ridden, and no-one was better qualified to know. The world was immeasurably large, whole island chains were yet to be explored by surfers.

The teenage Ryan filed that information away, and we’ll do likewise with it for now.

(photo)

The dairy farmer's son had always been good with his hands – you don't milk cows for fifteen years without developing dexterity. He thought in pictures and had the ability to make his imagination material. Art school at Warnambool was the next logical step, and it was there that he caught the eye of Quiksilver's Peter Webb, the artistic force behind the ‘Ghetto Dog’ and ‘Warpaint’ campaigns that saw surfing transition from beach culture to street fashion.

“The whole world was changing visually, getting more street oriented,” wrote Webb in ‘The Mountain And The Wave’. 

There were other changes too. Ryan arrived at Quiksilver just as the art world was undergoing a seismic shift. Quiksilver's art rooms were transforming. Where celebrated artists such as Webb, Simon Buttonshaw, and Clayton Barr once stood at easels, hand-painting designs that defined surf culture, sleek computer monitors now hummed. The digital revolution had arrived, and Ryan found himself straddling two worlds once again.

"When I got to Quiksilver, the artists were still painting by hand," Ryan recalls, "but within a year, everything had gone digital.” Binary code in place of acrylics and oils.

It was a tough adjustment for some, yet Ryan's timing was impeccable. “There weren't many people that could think creatively like an artist and drive a computer as well - people with that skill set were rare.” Ryan quickly ingratiated himself in the company as the artist who could also work in the digital space.

Simon Buttonshaw, at left, surrounded by Quiksilver art (The Mountain And The Wave)

Now, about that chat with Peter Troy…

After making a mental map of Troy’s conversation, Ryan and friend Michael Cartwright, then both 18-years old, consulted an atlas and saw Nias sitting offshore from western Sumatra. While to the south and north of Nias ran island chains, presumably exposed to the very same south-westerly swells.

Though first surfed in 1983, the Mentawais were still a little-known prospect in the mid-nineties. The captain of the MV Indies Trader, Martin Daly, was running exploratory trips including a trickle of pro surfers and photographers. The subsequent photos made their way to a willing surf media.

Between Nias and the Mentawais, however, sat many other islands and neither Ryan nor Michael had heard anything about them. There was no more to it: they bought tents, a water purifier, and enough rice for two months.

“We got to Nias and then took a fishing boat south from there,” says Ryan and they may have been dropping off the edge of the known world. “We had a magical time, just two naive young idiots fumbling our way through Western Sumatra, scoring incredible, untouched waves along the way.”

Ryan and Michael did three more trips together, each time for a few months, and they also went alone or with other people too. “We ended up spending a lot of time up there in that period from the mid to late-nineties.”

“It’s amazing to look back on now,” says Ryan wistfully, “just surfing without any people or any influence from Western civilization, in a really untouched part of the world with its own rich culture, and an environment devoid of plastics or pollution.”

He laughs, but there's a note of melancholy in it. "We had absolutely no idea how quickly things would change. A part of me thinks, ‘Geez, I was lucky to experience that - to see the world before that happened’. At the same time, you become an adult and the whole world changes.”

Regardless, traveling and exploration became a recurring theme, interjected between bouts of bottom-line corporatism. A legacy of those early travels, if we’re to look for it, is that later films Ryan was involved in refrained from further signposting. No place names, even if they’re obvious, the only reference point being the ocean basin.

Caption to come

“I think I had a good work ethic from my days on the farm,” says Ryan recalling his relentless early morning starts at Connewarre, “perhaps it distinguished me from others.”

 “It wasn’t just that Ryan had a good worth ethic,” explains Simon Buttonshaw, “but he also has a unique level of self-confidence. He’s smart and he virtually created the role he fulfilled.”

All of which meant that, despite leaving Quiksilver in 1998 on an indefinite break, they still required his services. In late 2000, while in the outer reaches of Indonesia he received an email from HQ offering him the position of Head of Design in Torquay. He was 23-years old and with his travel budget exhausted he accepted the position and bought a ticket home.

In the first years of the new millennium, the surf industry began to transform. Most notably, Billabong went public, beginning a spree of acquisitions that would make a corporate raider blush. Not to be outdone, Quiksilver followed suit and the two Australian-born companies locked into a global arms race, throwing Manhattan money at playground games. 

The company that had started in a Torquay garage was becoming a global powerhouse. Green and Law, the founders who used to walk the office floor and, says Ryan, “made it feel like a family company,” were now rarely sighted. Meanwhile, the epicenter of power shifted to California, with increasing influence from Europe, as the Australian office became a satellite office in its own empire.

“I'd sit in Quiksilver’s corporate boardroom in Los Angeles,” observes Ryan, “surrounded by people with a lot of material wealth and assets, yet some of them were really challenged in spirit and mind. Then I'd leave that world for stints in remote Indonesia - living the lifestyle we were selling - and I’d meet people with minimal material possessions but incredible knowledge and connection to nature and community. They had wealth of another kind.”

By 2008, a storm was brewing. Surf fashion was no longer considered cool, revealing an uncomfortable truth: the industry had been built largely on the backs of non-surfers. When they stopped wearing the clothes, sales plummeted. Then came the Global Financial Crisis, catching companies overextended and overconfident.

Ryan watched it all from an unusual vantage point – a sailboat moored in Newport Harbour, California. As Senior Vice President of Global Products, he was down in the company engine room while up above, the boardroom charted the best course. The company was still reeling from an ill-fated $700 million acquisition of French ski company Rossignol – sold three years later for just $37 million – in what would prove to be the beginning of a long, painful descent toward bankruptcy.

His time in California was beneficial, however, as Ryan worked closely on wetsuit production and also with Kelly Slater on his short-lived label VSTR. The boardroom eventually drew a red line through VSTR, with Kelly promptly putting an end to he and Quiksilver’s 23-year relationship. Six months later Kelly struck out on his own with Outerknown.

By that stage, Ryan had already left Quiksilver, although he didn’t quite know what he was going to do next. He sailed his boat back from California via New Caledonia and New Zealand, and thought about his future. “Sailing is slow,” says Ryan, “you only go at walking pace. You get a lot of time to think.”

"All I knew was that I'd left the surf industry," he says of his decision to sail away from California, "and this time I wasn't going back."

When he finally dropped anchor in Yamba - a short stopover that’s lasted twelve years - he lent on his skill set and made a small run of wetsuits. “I warehoused them in the back of a Hiace van, and if I got an order I'd row the dinghy to shore, grab the wetsuit and take it to the post office to send.”

Not only did the wetsuits have no swing tags, no printing, and no packaging, they also had no name. "I didn't want a brand," Ryan insists, "I didn't want to be a businessman. I just wanted to create a small sustainable income doing something real."

But sometimes, as the saying goes, the universe has other plans. Here he was, actively trying to avoid creating a brand, yet the digital world wasn’t having it. A website needs a name and www.plainblackwetsuits.com wasn't going to cut it.

And so needESSENTIALS was born – albeit reluctantly. In a small act of defiance the word mark was written in Helvetica, the world's most common font. No logo. No flashy graphics. The antithesis of everything the corporate surf world stood for.

"Even as a kid I was sceptical of branding," Ryan says, "I find it weird that someone would pay top dollar to become a walking billboard...I'm okay with other people doing it, I just don't want to do it myself.”

Though it involves jumping ahead of the storyline it’s worth passing the talking stick back to Simon Buttonshaw for a moment.

“It’s not quite true that he doesn’t have a logo,” explains Simon. “The word mark is his logo. That’s a literal take on it, but conceptually it’s more complex, and also more interesting. He’s created a brand where the act itself, the people who surf, the music, the boards, all of that stuff, that’s the art.”

It’s worth keeping in mind that Simon is a visual artist, working mostly in static form, but he bears no grudge at those mediums being superseded, and that the ‘story’ he once told via graphics in surf magazines is now being told via video on the internet. “The surfers at needESSENTIALS are the creative artists,” says Simon expressively, “and it’s beautifully documented.”

The art of needESSENTIALS. Torren Martyn, Ishka Folkwell, and Simon Jones combining (Folkwell)

Despite the lack of branding, Ryan’s suits spoke for themselves: top-quality materials, clever design, no frills, at half the market price. His first range featured a 3/2 steamer for $180 in a market where $300 was standard, and premium higher again.

Rather than releasing new and improved lines each calendar year, the ranges continued until there was no more stock. Shunning the seasonal schedule meant suits weren't dumped on sale in rummage bins. They sold until they were sold out - and sold out they did.

Those first few years of existence saw Ryan offering interviews to surf media: Swellnet, BeachGrit, Surfline, always online publications and often emphasising the new way of doing business, including a social media presence and a direct line to consumers. Judging by website comments, the message resonated.

An ex-Quiksilver colleague of Ryan’s says he was often annoyed at his digital-first attitude. “He wanted to do more online, more social media, more video. We couldn’t do that, we were grounded elsewhere. A few years later it all made sense to me.”

“Those first few years, it was just me,” says Ryan who stretched Michael Tomson’s maxim about 'size being the enemy of cool' to its singular limit. “I took it slow, though with the interest around I could’ve easily expanded quicker.”

Founder, designer, distributor, and for a time, product model too (needESSENTIALS)

"I love the beginnings of things a lot more than later on, when they become huge," says Simon Buttonshaw, describing Ryan’s new venture. "There's nothing there at the beginning and you're bringing it into existence – that's really good fun. It takes a lot of guts though."

If he’s to be believed, Ryan would’ve stayed a one man band, but he slowly pulled others into his orbit. In 2016, another ex-Quiksilver colleague, Rob Colby, was brought in to distribute needESSENTIALS in the US. That relationship ended with lawyers at ten paces: Colby sued, Ryan counter-sued, yet the case was dropped before a shot was fired.

It’s not an episode you’ll find written in the ‘history’ section on the needESSENTIALS website, and Ryan is loath to talk about it. Yet here we are, and while we’re passing through it’s worth mentioning another case where an American who used the ‘Needs’ brand name years earlier claimed to own the word. Seeing a payday he contacted Ryan.

“I was living in a house with a dirt floor and opened a letter that said I was going to be sued for millions of dollars,” says Ryan despondently. “At that point I was thinking, ‘Fuck, I wish I’d just gone and mowed lawns instead of starting this’."

Cue many quiet moments - in the bush, on his boat - again wondering if he wanted to be a businessperson. People believed in the concept but the challenges and attacks were draining. Ryan started seeing a woman who lived at Byron Bay and began traveling north from Yamba to spend time with her. That storyline runs into a private chapter that continues to this day, but during the trips to Byron another relationship formed.

“I’d go up to Byron Bay and occasionally watch this guy move through the lineups with effortless grace. So effortless it was like most people hadn’t noticed him.”

Torren Martyn was raised in Suffolk Park by a single mother and his grandmother. When he was noticed by Ryan, Torren was working as a swimming teacher and also working part-time in the warehouse of another surf company. Hearing that Torren and good mate and filmmaker Ishka Folkwell were about to travel around Australia, Ryan gave them some wetsuits and petrol money.

Eight years and as many films later, that chance encounter has evolved into something unique in the surf industry. Not just another sponsor-athlete relationship, but a self-sustaining ecosystem of creative characters: Torren's style and charm, Ishka's cinematic eye, Murray Paterson's orchestral soundtracks, Simon Jones shaping the boards.

Caption to come (Gershkow)

An illustration of their hermetic world is needESSENTIALS most recent film, Calypte, which is also their most objectively successful  film: after a national tour it’s since had 1.7M views on YouTube. A superbly crafted surf exploration film, Calypte combines all the elements of needESSENTIALS’ working ecosystem - if not in the film then in its backstory. Family. Self-sufficiency. Adventure. Board design. Music. Film-making.

Like his initial trip with Ishka, Torren was doing the sailing trip anyway. The idea to film it and create Calypte followed the initial impulse for adventure, and not the other way around. A distinction that shifts it more toward documentary than company promo.

There are other examples. In 2018, Laurie Towner joined as an ambassador while working as a tiling apprentice. Two years later, Ryan took him under his wing - just as Jeff Sweeney had done for himself decades ago at Quiksilver. Today, Laurie splits his time between raising his family, using CAD software to improve the needESSENTIALS range, and appearing in the odd film doing what he’s always done: surfing heavy waves with nonchalance.

However it’s Torren who, for better or worse, is the surfer most associated with the brand. Like Kelly and Quiksilver, Occy and Billabong, Mick and Rip Curl. During those early online interviews, Ryan stated there’d be “no marketing”, and at that stage there wasn’t - if there were any press photos they featured Ryan alone. It was true they’d never run marketing campaigns akin to the industry of old, but how else to see Torren and Ishka’s film work as anything other than marketing?

“Well, for starters, Ishka’s passion for filmmaking is also my passion for filmmaking,” says Ryan who indeed is listed as providing additional footage or as executive producer on the films. “The two things I like in this space are making films and designing products.”

“At some point,” Ryan reflects, “when you have employees then you then have a duty to ensure that their jobs will be there into the future. You also have to create some form of economy that shares your story and reminds people that you exist.”

“Anyway,” says Ryan as an afterthought, “if you’re in the market then you’re doing marketing. The point was we don’t create advertising material. Never have, never will.”

It sounds like the last word and possibly should be, except as customers we all know that comes at the checkout. From a consumer’s point-of-view, the ‘no marketing’ mantra resonated as the implication was a cheaper end price. The 3/2 steamer that cost $180 in 2014 now only costs $280 - despite a decade of inflation and supply chain chaos.

Caption to come (Grambeau)

In his 2010 book ‘Salts and Suits’ Phil Jarratt charted the rise and fall of the surf industry, playing with the idea of creative young surfers - the salts - building surf companies whose boardrooms were gradually infiltrated by business people - the suits of course - with little knowledge of the culture the companies grew from.

In the final chapter, Phil provides optimism about the surf industry. The sentiment is well-placed but at the same time incorrect. The industry now is unrecognisable to what it was. Quiksilver and Billabong, once rivals, now share the same corporate owner. Hurley, Volcom, and Rip Curl have all been absorbed by larger entities. The titans that once ruled from Torquay have been vanquished. Controlled by suits who've never waxed a board.

Yet what Phil Jarratt couldn’t know was that as the old monopolies gave way, newer and smaller companies began to take their place. Aside from needESSENTIALS, Dane Reynolds and Craig Anderson, who like Kelly and Ryan were Quiksilver alma mater, started Former, making clothes with zero overtures to the mainstream market. Alongside Former are a slew of rag traders, wetsuit makers, and apparel companies, all owned by surfers and all operating within the new confines of the surf industry.

“The old surf industry,” says Ryan, “had an ego bigger than the actual reality of the surf community.” Once the reckoning came it blew away all the fluff and non-essentials. And while the new order retains many of the old order’s ways – sponsored surfers, surf films, product drops – there's a crucial difference. The scale remains human, meaning the connections remain real.

At present, fifteen people are employed by needESSENTIALS, split between Yamba and Torquay - which is no longer the surf capital it once was. “I’m really grateful for people like Greeny and Lawro, and even Brian Singer and Claw,” says Ryan thoughtfully. “I saw what they did for Torquay and they have every right to hand it over; to let someone else take it on.”

“Right now though,” Ryan continues, comparing then to now, “the surf industry feels like what Quiksilver and Billabong once were. Just these little family and friends communities. I’d like to see the industry made up of a hundred of these companies.”

When he makes the comparison, however, it’s hard not to also wonder if, given the opportunity, the new surf industry will shoot for the stars, go public on the sharemarket, the way Quiksilver and Billabong once did. Or if the owners, Ryan included, will be satisfied remaining at a human scale, making real products, authentic films and art and even activism, while surfing every day.

Perhaps the answer to that lies in the fact he’s been there before and he’s seen where it leads to. "Ryan knows exactly how big a thing can get before he can't live that life anymore," Simon Buttonshaw observes. "If there's a guiding principle in needESSENTIALS, it's a clear recognition of what success really looks like."

//STU NETTLE