Surf’s Up

MAKING WAVES

Jack O’Neill followed his love of water and developed an entirely new business suit—one that has grown into a multimillion dollar business.

BY SIMON VAN BOOY

On his way home from work in the late 1940s, a young man in downtown San Francisco stopped his car on a cliff that overlooked the frigid Pacific Ocean. Then, he took the plunge.

Despite the cold, dark and foggy water, jumping into the ocean after a grueling day at the office was a normal after-work activity for Jack O’Neill, founder and chairman of O’Neill, Inc., a multimillion dollar operation that began with a young man’s quest to keep himself warm in the water.

According to Sporting Goods Intelligence magazine, in May of 2007—55 years aft er O’Neill started experimenting with rubber suits at his little surf shop in Northern California—Logo International spent $403.8 million for the international rights to the O’Neill trademark.

Businesspeople know O’Neill as a tech pioneer and market leader, but to surfers and other water-sport enthusiasts from Scotland to Alaska, he’s simply the genius who found a way to stay warm in near-freezing waters.

O’Neill decided to make surfing his business in the early 1950s aft er being fired from his job selling architectural aluminum to engineers and architects. “I was leaning over expensive architectural drawings and water started coming out of my nose—you tried to explain it, but they knew something was wrong with you because it was illegal to go in the water back then,” O’Neill says.

Before O’Neill could revolutionize the wetsuit business, he had to jump-start it. As a regular swimmer and bodysurfer in water that was frequently below 50 degrees, O’Neill simply wanted to make something that would allow for him to surf longer.

“I went to the Army and Navy surplus store and bought the stuff the World War II Navy frogmen would wear, which you could go in and out [of the ocean] with, but to surf with it was hazardous because when it opened, water replaced the air,” O’Neill says.

O’Neill’s first real success with wetsuit making was with unicellular plastic (which may have been PVC), also salvaged from surplus stores. “I made a kind of diaper out of it that I put under my bathing suit, and that, combined with a girl’s bathing hat, made the diff erence when the water dropped below 50 degrees,” he says.

While O’Neill admits there were more than a few laughs from other surfers, he wasn’t the only person experimenting with ways to extend his sessions in the water.

“One guy took a navy jumper and put Thompson’s Water Seal on it, then sat in an oil slick all by himself,” O’Neill laughs.

His real breakthrough came when he discovered neoprene, used to carpet the aisle of DC-3 passenger planes. O’Neill found the material was an efficient insulator, buoyant and had more “tensile” strength. As he gained more confidence with the material, he began developing designs for the short john, long john, spring suits, long-sleeved-beaver-tailed jacket and full-suit wetsuits.

Opening a surf shop in a garage just yards from his favorite bodysurfing break was also a way for O’Neill to spend time in his beloved ocean and build friendships around it. He sold rubber suits and balsa wood surfboards.

O’Neill recalls how a fellow bodysurfer said he’d be out of business once he’d sold his rubber suits to the five guys on the beach. Boy, was he wrong.

But O’Neill is quick to admit his business was not an overnight success. “Th e business grew slowly—it was a slow, steady growth, and for years we were the only manufacturers of real suits for surfing,” he says.

Like many things in life, it was all about timing. “Th e best thing was to start at that time… but there have been scary times when we didn’t sell enough merchandise. During the early part, 90% of our business was selling the balsa wood surfb oards,” O’Neill says.

When people started writing to him from all over the world, he knew he was doing something right, and within the next several decades, business exploded. Surfing became popularized through movies like Gidget and bands like Th e Beach Boys, and Northern California became a popular surfing area. Demand for O’Neill’s product was not limited to surfers; divers, water-skiers and other water sports-enthusiasts also realized wetsuits would allow them to pursue their hobbies despite the cold water. To gage just how successful the wetsuits are, imagine spending several hours sitting comfortably in freezing cold water, and still having the flexibility to paddle and move around comfortably.

As the business grew, so, too, did O’Neill’s family, and his six children were soon working (and continue to work) for the company. O’Neill now spends a great deal of his time with the O’Neill Sea Odyssey, a program he created in 1996, which consists of a classroom on board a 65-foot catamaran that sails the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. Students learn about the marine environment and the living sea. Th e program is free, but O’Neill explains that students earn their way into the program by designing and performing a project to benefit their communities. According to O’Neill, more than 30,000 children have participated in the program.

While O’Neill is more comfortable talking about the sea than talking about business, he admits that he never saw any conflict between running a business and pursuing his vision. He made wetsuits and surfb oards, and then he tested them. Th e feeling of interconnection between passion and business is echoed in his advice to modern entrepreneurs. “Get into something you like to do—that’s the main thing. Since you spend most of your life working, you’d better do something you like,” he says.

“We’re still doing the wetsuits, which is our core business, and we’ve got over half the quality wetsuit market… that is what the family business is and the main thing I’ve been interested in,” O’Neill says. He explains how the third generation of the O’Neill family is almost ready to get on board. “Th ey’re involved in surfing now,” he says. “The ocean has been very good to us.”

Some might argue it’s now the other way around, since the pioneer of the modern wetsuit has turned his attention to protecting the environment and educating the next generation about the sea.