There is an interesting interplay between surf shops and wave pools. Some facilities sign on with a large, international brand while others choose to craft their own hyper-localized shop. But how do you decide which option for your surf park? To complicate these decisions, often made before the first shovel hits the ground, is that your customer demographic data is often just a crystal ball forecast. Fortunately, Atlantic Park Surf already had a bead on the established surf scene in Virginia Beach.
There are three established surf shops within a couple of blocks radius of the wave pool, which helped clue in decision-makers. Ultimately, the choice by Atlantic Park Surf was made to work with East Coast legacy retailer Wave Riding Vehicles, or simply WRV, which opened its first shop just down the street in 1967.
To learn more about the connection to Virginia Beach surf history, the legacy surf shop and how stocking a pool shop differs from stocking a beach-focused shop, we spoke with L.G. Shaw.
How did this arrangement come about? It’s a very competitive retail arena.
It was a pretty natural, organic confluence of events that led to that. To my knowledge, this is the first wave pool of consequence to actually get built inside of a surfing community. There’s no other one that’s truly embedded where the bulk of the population has built their lifestyle around the beach and being able to ride a beach cruiser to go surf every day. That was probably the biggest change. Blake has a wealth of knowledge on it all, and he was one of the guys who advocated for it to be set up this way from the very beginning, almost ten years ago.
There was a big grassroots movement from the surf community to see something like this happen. At that point, the technology was still pretty elementary and people were looking at it more as, “Hey, this will be fun. We can knock the rust off. It’s a great on-ramp for beginners.”
That was me from the very beginning. We’ve got the largest surf school and surf camp in the city, one of the bigger ones on the East Coast for the number of kids that go through it. To me, it became this opportunity of, man, that’s just going to be an incredible opportunity for people to learn to surf and come into the lifestyle.
The sandbars can be junk out here at the oceanfront. There will literally be no waves. We’ll get a nor’easter in the middle of summer and it’s chest high, and you’ve got little ten-year-old kids trying to learn to surf and just getting wrecked.
Through the years, we continued to engage with Venture, who is the master developer for the whole project. The whole time, we’re tied into different groups of people and saying, “Hey, we can help lead the way. We have all the relationships with vendors. We’re the largest surfboard manufacturer. We distribute raw materials on the East Coast. We’ve got networks, surf camps, and we’re ready to plug and play for a lot of these pieces.”
The development team decided to go with you because you’re already established?
Yes and because of what we can do here. I can’t speak to Australia because I’ve never been to the wave pools there. But when you go to Waco, it’s a great facility and really good people. One of the biggest shortcomings is the rental equipment. The suits get dilapidated. The boards get dinged up. The amount of infrastructure, manpower, and knowledge it takes to maintain that stuff is enormous.
To my knowledge, no one has a rental fleet like we do in the world. I think we’re going to continue to maintain one of the largest, most well-rounded rental fleets of surfboards of any wave pool. Because we have our own secondary market and our own shops, what are you going to do with all these things when you’re in Waco, Texas? How do you unload hundreds of boards a year? How do you unload hundreds of wetsuits a year without bulk selling them to someone in Costa Rica?
For us, the life cycle of these things can be maintained a lot better. We can, as soon as the board’s blown out a fin, get rid of it, sell it, still get our money back, and put a new board right back into the mix. We continued to present ourselves to them by saying, “Listen, you can probably do this without us, but we can help you guys keep Atlantic Park Surf this pinnacle concept a little easier. We can do some of the grunt work on the side in our stride, whereas otherwise you’re going to have to partner with somebody somewhere to offload all this stuff.”
A lot of wave pools partner with a larger brand. It’s kind of plug-and-play.
Totally. We did the same thing. We’ve partnered with Rip Curl because we know they’ve got the product mix. They’re one of the most vertically integrated brands. You have other brands that have similar product mixes, but they’re through different licensees and they’re fragmented. You’re actually talking to three different sales managers to get one project accomplished.
The nice thing with Rip Curl is we’ve known the team for a long time. They’re a very clean organization. You’re talking to one person who talks to one person in Australia to get a budget approved or not, and that’s it.
Through all the bankruptcies of Liberated and all these challenges, they were ahead of the curve because they got bought by Kathmandu well before all that. They’ve worked out all their growing pains and seem to really be on the upswing globally with their branding, style, collaborations, and everything.
In stocking the shop here, is it different than a beach location?
It has to be so much more curated. We had hoped for 1,500 square feet. We’re down to 700 square feet. That just became the beast that it was as they were developing the place. We got squeezed because ultimately you have to have the back-of-house operations to make the thing work.
It’s been a really fun challenge. Alec and the Hanbury team actually designed the interior here as well for us. We wanted to finish off the look of the whole outside and inside. They call it the surfboard chapel. All the face-outs are actually closets. You push them and they’re all very deep. So we had to make it hyper-curated and super specific in the type of product.
What we’re finding is that sales are need-based. We have a retail location on the beach at Hobo’s in Puerto Rico. It’s the same thing. You’re not going down there shopping for back-to-school clothes. You’re going because you want sunblock, wax, a leash, ding repair. Same thing here. Of course, the destination product, the unique Atlantic Park Surf stuff, is really going. We’re trying to feature Rip Curl’s pinnacle product and show something like that off. That’s been a big hit for sure.
Are the customers here different than the customers at the larger WRV shop?
They really are. It’s been really fun to learn them. This space has only been open for a few weeks. Last August, when the lagoon opened, we were running out of the glass kiosk at the front check-in counter. We got the keys to this in December, and by then the casual customer was almost done for the season.
We’re learning quickly and on the fly. As mentioned, some of the top products have been the necessity-based items, sunblock, surf wax, and then the Atlantic Park Surf branded merchandise. Fins and all those types of things.
We’re looking forward to getting into summer and watching that consumer. Because we’re one block off the boardwalk, there’s definitely going to be some foot traffic and some pass-through. But right now, we’re really learning what this one-of-a-kind wave pool in the middle of an existing neighborhood surf community is going to generate for us.
Is there anything unique about working with a surf park or wave pool that differentiates the business model here?
It’s been amazing to watch. Virginia Beach has had a long-standing, bumpy relationship with public-private developments and the naysayers that were doubting all this. Once it comes online, you watch them walk into the facility and they just go, “Wow.”
You see it. They can’t fight a smile coming on. Then they walk out there and watch the waves happen and start smiling like, “Wow, this is a lot nicer than I thought it was going to be.” Once they get in the water, they’re awash with this stoke.
The most unique thing here is that this wave pool is inside of three or four other surf shops within a couple-block radius and everyone’s benefiting from it. All the shops are growing. We’re loving watching and learning what the customers coming in here want and need, and we’re excited to see where it takes us.
It’s interesting because Bob McKnight used to talk about growing the pond. Surf schools did that, but now wave pools have effectively grown the pond.
Yeah. We forgot to build the pond. We needed to grow the pond, but the pond was never there. We were still trying to make the ocean bigger. You can’t make the ocean bigger. Mike Riley, who used to be one of Bob’s main guys at Quiksilver, and I used to always get in fights over wave pools. I’d say, “They’re never going to be real. They’re kooky.”
At that point Bob and those guys were already involved in Slater’s thing. He kept looking at me and saying, “Just wait.” I said, “No, man. It’s going to be Typhoon Lagoon forever. It’s going to be a novelty.” Sure enough, when this thing happened, I called him and said, “Okay, you were sandbagging me. You knew.”
It’s been amazing to see people come and find surfing. The thing that you see here, way more than at the beach, is the whole family. You saw it walking in. The whole family is here. You’ve got to get the whole family involved. You’ve got to get the next generation involved. You’ve got to keep the pond growing.
