Patagonia Director, Surf Division Jason McCaffrey
While surfing has long been a passion for Patagonia’s founding Chouinard family, the company has only recently begun to be recognized for its advancements in surf product. Fletcher Chouinard, son of legendary founder Yvon, is pushing boundaries with his FCD surfboards, and Patagonia has been slowly building its reputation in some of the top surf shops by pushing the boundaries of technological innovations in the wetsuit world. Add in one of its best looking surf apparel lines for 2012, and next summer is looking to be a break out surf season for the brand.
At the helm of the Surf Division is Jason McCaffrey, a self described surf bum who paid his dues working up through Patagonia’s retail division, living in the parking lot of FCD’s shop, becoming best friends with Fletcher, and eventually going to Pepperdine to get his MBA, which helped him land the position of director of the surf division five years ago. These days McCaffrey has his sites set on nothing less than revolutionizing the company’s surf group by leading the charge with ground breaking wetsuits. We caught up with McCaffrey to learn more about his vision, how surf became the company’s fastest growing division, and how Patagonia’s culture makes it possible.
How closely do you work with FCD at this point?
That’s my grounding point. I’m at the shop right now. I’ve lived in this shop. Fletch lived in his car in the parking lot. We didn’t care about anything else. All we wanted was to surf and make surfboards, and that’s all we did for a long time. So it’s kind of weird. I’m from New Jersey man. What do I know about the surf industry? It just was something I wanted to do, and I ended up at Patagonia. The surf industry is an industry. You’ve got the Quiksilvers and Billabongs and they’re just mega companies. I wouldn’t last a second there. The thing about Patagonia that’s the best for me, is that I can say and think whatever I want about how I think something should be.
It’s like going to a small school or a big school kind of thing. It’s like, your professor knowing you or not knowing you. Patagonia’s more of a small school. There are down sides to that too, but I think that’s the best thing about it, you can say whacky stuff in front of the whole company if you want. It’s a very open place, where people say crazy things that don’t mean anything, and people say crazy things that do mean something. What I’ve learned from working here is that both good and bad ideas can come from anywhere in the company and all positions and levels. The guy running the company can have a bad idea, and the guy who’s the shipper or janitor can have a great idea and vice versa. At Patagonia, everyone has the same opportunity to work through that idea. I mean, I was homeless living in a parking lot and now I run the surf department, how did that happen? (Laughing)
That’s rad. How does that horizontal structure affect the culture there?
You get a lot of that individual mind-set, and that’s why the culture of the company is what it is…because we draw from the sports we sell to. It wasn’t until recently where, no one who ran this company went to school. They were just kind of “school of hard knocks” and just learned by doing.
I mean, Yvon, one of his best friend’s started The North Face and his wife started Esprit…it’s weird, right? It’s not because they went to school, but it was like, “we do this, there’s an opportunity for it, and there’s a space for it.” That culture is still kind of here, there’s a lot left over.
A sales rep, goes to Huntington Surf & Sport and says, “Yeah, Patagonia’s got this surf scene going on…” and Huntington is like “aren’t you guys an underwear company or something?” Two years later, they’re an account because of the wetsuit.
That culture has gotten lost in a lot of institutions as they get bigger…
It’s funny, as we grow, and we’re growing a lot right now, that’s one of the things that makes people nervous, “oh we’re gonna get all corporate.” And there’s no way! We really look at how fast we’re growing, and we’re like, “nope. Too fast. Too weird. Not comfortable. Dial it back.” We’re a privately owned company so we don’t have to do anything that really feels uncomfortable. So if the owners are like, “ease up, you guys are getting weird on us,” we do it.
Can you give me working example of that? Your wetsuits right now are killing it. Walk me through the development process.
That was my first project. I was tasked with making it a functioning business unit. Basically we came to the market with idea that [nothing] lasts more than six months before it leaks or bags out…it may do one thing really well, it’s super flexible, but it’s really not that warm, and it doesn’t last. We thought we could do it better.
Well, thinking you can do it better, and actually doing it better are two different things. So, pretend cost is not an issue, find the best materials you can, find the best designs you can, and start there. So that’s exactly what we did. We knew the end goal was to make the warmest, most durable, most flexible wetsuit on the market. Finding the right balance between those qualities was the trick that took a few years and then being able to bring it to market at a cost that-even when we brought it to market, we weren’t making any money. We were making a very small margin on the suits. But we felt that it was a good product, and we knew we had to introduce it to the market while we had this interest.
The first suits were the best suits we knew how to make at the time. The second suits were three times better then the first. And now the next generation of suits coming out in the fall will absolutely blow doors on what we have right now. We never tried to be a Rip Curl or an O’Neill. We tried to take the Patagonia philosophy and way of building things— if it’s not built right it’ll come back.
We didn’t make any money, it cost a ton in the beginning, and it took a few years in investment and time of both money and resources and personnel dedicated to this project that didn’t produce anything for a long time, but because we held the course…I mean Yvon said the words, “Do it like this” and because he said it and people executed it, that was the key for getting us into a lot of surf shops that we would have never been considered for in the past.
That set the bar pretty high for you guys coming into the surf market.
Aww dude! This is a funny story, my good friend Bremen, who was a sales rep at the time, goes to Huntington Surf & Sport and says, “Yeah, Patagonia’s got this surf scene going on…” and Huntington is like “aren’t you guys an underwear company or something?” Two years later, they’re an account because of the wetsuit. We actually did something unique. We didn’t know it was going to be that good. We said, “We’re going to build warm wetsuits and we’re going to love them, but who will believe us?” You know what I mean? Having the Malloys be a part of that process was instrumental in getting street cred with the surf community. Those guys obviously have a good reputation and I don’t think people saw them as the kind of guys to be puppets for something for just a paycheck.
Is the surf division profitable for you guys these days?
Oh yeah, it’s the fastest growing unit. Between wetsuits, clothing and surfboards, it has the best margins and it’s the most profitable. We took a wetsuit and charged what we needed to charge. I wish we could do that with surfboards. Every shaper would love -hand-shaped surfboards are a true art. Not to sound weird or lame, but the craft is going to die if we don’t preserve it by charging the correct prices. If we pay teachers what shapers make, our kids would really be dumb.
Some would argue that’s definitely the case. What’s the price tag going to be on Fall 2013 wetsuits?
There will be a slight increase, but nothing major. We’ve had material price increases at the factory level that we haven’t adjusted for on the market side because designs have stayed the same.
In Fall 2013 we’re going to do new designs and we’ll adjust pricing accordingly. It’ll make sense then because we’ll have upgrades in the suits. It won’t be in the hundreds or fifties…but maybe $20.
Follow the jump for the rest of the interview and a look at Patagonia’s 2012 surf apparel.
TAGS: fletcher chouinard, jason mccaffrey, patagonia, Surf Industry, the malloys, yvon chouinard
