Nate Florence Signs Career-Altering Deal With Red Bull

Read our Q3 surfing report here.

In 2019, Nathan Florence told us he was ready to become an air guy.

While he launched valiantly — and even landed a few proper airs — the middle of the Florence brother eventually succumbed to gravity and found himself back in his natural habitat: in the vortex of large, hollow waves.

Since then, he’s broken his back, won Stab Surfer of the Year, and built a YouTube audience of over 500k followers that generates a billion interactions per year. Who needs a stalefish backflip, anyway? 

Nate has spoken in depth with Stab about how he views his profession. The gist of it: If you ain’t building your own audience, you’re dead. 

Although Nate’s immense success got in the way of his air game, he still finally got his wings today. Red Bull just announced that the 31-year-old has joined their team. We gave Nate a quick ring to discuss the art of the deal…and heli-surfing Antarctic glacier slabs.

Stab: Congrats on the new deal, Nate. Feels like a massive catch on both sides.

Nathan Florence: “Yeah, it’s funny because I feel like we flirted for six years — just this funny, flirtatious relationship. Watching what Mark Mathews did with Red Bull his whole career, I knew they were the company to be with for what I’m doing — just chasing big heavy waves — but nothing ever came to fruition.

Even after I won the Cape Fear event in Tasmania [in 2019], I reached out and was like, ‘Hey, I want to be on the team. Let’s do something. I just won one of your events.’ And they were kind of like, ‘Ah, actually maybe not.’ And I was like, damn, full rejection [laughs].

Fast forward to now, just having had the last three or four years where I’ve built up the slab tour and become more established, I thought maybe that ship has sailed. Because it feels like Red Bull tends to pick up people based off potential. Most of the time it’s like, This young guy’s possibly going to be winning world titles, and they want to be a part of that growth and enhance that athlete and guide them through that. So I was surprised they came back and were like, “Hey, we want to partner. We love what you’re doing. We love the YouTube, let’s make something happen.”

Where does this sit among your other recent brand changes?

I feel like I’m at this high point in my career, and there are a lot of things going my way — especially with the transition from Vans to Florence and how cool that’s been for me and my brothers. And with Red Bull I just thought, whoa, this is an awesome opportunity. One, I’m honored to be recognized by one of the biggest names in action sports history — that feels good. And then two, where can we take this from here? Just imagining the resources Red Bull has, it’s like, am I getting a helicopter to Antarctica and surfing slabs off of icebergs? Because that’s what you think when you think of Red Bull — just larger than life ideas and projects.

And then I was like, whoa, how can I get Florence in front of all these different disciplines in the sports world? We’re really trying to be an outdoor brand, and Red Bull has this incredible reach through so many different outdoor sports. Red Bull took the hat, which was kind of a big deal for me. I didn’t want to give up the Florence hat, but then I was like, you know what? If this is your guys’ thing, let’s do a co-branded hat. They were stoked to do that. Florence was stoked to do that, and it just felt like a great all around partnership.

So how does your deal look — salary plus travel budget? And what about the duration?

It’s a two-year deal, which I’m told is standard with most of their athletes. But if you look at Red Bull’s team, they tend to work with people for a really long time, so I’m hoping we’re able to do that as well.

And then yeah, it’s super interesting because it’s different from my past deals with brands. Up until now, I’ve funded all my travel out of my salaries from my partners. I’ve never had a travel budget, so I would just blast my salary doing these trips. Thankfully it’s all paid off — Youtube revenue helps and it’s allowed me to grow my brand deals — but with Red Bull, they are big idea people. They’re like, “Hey, pitch us anything. It can’t be too big. We literally have had people skydive out of space, so you pitch is anything, and if it’s manageable, we’re going to do it.”

And so while it isn’t necessarily some specific travel budget, it’s like, the sky’s the limit with the right idea. Or I guess, space is the limit [laughs]. Beyond that it’s a normal contract with a salary, an incentive structure, but then there’s this whole other part of it where you have access to things like jet skis in every country, budgets for major projects, huge logistics planning, as well as athlete performance centers, which is really big deal for someone like me. Like, “Hey, come in, we’ll do your blood work, we’ll do your athlete testing. You have an injury? We got MRIs, we got doctors, we got all these crazy resources to keep you performing.”

And just the jetskis all over the world thing… that alone has to be huge for your program.

For sure, because there’s so many places I go where I see a wave and I’m like… I just need to ski to get there. Not even to tow it, but just to get someone out there to film it or sit on the ski while I paddle it or whatever.

And any ideas what your first trip is going to be with the new stickers?

Not sure yet. The way I travel, the ocean’s going to dictate that, but I hope it’s something heavy, cold and remote. We’re nearing our European winter, so I’m thinking it’ll be toward those regions.