Lost at Sea: Surf100, Stab High, SITD and the Projects Keeping Us Up at Night
A taste of what’s to come in 2025.
I got to attend my first Surf Expo earlier this month in Orlando, Florida — a remarkable American city best known for its theme parks and trade shows. One half of the event featured the surf industry as we know it — with some older players and some emerging brands showcasing new products and some innovation. The show also pulled names like Kelly Slater, Filipe Toledo and Rob Machado — getting these heavyweights to an inland event is equal parts baffling and impressive.
The other half of the trade show? A full-blown Landfill in Waiting Festival. The lowest quality, highest margin section was a collection of Chinese-made paraphernalia destined for either a poorly-outfitted Airbnb, or worse, your own suitcase as a regrettable souvenir from a tropical holiday.
Amongst the show were some great people, and it was good to connect on a bunch of inspired topics. At the Florence booth, Ryan and Jeff Hurley dropped a bomb: goofyfooters objectively look worse on a surfboard. And the data backs them up. Their distilled takeaways: Kelly looks like Rizal Tandjung as a goofy, Cory Lopez and Andy Irons are the same surfer, Dane and John absolutely do not work as goofies, plus a bunch of others I can’t recall. We definitely need to explore this at length in the future.
At the show there was also a lot of talk about the future opportunity around the surf industry. Surf participation being at an all-time high and all, the talk often circled back to how Stab would capitalize on the 12 million or 20 billion or however many surfers are in the world. Since we made the move to a subscription model, that’s the question we are often tossed. What’s our TAM (total addressable market)? What are we doing to reach these mythical billions of surfers and capitalize on the LA Olympics in 2028?
It’s cute and flattering to hear these visionaries think big, but we get so lost in the day to day — like if we publish an article reasoning why Steph Gilmore should not return to tour, would she feel painted into a corner and not work with us on a project we’re due to finish this year? (This is the article that never ran, btw.)
When it comes to thinking big, we tend to focus on ideas and execution over scale. If we make a product we like that can connect with 30k or 50k or 100k surfers in the world, then it’s a privilege we get to show up everyday and work on those.
Not that it happens easily.
We have over 20 full-time employees spanning the globe between Portugal, Costa Rica, Northern California and Los Angeles, with our two major offices sitting in Oceanside, California and Byron Bay, Australia. On top of that, we are lucky enough to get to work with highly connected contractors from various parts of the world.
For all of the challenges that distance creates, this spread of talent also gives us insight into various surf cultures and the ability to cover breaking news around the world.
While we’re always trying to uncover untold stories, there’s a singular star that makes or breaks any surf entertainment — whether it’s us at Stab, Nathan Florence, the WSL, Quiksilver or Red Bull, the box office star is and will always be wave quality.
With that in mind, here’s what we’ve been working on this year:
…was the latest How Surfers Get Paid episode, “The High Price of Authenticity: Craig Anderson’s Knee Doesn’t Bend.” This unlikely story fell into place one jigsaw piece at a time — a young unknown shaper from Australia meets an emerging freesurfing talent, and their combined talents lead to the highest-selling surfboard of all time.
Craig was difficult to land for this series but once we sat him down in Hawaii, his stories were raw, and it’s amazing to see someone so principled and resolute. We also love how Hayden held his ground.
The goal with the series now is to anchor each with two stories we’ve never heard before.
Now 100 interviews deep, we have another dozen more eps in the chamber to craft.
Also live now is Stab Highway presented by Monster Energy.
I’m not sure what creates more anxiety: being a participant in this hellish 10-day road trip, or working on the post-production team and trying to distill these stories down into clean and cohesive episodes. Modern surfers get a bad rap for lacking the wild fortitude of previous generations. This series makes a compelling case that those roots have extended to Gen Z bloodlines.
Ten years ago to the day, we spent two weeks in Western Australia with surfboard free agent Julian Wilson. We dragged 11 surfboards west (the Pyzel never made it), and the most unlikely thing happened: a pro surfer went on a surf trip without bringing a single surfboard. The project doubled as a Hurley campaign shoot, and underestimating the power of this series, we did a lot of surfing – and I even organised a secret wedding in the downtime.
We’re now a decade into this project (which has been compared to a “world title for shapers”) but admittedly, it feels like we’ve paddled out one of Italo’s SITD boards at maxing Sunset. We are lost at sea.
In a typical year, our Stab in the Dark shoot should have been wrapped already, a winner chosen, and it would be in post-production ready to drop. Spoiler: we haven’t started. It’s not without significant effort, but we have been setting sights on the impossible for this one. We’ll share details once we have hard drives stacked and copied. The more we speak, the more this project perishes — so silence from us for a while.
Stab High, presented by Monster Energy.
Contests in pools get a bad wrap. But there’s something about a surf event with a set date and time that makes it easy to gather with friends. The engagement on Stab High Japan last year blew our minds (it was our most watched piece of film content in 2024). The brief to our surfers, to our judges, to our commentary is simple: we want this event to feel as surfing does to us when we’re in the parking lot after a day of good waves. Be yourself and enjoy yourself. We want to get out of the way and document it as it unfolds.
This year we are doing two events. We will share invitations with you shortly.
EAST
The Electric Acid Surfboard Test with Dave Rastovich was a gift wrapped in thorns. It was widely accepted as the most impressive version since our original launch with Dane Reynolds. The response has also made us rethink the project in its entirety. Typically, we shot EAST over an eight or 10 day window, but the knowledge and respect Dave had around surfboards elevated this series to a place we could have never imagined.
Our audience has been begging for surfers who ride alt boards to star in EAST, and I was reluctant — I preferred the conflict of a shortboard thresher trying to work the magic from these non-homogenous designs. The thinking was without the tension or conflict, there was no reason for the audience to care about what happens. It turns out, the breakages, the changing of fins, and the absolute surf nerdery was what we all wanted. I was happy to be wrong this time.
We’re about to start production on this year’s EAST. The nine-day surf trip model requires a rethink, and we’ll have our star work through multiple trips and multiple episodes.
Next up is a YETI and Sun Bum feature film we’re working on with Coco Ho, Caity Simmers, Frankie Harrer, and Steph Gilmore. We’ve captured sessions in Australia, Hawaii and the Philippines. Interestingly, one of the first surfboard orders EAST winner Ryan Lovelace received was the world champ, Caity Simmers. First session, she violently and elegantly slammed this end section.
We are bringing Surf100 back to life this year. The format will change a little, but we’re excited to run a post-live broadcast whereby competitors are judged by the Stab audience at home. The format of the final will still be 100 minutes with surfers mic’d up, but we’re close to securing something big: $100k for first place.
While we’re on the subject of $100k, or more specifically $102k (the current price of Bitcoin), we couldn’t afford the Stab Edit of the Year BTC as a prize in 2024 or 2025. The price shot up before we could buy it, and in full transparency, the Bitcoin as Bait didn’t evoke the same feeding frenzy in surfers’ edits as we’d first hoped.
The way the music licensing has changed across platforms like YouTube, Tik Tok and Instagram in recent years means you can couple your surfing with world-class music without breaking copyright rules. We needed music cleared for our bespoke Stab player, and music has to be at least 30% of a good surf clip. It was an unnecessary tax we were putting surfers through, so we clipped it and now surfers can just run their edits on YouTube.
We still want to elevate and celebrate “the surf part” and we’re proud that previous winners, Australians Russ Bierke and Kael Walsh, are still holding their $AUD164k coins.
Beyond our own creations, we’re still going to be licensing pieces in 2025, with Noa Deane’s new film Horse dropping on Premium shortly. Noa is a surfer who believes there’s a market of people who will pay for quality productions, choosing to sell his film on Vimeo (and to us) as opposed to showcasing it for free on YouTube. We have no beef with Youtube, but like Noa, we also couldn’t make this dysfunctional operation work with Adsense revenue.
The internet is drowning in free content, yet somehow, we have an audience and partners who keep us afloat, and that’s something we don’t take lightly.
One day, AI will settle the best high performance shortboard of the year debate with cold, algorithmic certainty. Until then, we’ll pretend pro surfer judgment still counts. We’re not making content for the billions of mythical surfers out there. But for the ones who get it? That’s enough for us.
