25 Minutes Of Candid Kelly Slater On The Topic Of ‘Creativity’

If there’s one thing the surf world has learned in the past 30 years it’s that when Kelly talks, we listen.

Anyone with an Instagram knows that Kelly is an opinionated fellow. Unfortunately as media consumers we don’t get nearly enough exposure to candid GOAT as we’d like, which honestly is probably a good thing. The less time Kelly spends speaking to a camera the more time he has to develop the next world-class wave pool, innovate surfboard design, build eco-friendly clothing manufacturing systems and do things like win 11 world titles.

Murray Bell of Semi Permanent caught up with Kelly early in 2020 to discuss what creativity means to both him and his company. With creativity as the key topic, it only made sense to bring Outerknown co-founder and Chief Creative John Moore into the fold. In what is a winding and incredibly insightful conversation, the two discuss their personal creative outlets, Outerknown’s creative ethos, and how at the end of the day all Kelly really wants to do is live in a van and ride twin fins? Crazy, but when you hear how he talks about it you start to see it…

Kelly and John even go so far as to address the criticism of Outerknown’s price points, explaining their goals to make products that are built to last and seamlessly fit amongst each other. At the time of the interview Kelly had been in Sydney a total of 6 weeks and was only traveling with 10 items of clothing. To hear that the multi-millionaire founder of Outerknown lives by the word his company sews is an incredibly potent argument against any detractor to their eco-friendly model. Kelly said it best, “It just means I have to do laundry a lot.”

Click above as this clip is littered with plenty of thought provoking gold.