The New Surf Industry Lives In Garages
As surfing splinters into a thousand independent voices, Maze is betting there’s still room for another.
Every generation likes to believe it’s witnessing the end of something.
With the erosion of the legacy surf industry, new brands have been sprouting like artisanal bakeries in gentrified neighbourhoods.
It wasn’t long ago that there were millions of seats and only a handful of stages. Now everyone seems to have climbed onto an upside-down beer crate with something to say, shout, or sell. The audience thins, replaced by a stampede of founders, filmmakers, shapers, and all kinds of entrepreneurs betting on themselves. Maze founder Jake Schoonover is one of them.
“There’s always another way, there’s always another path to choose,” says Jake, a former sponsored skateboarder from Glendora, just outside LA, who got into surfing after moving to San Clemente in middle school.
Unfortunate knee injuries between the ages of 15 and 22 kept him away from skating and surfing. Around the same time, a barber friend showed him how to handle scissors and a comb. During COVID, he started cutting hair for the crew at the …Lost factory.
Coincidentally, they were behind on orders and he ended up being offered a job. “I started doing deliveries, then ended up managing the factory for a bit, got into airbrushing — it was a little bit of everything.”
Maze began taking shape under Matt Biolos’ roof. “It came about organically while I was working at Lost,” Jake says.
If autonomy has become the last true luxury, why spend your life building someone else’s company when you can risk building your own? “A big thing for me was wanting to feel like I can provide for my family and still be doing what I love to do,” Jake says.
The blueprint is similar to that of brands like Rage and Octopus, or, in a different product category, Epokhe and Ritual Vision. Keep the operation small enough to remain legit, surround yourself with an eclectic and interesting crew, give them a platform, and reinvest a good chunk of the profits into the best type of advertisement there is: quality surf films.
Andrew “Droid” Doheny was the brand’s first believer. “He was the first person riding my pads. He’d give me Slob Craft surfboards, and we’d basically trade.”
Jake then started supporting talented local groms with product and pointing lenses at them. “The funds weren’t there to pay the biggest names, so it happened with people I actually knew.”
Born in San Clemente, Maze follows the lineage of the garage brands that came before it with a touch of the inevitable post-modern obsession with nostalgia. But it’s hard not to when you’re starting a grassroots traction brand in the spiritual home of surfboard traction.
Where Paths Collide is Maze’s web screen debut, introducing both the brand and the collective determined to push it forward. “I’m not trying to overly push anything. I just want to keep making movies, showcase underground talent, and build it that way.”
Like the brands that inspired it and the ones still waiting on their own upside-down beer crates, a new generation may not realise it’s living through the beginning of something, not the end.
If you’re an IRL kinda fella, come meet Jake and the rest of the Maze team for their film premiere at Shoots in Oceanside, CA, this September 18.
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