Now Unlocked: Mission Control by Octopus

“We wanted to start Octopus as a little rebellion against big time corpo surf industry stuff,” I’m told, by the man known in certain underground circles as ‘The Octopus’. 

“As we all know, the last few years, all of those big surf brands have been bought and sold and packaged in a way that feels very weird based on how our industry should be,” says the Octopus. “It’s been 10 years since that all started to unfold and it’s been 10 years since we started Octo. Our team is just guys who all wanted to have specific grips, and to have more input on what they rode. We started making these pads as a creative experiment. It ended up being more successful than we thought, but it’s still just a small little accessories brand that we’re trying to have fun with. The idea behind it is that we’re a covert group of surfers trying to conspire to take the surf industry back and put it in the hands of people who actually surf.”

How successful has Octopus been?

Well, they consistently top our yearly Audience Survey as our community’s traction pad of choice — coming in as a clear leader over larger accessory brands — and they have a team that can casually put together a film like the one above. 

“We spent a lot of time on a project that we ended up not being able to put out,” says the Octopus. “And then with all the crazy post-COVID, weird surf economy tariff stuff, we’ve been just trying to navigate on the business side. It kinda takes the creative juices out of ya, and it’s such a small crew at Octo. If we’re dealing with that stuff, we’re not dealing with fun stuff.”

It’s been nearly three years since the last eight-legged rip-clip, but Mission Control is worth the wait. 

“This film started with us wanting to do a little summer edit,” he continues. “I hit up the boys and just asked them for any clips that didn’t have a home. That was two years ago now, and because people started sending so much good stuff we realized we could probably make a movie. Once we decided to make a film, it kept snowballing, and people kept sending us more stuff.”

Editor and longtime Octopus business partner Matt Payne elaborates.

“Everybody kept sending more and more stuff,” says Matt. “Then we got Kael [Walsh] on the program and he sent through some crazy stuff, so everybody kinda had to level up. Dion was coming off the back of some Globe projects and, as you’ll see, he was really doing his best surfing.

“We realized we could make a full team movie, and we landed on the concept of trying to make it something that we show in the streets and dive back into the community,” continues Matt. “And, it just so happened to coincide with us being 10 years into making pads.”

“It’s funny,” concludes the Octopus, “Because the way the world went, we’re in such a weird political environment right now, the film almost comes off like we’re trying to save the world or something. We’re not trying to save the world, we’re just trying to save surfing and have fun.”

Click above to watch Mission Control, and watch for a full BTS editorial breakdown of the film dropping on site next week.