Watch: Ritualistic Tendencies, A Heavyweight Film Of The Year Contender
The eyewear cult releases their first team feature film.
Sink or swim.
Adapting to a changing world is a bitch.
Buy Reeboks, next season, Nikes. Buy a powerband, next semester, fidget spinners. A velcro wallet, next minute, we only accept dogecoin.
Every month, Meta’s Adam Mosseri descends from the platform heavens with another update to the creator/enterprise economy. New growth levers. New retention strategies. Some shiny little button you’re meant to pretend will save your business. Thought you had it all figured out? Here’s to getting fooled, and fooled, and fooled again.
No, the work is never done. Yes, the world will always ask more of you. Shutup and swallow it.
Sink or swim.
When Ritty Vis launched in November 2024 it had the kind of founding myth most surf brands would kill for: Noa Deane, Mikey Wright, Harry Bryant, and Wade Carroll — Stab Edit of the Year 2022 and Film of the Year 2023 winning filmmaker — stakeholders in a high-powered eyewear cult, listing Dion Agius as creative director with the Hill brothers of Globe handling distribution.
On paper, that was already a strange and potent cocktail: freesurfer star power, proper commercial infrastructure, a filmmaker with runs on the board. Dion, an Epokhe co-founder, Former rider/shadow creative whisperer, Standard Procedure side-hustler, broken-board upcycler, shipping-container aesthete, sat in the middle of it with the moodboard.
The thesis was simple enough: target the low-price-point servo sunnies market, use the money to make surf films, use the films to sell the dream, rinse, repeat.
“Surf films have always been the backbone of surf culture,” said Dion at the time. But their ROI? Shithouse.
Despite the collective grommet population almost pulling a hamstring running to the premieres of Noa’s Mash, Horse and Munch, Haz’s Motel Hell and Quik’s Repeater, getting budgetary approval from corporate philistines for surf films has often resembled letting blood from stone.
Injection-molded polycarbonate vision googles, “frames you’re not scared to take to the beach, throw around, take to a fezzy or leave on the dash of your car”, was at least partly a reaction to the modern freesurfer economy — where surfers are expected to make films, maintain relevance, feed the algorithm, travel for swell, pay filmers, pay for flights, often entirely off their own bat.
The brand was also unusually explicit about wanting to keep surf shops in the loop, rather than treating them as nostalgic retail taxidermy. “Surf shops are the heartbeat of surf communities,” Dion said. “We want to partner with them, host events, and bring films directly to these spaces. It’s about creating a real connection, not just selling a product.”
And to their credit, they did.
Within months, Ritual had blown through multiple rounds of inventory. The demand curve was less polite business-school graph and more teens looting a servo for white Monster. “The biggest issue we’ve had is we fucking launched and then pretty much sold out of everything,” Dion said. “We thought we’d ordered heaps of shit.”
They restocked. They sold out again. The team metastasized.
Bungan gals Holly Wawn and Milla Coco Brown joined, giving Ritual two of Australia’s most middle-finger-happy female surfers. Then they crossed the pond, Rajneeshpuram spec, expanding the cult into the US. The cerebral Parker Coffin, its stateside spirit. Mason Ho, its Hawaiian high priest. Two wildly different personalities, both capable of selling the same feeling: surfing as a way to dissolve the normal world.
“We never wanted to be just another product brand,” Dion said. “Surf films and the team, that’s the engine. That’s what builds culture. That’s how we grew up. Watching videos. Frothing out. Wanting to surf. Wanting to be part of something.”
Enough of the brand spiel. If you haven’t already seen it, Ritualistic Tendencies, shot over an 18-month window, is as good as you’d hoped for.
