I Don’t Surf

I don’t surf.

Which is probably a slightly unusual way to begin the story of a wetsuit company.

I have spent most of my career in advertising, music and brand strategy. I have worked with some of the biggest companies in the world and, as a consequence, spent a slightly unhealthy amount of time thinking about why certain products become objects of genuine desire while others simply become more stuff.

Then, in 2024, I moved to Spain.

For the first time in years, there was enough space around me to think properly about what I wanted to build next.

I knew I did not want to start another company that existed simply because there was a market for it. I wanted to make something tangible. Something difficult. Something where the quality of the product mattered more than the quality of the presentation around it.

A conversation with a friend about Born Slippy eventually narrowed the idea down to one product.

The wetsuit.

It was a peculiar choice.

I didn’t surf. I had no grand childhood story involving dawn patrols, battered boards or growing up beside the Atlantic. What I had instead was curiosity, which turned out to be quite useful.

Over the next two years, I became mildly obsessed.

I spoke to surfers, wetsuit manufacturers, material specialists and people who had spent far more of their lives in the ocean than I had. I bought wetsuits. I pulled them apart. I looked at neoprene, seams, linings, panels, zips and patterns.

I learned what worked.

More importantly, I learned what did not.

And the deeper I went, the stranger the category began to look.

Think about the equipment we buy to spend time outside.

Running shoes are analysed down to fractions of a millimetre. Cycling clothing is tested in wind tunnels. Ski jackets contain extraordinary material technology. Tents have become feats of lightweight engineering.

Then there is the wetsuit.

It is, when you stop to think about it, an astonishing piece of equipment. A second skin that allows a human being to spend hours in cold water. It is stretched, soaked in salt, dragged across sand, folded into bags, dried badly, pulled on and ripped off hundreds of times.

And yet we have somehow accepted that it is relatively disposable.

That did not make sense to me.

What does premium actually mean?

The word premium has been almost completely ruined by marketing.

Put something in a black box. Photograph it nicely. Add some foil to the packaging. Increase the price.

Premium.

But price and quality are not the same thing.

The companies I have always found interesting are the ones where the expense is almost incidental to the obsession behind the product.

Look at Loro Piana.

The fascination is not simply that its clothes cost a lot of money. It is the amount of thought hidden inside things that can appear remarkably simple.

The fibre. The construction. The provenance. The feel. The small decisions that most people will never consciously notice but somehow understand when they put the thing on.

That led to the question that has occupied me for the past two years.

What happens if you treat a wetsuit with the same degree of attention?

Not as surf merchandise.

Not as seasonal apparel.

Not as something designed backwards from a wholesale margin.

As a serious piece of technical equipment.

This wetsuit will never be a bestseller

I have spent most of my professional life around advertising.

David Ogilvy. Levi’s Flat Eric. Guinness Surfer. Cadbury’s Gorilla. The wonderful, strange history of people finding memorable ways to sell things.

At some point during the development of Born Slippy, I began wondering what the advert would be if somebody from that era had written it.

I think the headline might have been:

This wetsuit will never be a bestseller.

O’Neill will not lose any sleep over us. Rip Curl will continue making vastly more wetsuits than we ever will.

We simply cannot make ours quickly enough.

Every Aptus 1.0 is made individually for the person who will wear it. Instead of asking someone to fit into one of a handful of predetermined sizes, we take a detailed anatomical measurement profile and build the wetsuit around their body.

It takes longer.

It costs more.

It is considerably less efficient.

That is rather the point.

Most businesses are built around the pursuit of more. More customers. More units. More distribution. More revenue.

Born Slippy is trying something different.

We will make 1,000 Aptus 1.0 wetsuits.

Not 1,000 this season.

Not 1,000 this year.

One thousand. Ever.

Each one will be individually numbered from 001 to 1000.

When the final suit is made, Aptus 1.0 is finished.

Fewer, better things

The philosophy behind Born Slippy is very simple.

Fewer. Better.

That sounds obvious until you try to build a business around it.

Materials became an obsession.

We chose Japanese Yamamoto limestone neoprene for its stretch, softness and performance. Different parts of the suit use different material specifications depending on what that area of the body needs to do. Some require warmth. Others need movement.

The pattern was developed around freedom through the shoulders and upper body because paddling should not feel like fighting your own equipment.

The seams are glued and blindstitched, then internally taped.

We developed CORECELL because we wanted warmth without relying on a heavy lining that absorbs water.

Even the entry system became a subject of endless discussion. Move a zip by a few centimetres and the way the upper body behaves can change.

These are not particularly glamorous things to talk about.

They do not make for spectacular advertising.

But when you are standing in cold water wearing the suit, they matter enormously.

That difference interests me far more than whether something looks good on Instagram.

Why you won’t find it hanging in a surf shop

I do not want Born Slippy hanging on rails in hundreds of shops.

Again, not a particularly conventional ambition for somebody trying to sell wetsuits.

But Aptus 1.0 is not really something you wander into a shop, pick up in a medium and take home.

It is made for you.

That creates a different kind of relationship between the person making the product and the person buying it.

We measure you.

We build your suit.

We put your name and individual number inside it.

We repair it.

And, eventually, we want to understand what happens to it at the end of its useful life.

The ambition is not to persuade someone to buy another wetsuit next season.

It is to make one they would rather keep.

Built for consequence

Eventually, I contacted Andrew Cotton.

Cotty has surfed waves at Nazaré that most sensible people would prefer to observe from a cliff several hundred metres away.

When I first spoke to him, I assumed the most interesting thing about a big-wave surfer would be the willingness to paddle into enormous waves.

It isn’t.

It is the preparation.

Over the past year, that is the thing I have come to understand about him.

When the consequences become serious, equipment stops being fashion.

You do not want to wonder whether something will work.

You need to trust it.

Cotty began testing Aptus 1.0 and giving us the kind of feedback that can only come from somebody who has spent decades putting equipment into situations far beyond anything I could reproduce myself.

He questioned things.

He broke things.

He suggested changes.

We changed them.

Eventually he became Born Slippy’s Founding Athlete.

There is something pleasingly absurd about it.

The founder of the wetsuit company does not surf.

The man helping him build the wetsuit surfs waves the size of buildings.

Somehow, it works.

The €1,295 question

Which brings us to the uncomfortable bit.

Aptus 1.0 costs €1,295.

The hardest thing about making a €1,295 wetsuit is not necessarily making one.

It is explaining why it costs €1,295.

Because there are many very good wetsuits that cost considerably less.

If price is the most important consideration, you should probably buy one of them.

We are not interested in persuading everybody that they need Aptus 1.0.

They do not.

The price reflects the materials, the construction, the individual measurement process, the time involved in producing each suit and a deliberate decision not to design the product around mass manufacturing.

There are easier ways to build a wetsuit company.

There are certainly more scalable ones.

But after spending most of my career helping companies tell stories about products, I have become increasingly interested in doing things in the opposite order.

Make the product worthy of the story first.

Advertising can make almost anything look interesting for thirty seconds.

It cannot make a mediocre product excellent.

Eventually, somebody has to open the box.

They have to put the thing on.

They have to paddle out.

And at that point the advertising department is no longer invited.

The rubber simply has to work.

September

So this is where two years of drawings, samples, conversations, mistakes, measurements, arguments, prototypes, late-night WhatsApps and microscopic decisions have led.

September 2026.

Born Slippy exists.

That sentence still feels slightly strange to write.

Aptus 1.0 is no longer an idea sitting in a notebook or a prototype travelling backwards and forwards from a factory.

People can buy one.

I have absolutely no idea whether we will sell ten, one hundred or all one thousand.

I would be lying if I said that did not make me nervous.

But there is something liberating about arriving at this point.

For two years, almost everything has been within our control.

The product. The material. The fit. The website. The photography. The packaging. The details.

Now it leaves our hands.

The only thing that matters next is whether somebody puts Aptus 1.0 on, walks into the water and feels the difference we have spent two years trying to create.

Cotty recently tested one of our prototypes at Croyde Bay.

Afterwards, he said:

“I’ve surfed some of the biggest waves on the planet and worn some of the best equipment ever made. Born Slippy is the wetsuit I choose to wear now. The custom fit is incredible, the CORECELL technology is next level, and the Yamamoto neoprene feels like cashmere against your skin. It’s performance without compromise.”

For a wetsuit company founded by someone who does not surf, I will take that.

Aptus 1.0 is now live.

1,000 individually numbered wetsuits. No more.

Stay Slippy.

Pioneering the ocean’s future.