Does Surfing Work In The City?
Images by Renzo Steffens / Jaas Roeper / Senne Roeper
There’s a bit of an odd trend in surfing right now, at least around Southern California.
I’m not talking about anything like people screwing keel fins into their thrusters. No, I’m talking about the recent string of professional surfers who have made the active decision to move to Los Angeles. I won’t name names because that’s what annoying people do to make themselves sound interesting. But why anyone would swap the scenery of Southwest France, Bali, and anywhere else with white sand beaches, blue water, and better waves for grey, sandy air, the gnarled feet of diseased seagulls, and LAX is beyond me.
Yes, there are galleries. There are parties. There are, always, every Thursday, at least 15 shops on the east side with 50 people in them dishing out gratis Modelos and natural wine. This is a city where you never get bored because the chief export is figuratively and literally entertainment. When you move here you make friends with people who will go on to do wonderful things. Or at least that's what you're told.
I’ve spent a decade and some change living here and LA is all those things. It’s also your taking an hour to get anywhere from everywhere, El Porto, and living in that grey middle zone of a Venn diagram between FOMO and squalor. Do I complain about it? Constantly. But I also reckon that if I actually did move to some remote cottage on the coast like I’m always threatening to do I’d spend my time doing a lot of thinking about my life and if it was better when I could still walk to my favourite bar where all my friends were and we had interesting things to talk about.
Surfing has a strange relationship with cities. Strange in that we don’t do them. The first cornerstones of every contemporary metropolis weren’t set down a millennia ago because the waves happened to be firing out front. Rome wasn’t built in a day and it certainly wasn’t built because there’s a consistent beach break on the banks of The Tiber either.
Think about it: on one hand, there are obvious crowd and wave-quality factors. And on the other much, much larger hand, this hand almost 12 times larger than its opposite, which can barely hold a golf ball, while this one is the size of one of those novelty foam fingers you get at football games, anyway on that grotesque thing: get real. If you live somewhere like New York, Barcelona, or Tokyo is hitting the surf your primary concern? No. You moved there because you’re human and have the very human craving for excitement, opportunity, and new experiences.
So, does surf work in the city? Well, if you tuned out everything written above or talked to the right Paul Zeper in The Netherlands before, your answer may be, “Why wouldn’t it?” Paul heads up New Amsterdam Surf Association, a fashion, clothing, and surf outfit in the Venice of the North. The nearest surfable beach is 40 minutes away by car and it only really gets good 10 times a year. Yet, despite all that, Paul and New Amsterdam are thriving. Their storefront is located on the very central Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal straat, maybe only a minute’s bike ride from the city's Royal Palace. Their most recent project was an exclusive capsule with the 147-year-old Rijksmuseum. And, most importantly, they’re still finding success by combining their favourite aspects of surfing with their city’s unique characteristics.
Are they cool because they’re bringing the city into surfing? Or, are they cool because they’re bringing surfing into the city? Well, it’s hard to say because there’s more to it than just that. But if there’s a blueprint to making surf work in the city, Paul’s got it stuffed away in a filing cabinet somewhere in The Netherlands. We talked to him to see if he’d tell us the secret:
Afternoon Paul! It is the afternoon where you’re at, right?
Yeah, yeah. I’m just now leaving the office.
Oh wow would you look at that I just got into mine.
Where did you say you are?
I’m in Los Angeles. It’s fun and all, it’s just a bit expensive and the surf’s not exactly that great.
I bet. Well, the surf’s not that great either here around Amsterdam.
But there are plenty of other distractions.
A lot (laughs).
So you founded New Amsterdam, correct? How’d that come about?
Yes, I had a different brand before and I started New Amsterdam as a line within that brand. I kind of went one way and the rest of the brand went the other way. I actually used to professionally windsurf, so I used to do World Cup competitions in windsurfing and I always felt a bit like an outsider in terms of the way I dressed and was someone who was living in Amsterdam.
I was living a different lifestyle than what everybody else was doing and living. So at a certain point, when the brand kind of split up, naturally, I thought that New Amsterdam would be the right way to go. I wanted to make it more of a brand by surfers and communicate the surf part a bit more. The first brand that I started was more of a fashion brand, and not so, so focused on the surf side. It just clicked and that was what made it special. Like, the surfing we have here, living in a city, and not being about that palm tree blue-water lifestyle that every brand is portraying. So yeah, that was five years ago.
Oh, how time flies. That attitude is definitely reflected in the brand too, and it’s great. Usually, it’s the other way around with a surf brand trying to become fashion, and it just trips over its own shoelace belt.
And, well, in terms of marketing, if we had taken big brands as an example, they really start catering to the old surf guys. And then you have the ones that are, I don't know, like sports shops or something, and it’s a bit similar but they have a very different focus in terms of sales. Usually, it’s from a lower, lower angle in terms of pricing and positioning. So, it's impossible to work up from there. And then we, well, we live in the city more than we actually surf. I mean, if possible we'd like to surf more. But that just isn't the case. If there is a description it’s not super, in terms of copywriting, not the nicest. But it's more of a fashion brand by surfers than it’s for surfers. We'd like to welcome everybody, of course, and surfing’s still our passion and it brings a lot of inspiration that we use for the brand.
Right, so you've had the storefront that in Amsterdam for about five years then as well, right?
So, the storefront opened right in the midst of Corona.
That’s, uh, that's really tricky timing.
We were lucky because the brand was taking off and we didn't even have an office yet because I just started by myself and was doing work from home and other different places. But we were at the point where somebody else was getting involved and started working with me on the brand and we were moving on the decision of going to work on it full time. So, at that point, we needed an office and then this spot came around and we were like, “Hey, that actually... We could have an office and a little shop and the shop could pay the bills.” So it would be a free office basically. But that kind of didn't work.
Oh, that’s tough.
Well, not the way where we wanted it. But it was still a fairly cheap office. So yeah, that's how we opened the store and we had the office upstairs and then about one-and-a-half years ago we actually moved out of the store and opened an office in the south side of Amsterdam.
So, how does essentially a surf-adjacent shop work scene-wise in Amsterdam? Were people more, like, what are you guys even doing? What was sort of the city’s vibe from the get-go?
So, I took it away from that other brand and really started working with the rebranding first. Like, okay, what, what am I about? What is this brand about? What should the feeling be around the brand? And then I looked into if there were actually more guys like me living in the city, people who are really stoked and addicted to surfing but just live that more city lifestyle with their surfing. And then I found a couple of guys who had actually just started a surf team. So when we did the first pop-shop day, we all invited our friends and other people who were very much more interested in surfing than fashion and the city lifestyle. And when we opened the store, there were still these people that were an extension of the pop-up shop that we did those four or five years before. It was natural.
So is there exactly a surf scene within Amsterdam itself, because the nearest beach is like, what? Forty minutes away by car?
Yeah, 40 minutes. Not too far. But yeah, a lot of people that we sell to with the brand… don't actually surf at all. I think 99 per cent of the people that buy our products don’t surf (laughs).
I mean that’s that golden, disposable-income-sparing customer base right there, though.
I sometimes don't even understand it myself. They just have a good feeling about the name and the brand and the logo that I guess doesn't need them to actually surf (laughs). But, I mean, with Amsterdam we do have it all and all within quite a small area. It’s a small city with a big mindset. It's competitive but in a good way. It all kind of mixes as well. I think it's just quite a good place now for brands and there are quite a few successful ones starting here now.
How did the collaboration with the Rijksmuseum come about?
So they have this website called the Rijksstudio that has all the art from the museum in high-resolution, and you can actually download them and use them for commercial purposes if they're, like, 100 years old or older. They're copyright free. I had already actually been using it for a lot of years. Then last year I used an image with The Threatened Swan on a shirt and that shirt made KLM's Magazine. One of the directors of the museum saw that image in the magazine and was like, “Why?” But why in a positive way. Like, “Why do I not know this is there?” And then the ball started rolling and we started having meetings with them and they came up with the idea to do a collaboration for the premiere exhibition of the year that actually just ended.
So, what message were you hoping to communicate through the pieces? Was there a deliberate intention other than a celebration of all things Dutch art and craftsmanship?
The collab was all focused on Vermeer paintings. It just focused on one artist and we looked into what his techniques were and what he was he known for and knew about and we tried to amplify that through the pieces. For example, he was known for having quite a rough brushstroke at that time. So with the cardigan, we took that quite literally and made one big brushstroke as the embroidery on top of that piece. That’s how we took a more conceptual approach to every piece.
It certainly must feel cool to be an original Dutch company working not just with the most famous museum in the Netherlands but one of the most famous museums in the entire world.
It's definitely quite, quite high on the list of best-known museums in the world (laughs). So that's quite, it's quite crazy and I still need to pinch myself sometimes.
I just want to touch a little bit more on the surf aspect of the Netherlands. I’m just curious, like, what’s the scene exactly? Are there actual guys who are going from Amsterdam to the beach several times a week?
It depends a bit on the different spots, but the one that we go to usually, Wijk Aan Zee, is the nearest to Amsterdam. There's not much going on there. There are a few towns around it, but you still need to go there by car. But, most people that surf there are from Amsterdam or other towns around.
The most known spots are more in the south of the Netherlands within the city of The Hague. They also have that core surfing community in that city. If you live in the Hague you can bike to the nearest surf spot and if the surf is good you can actually see girls and guys cycling with boards under and their arms and it's quite busy actually. I think on a good day now you can easily come around to 200 people in the water, for sure.
It's such a small, small country. But being in the city, you don't really notice that too much. Also, the surf is so on and off. It's very weather-dependent and very short-term.
I assume the North Sea isn’t exactly forgiving.
Not at all. And it's shallow as well. We really only get wind waves with short ranges it’s shore break with the sandy beaches of course. We don't have reefs and we don't really get we get the best swell. The best swells we get are northern swells, like north-northwest, but that still doesn't travel on a five-kilometre deep sea level and I think the average between the Netherlands and the UK is maybe 25-metres.
But for someone who wants to live in a metropolitan city and have the opportunity to experience some culture while still having the opportunity to surf, even if it’s not great, but an opportunity nonetheless, it must be nice.
I mean, we’re always coming from Amsterdam and we can go to some other spots by train which drops off 50 metres from the seaside. So that's quite handy sometimes. But when I started I was always looking for guys that already had their driver's license and had a car. And when I look at the surf team now, which is quite a bit younger, I think it's all about hustling, finding who has a car and then getting a ride to the beach.
I'm sure it certainly makes for a much more dedicated group compared to everyone who’s lucky to live on the beach somewhere in the South of France or California or Australia where it's just a matter of convenience for the most part.
And also the type of surf. Like, the really good sessions we get here in the Netherlands come around only ten times a year, tops.
But those ten feel spectacular, I'm sure.
Yeah, but before having those ten, you're getting fifty bad sessions in (laughs). So, you’re cursing and getting a bit annoyed because you had all these expectations and it sucks, kind of. But our mindset is also more about having fun with almost nothing, in terms of waves. But I think, you know, if you look at the places like Hossegor, you’re still spending more time out of the water than actually in the water. Especially if it's autumn or spring and it’s, yeah... It's fucking boring as hell. There’s nothing going on there besides a bit of surfing and maybe having a few drinks with your mates. That's also a thing that you get really used to though if you’re in the city but then you still have tons of restaurants and clubs and all that kind of stuff. You start to miss that if you leave those places.
So what’s on the plan next?
Well, it’s a bit of a hectic week. We have Paris Fashion Week next week and we always exhibit our new collection there. We don't do a show or anything, but we have this little showroom where we have all the pieces and we are just now getting our samples and everything is super late, so we have to go through the prices and the photos and that's a bit of a last-minute shuffling around, but it'll be fine. It doesn’t matter if you're a huge, huge brand or just a T-shirt brand. It's always the same.
And then after Paris, it's quite busy here. The sales team goes to Berlin the weekend after and the surf team goes to Biarritz but during that time I will be in Tokyo with another colleague and we’re having a showroom over there. And then I think the week after the sales team gets back they're off again to New York.
You’re almost covering every single continent there. Now, what’s the deal with the NASA surf team?
We’re about ten guys all from work. It’s not too formal. We don't really do much. Our expectation is that everybody shows up at a couple of photo shoots, and we do the surf trips and we send some clothing. And some people do the editing or the photo shoots, and we pay them of course, but we don't really do contracts and anything.
Well, I'm sure they're a diehard bunch. Thanks for chatting Paul! enjoy your evening and we'll talk here soon I'm sure.
Yes! Thank you.