Picture two surf retail stores.
Same-sized floor space, similar stock, right next door to each other.
One of them people rave about.
The other one they forget the second they’ve paid (if they go inside the store at all).
What’s the difference? It’s almost never the money. It’s rarely the stock. It’s the feel of the place… the reason one shop gets talked about and the identical one beside it doesn’t. The reason people walk straight past the first door to get to the second.
You can’t spend your way to that feel. If you could, the brands with the deepest pockets would win every time. And they don’t.
The thing that actually wins?
I call it your Frequency.
What TF is your “Frequency”?
Think of it like this.
Every surf brand’s giving off a signal whether they mean to or not. Your brand. My brand. Your mate’s brand. Every brand. Most of them are static. Noise. A muddle of half-truths and me-too messaging that nobody can quite tune into.
Then every now and then one comes through crystal clear. You lock onto it without trying. That’s a brand broadcasting on a clean Frequency.
It’s more of a thing you transmit than consciously create. It’s the reason someone (generally your target audience) locks onto you before they can explain why.
Chances are you’ve already got a Frequency. It’s been broadcasting since day one. You’ve just never tuned it properly! So it comes through fuzzy, which is exactly why your customers can’t lock onto it yet.
It’s already there. You just haven’t tuned it
Your Frequency isn’t something you perfect in a branding session, although coming together with your business partners or mentors to talk about it is a good place to start.
It’s a combo of aesthetics, deeply personal choices and your ability to say “No” to things that don’t align with you with just a dash of consistency in how you run things thrown in.
It’s the signal that’s been broadcasting under your whole operation the whole time.
Sometimes it comes through. Mostly it doesn’t. But it’s there in:
- The boards you refuse to build
- The trips you’d never send someone on
- The fabric you spent a fortune sourcing
- The people you hire
- The customers you quietly hope come back
- The stuff that makes you roll your eyes when a competitor does it
Your team can’t tune into it yet because nobody’s dialed it in. So it scatters across a dozen channels instead of broadcasting loud on one.
Which brings me to the problem most brands have when it comes to their Frequency. It’s not that you’ve got no signal. It’s that it’s never come through clean enough to resonate with the people you want to attract.
So let’s dial it in.
Tuning in: A step-by-step guide
1. The one sentence that tunes you in
Here’s a little exercise you can do to start uncovering your Frequency.
Pull up a Google Doc or grab a pen and go analog. Better yet… get your crew in a room and fill in the blanks together:
“After seeing ______ among my customers, the truth I wish they knew is that ______.”
Here’s what goes in each:
- First blank: The thing you watch happen over and over that quietly drives you a bit mad. It might be the reason you started the business
- Second blank: The slightly-too-honest insight you keep trying to get people to understand about your brand or service
A couple of examples.
Here’s one for a shaper who’s watched people buy the wrong board for years:
- Shaper: “After seeing surfers chase whatever pro model is blowing up right now then blame the board when they surf like sh!t, the truth I wish they knew is that the right board isn’t the priciest one. It’s the one built for the waves you actually surf and the body you actually have”
And one for a travel agent who’s over booking the same ol’ trip for clients:
- Travel agent: “After seeing people blow their one big trip a year chasing crowded, fickle or overhyped breaks, the truth I wish they knew is that the best trip isn’t the famous wave. It’s the right wave for your level and budget (and always, ALWAYS away from those gawd damn crowds)”
Same shape works for an apparel brand, a surf coaching operation, a boardbag maker, whoever.
Little note. Don’t you dare edit yourself while you’re doing this. Use a heap of words.
Write twenty of these. Write forty.
Make a mess.
I want you to really dig into the main truths that you wish your audience knew. Then we move on to the next step…
2. Cut it down to three
Once you’ve got your pile of messy truths, get the scalpel out.
Read back through the lot and do this:
- Keep the ones that make something in your chest go “yeah, that’s the one”
- Kill the polite ones
- Kill the ones that could belong to any surf biz (i.e. the ones that are too generic)
- Keep the ones that make you feel nervous… like you dunno whether they should be made public
After that you can squeeze down your truth using AI so it’s crisp and clear and jazz it up a bit so it sounds human. Like this:
- Shaper: “We don’t build trending boards. We build boards that’ll make you fall in love with surfing all over again”
- Travel agent: “We don’t send you to crowded, over-hyped surf zones. We build trips around your surf level and your budget”
See where I’m gettin’ at?
Get yourself down to three of those.
3. Test that mofo
A Frequency that sounds good in a Google Doc means nada. It’s got to change what you actually do. So test it properly.
Take your three candidates and live with one for a couple of weeks. Ask your mates about it. Ask your family. Ask your enemies. Throw it out to your newsletter list. Throw it out to your socials. Be honest. Vulnerable. It’s OK to say “Hey… trying to figure this out. What do you like best?”.
And if you get zero replies? If all your work looks the same with or without it?
Then that’s not your Frequency.
Run each of the three for a stretch and see which one actually reorganises how you work.
A genuine Frequency will change more than you’d expect. It’ll change:
- The words in your emails
- How your crew talks to customers, on the beach, on the phone or across the counter
- What you put on your product and booking pages
- The blog articles you write
- The boards, trips or gear you say no to
- Maybe even your logo and your merch
- Who you hire next season
- And it hands you a villain!!!
That villain’s underrated. The best surf brands aren’t just for something. They’re against something too:
- Against the ego of localism
- Against the sausage-factory operators cranking out subpar boards
- Against gear that costs a fortune but can’t handle a little salt or wind
- Against hype that sells people the wrong thing purely because it’s so hot right now (Zoolander reference)
Give your people something to stand against with you and the signal gets stronger.
Still torn after the test? If all three feel great, go with the one that you or your team got most fired up about.
4. Expect it to shift as you do
Remember… your Frequency isn’t set in stone forever.
The surf world changes. Your customers change. You change. You might even pick up little sub-frequencies that broadcast alongside the main one, feeding it, never jamming it.
But here’s the thing.
Don’t dip your toe. Don’t treat this as “We’ll give it a crack and if it doesn’t work in a fortnight we’ll go back to the old waffle”.
Brands that win commit. They go all the way in. They broadcast the same signal, loud, for years.
That’s why it works!
Frequently asked questions
Q. Isn’t this just my tagline?
No. A tagline’s words on a page. Your Frequency’s the signal underneath the words. It might birth a tagline eventually, but it’s the thing driving every decision, not a slogan you stick in the footer.
Q. What if my Frequency sounds like someone else’s?
Then you haven’t cut deep enough. If it could belong to the brand down the road, bin it. The whole point’s that it’s tuned to you specifically, not to surfing in general.
Q. Does this work if I’m not a surf camp?
Yes. Shaper, apparel label, travel agent, coach, retailer… it makes no difference. Every surf business has a truth it stands on. The trade changes, the exercise doesn’t.
Q. Can my Frequency change later?
Yes and it probably will as the world and your customers shift. Just don’t retune it on a whim after a fortnight because it felt hard. Commit. Give it a month. 6 months. An entire year.
Ready to find yours?
Finding the signal people already feel in your brand and finally broadcasting it clear is some of the most valuable work you’ll ever do on your surf biz. It’s also bloody hard to do on your own, because you’re too close to hear it.
That’s kind of my whole thing. If you want a hand tuning your Frequency in and building your messaging around it.