Riding a French New Wave

Take a walk through the picture-postcard heart of this coastal town, past diners lingering over lunch at La Crepe Bretonne, and you might think you were in Laguna Beach.

The surf-wear shops are lined up like boards on the beach: Roxy, Rip Curl Girl, Billabong and Quiksilver Boardriders Club. In the village of St. Jean de Luz, teenagers strolling the cobblestone streets are decked out in Volcom sweatshirts and sneakers from Vans. Kids in au courant Biarritz are wearing California-style T-shirts and jeans.

“It’s sort of like the Orange County of Europe,” said Bob Hurley, chief executive of Hurley, a Costa Mesa-based brand owned by Nike Inc. “It’s all happening there.”

The $4.5-billion surf-wear industry, rooted in Orange County, has made a second home in southwestern France. So many U.S. surf-wear companies have European headquarters, subsidiaries and stores in Pays Basque that it has a new nickname: la petite Californie.

And increasingly, France’s little California is setting the agenda for the entire industry.

“This is the best place to observe the market,” said Petra Holtschneider, who is organizing the first Action Sports Retailer trade show in Anglet this summer. “So if you’re not here, you’re not getting it.”

To disciples of the sport, it makes perfect sense. The best waves in Europe are in this part of France -- some say. Surfers never stop arguing about the most excellent swells, but the waves that break in the Atlantic here can rival those in Sydney, Santa Cruz or Lower Trestles, near San Clemente.

“It’s the most consistent surf in the world,” said Steve Veytia, who opened an Anglet office 18 months ago for Ocean Pacific Apparel Corp., headquartered in Irvine.

More important, Europe’s third-most populous country is the fashion pacesetter for the Continent.

“If you can make it in France, that’s a very strong stamp of approval for the rest of Europe,” said Dominique Hanssens, professor of marketing at UCLA.

The California contingent knows it. Pays Basque will take center stage next week when the industry converges on Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, for its annual surf summit. The theme will be “Going Global,” with the focus on Europe, where the revenue is piling up.

At Santa Fe Springs-based Vans Inc., European sales jumped 20% in the most recent fiscal quarter, while U.S. sales fell 5%.

Veytia predicts that Ocean Pacific’s sales across the Pond -- currently less than $10 million annually -- will triple next year, as the company opens four licensing offices that will have their own designers to interpret styles for specific markets in the 15-member European Union and beyond.

European sales for Santa Cruz-based O’Neill have risen at least 20% annually in the last five years, said Jean-Louis Rodrigues, head of the French operation based in Anglet.

Driving Growth

America is the bigger market, but Rodrigues said Europe drives the industry’s growth. One reason: It has more than twice as many people under the age of 25 than the United States. And unlike in the States, this all-important target audience for makers of casual wear has only just begun to be tapped.

What’s more, the EU, with 375 million residents, will add 10 members next May, creating a duty-free market of potential shoppers 35% bigger than the United States. Many of the EU candidates have vast coastlines, though countries such as Poland and Lithuania aren’t exactly on the surf culture’s map -- yet.

The EU’s expansion adds to the allure for California-based surf-wear makers that have made or are aiming for a continental beachhead in France. But Europe’s conquest won’t be as easy as America’s was.

Although most residents of the EU use the euro as their common currency, they speak more than a dozen languages and their tastes are anything but uniform. The French will buy U.S.-style board shorts, but Greeks and Italians insist on hitting the beach in volleyball shorts.

“In Italy, if you don’t have elastic around the waist, it won’t sell,” said Veytia, a former Laguna Beach resident. In Western Europe, the shirts are more fitted, while in Central Europe they’re more boxy, as they are in the United States.

Some products that might work in California don’t translate. The terrycloth shirt that Ocean Pacific recently relaunched as part of its Op Classics collection bombed here.

“Terry cloth just does not sell in France,” Veytia said.

The fragmented market in Europe is a hurdle but not a deal breaker.

Consider Quiksilver Inc., the world’s largest surf-wear maker and parent of 17 brands, which opened its European headquarters in southwestern France in 1984.

The firm, easily the biggest player in Europe, posted European sales last year of $283 million, about 40% of total sales. In the recent first quarter, Quiksilver’s European sales jumped 38%, while revenue from North America and South America rose 14%. It has 48 U.S. stores and 159 in Europe, including one on the Champs-Elysees in Paris.

The opening of that shop in 1998 was a turning point for Quiksilver, elevating the status of the brand and paving the way for stores in key locations, including a new Quiksilver Boardriders Club in Times Square.

The industry’s European soul is 500 miles southwest of the City of Light, along a 25-mile stretch of land that hugs the Atlantic coastline and reaches to the Spanish border.

To the north, Hossegor has more surf shops than traffic lights. To the south, in St. Jean de Luz, Quiksilver’s four-story complex is so prominent that cabbies don’t need an address to find it. In Anglet, Ocean Pacific, O’Neill and others have offices in Za de Maignon, a scaled-down version of Irvine’s Spectrum business park.

The capital is Biarritz, a resort town that played a key role in the birth of surfing here. In 1957, Hollywood screenwriter Peter Viertel traveled to Biarritz for the shooting of “The Sun Also Rises.” Catching sight of the surf, he wired home: “Send my surfboard,” San Francisco-based surf historian Matt Warshaw recalled.

Watching from shore, locals were mesmerized by the sight of the American riding a wave -- standing up. Before long, they were pushing their way into the surf; then Viertel taught them how to shape boards.

The surf-wear industry’s growth here played out much as it did in Southern California: The board shapers came first, followed by surf shops and then apparel makers. The first priority was to be near a good surfing beach; the second was to make money.

“It’s all grown from nothing,” said Chris Kypriotis, who manages surf-wear brand Rusty outside the U.S., keeping homes in Biarritz and Corona del Mar.

From a Farmhouse

Back in the 1970s, the industry in Europe was, basically, a 300-year-old farmhouse owned by the Darrigrand family in the rolling Basque countryside in Anglet.

“Quiksilver started in Europe in a stable,” said Maritxu Darrigrand, showing off the stone structure where she stocked the first Quiksilver board shorts and Rip Curl wet suits. “That bar up there was where the wet suits hung.”

After learning to surf at Cotes des Basque in Biarritz as a teenager, the totally stoked Darrigrand began traveling the world in the late ‘70s, collecting, and helping produce, surfing films to show in France, where the sport was a novelty.

In California, she noticed that the surfers looked different. No Lacoste shirts for them; they were wearing earth-tone canvas board shorts and big T-shirts.

Then came happenstance: On her travels, Darrigrand ran into Quiksilver’s Australian founders Alan Green and John Law, and made a deal to try to sell Quiksilver T-shirts and board shorts in France. She made a similar arrangement to sell Rip Curl wet suits.

“Everything the Americans were doing, we wanted to do,” said Darrigrand, who in 1978 won the French women’s surfing championship, in a meager field of eight contenders.

Darrigrand, now a Quiksilver marketing director, and former husband Yves Bessas hawked the California-style clothes on the beaches and to the handful of surf shops scattered throughout Europe. “It was just a game when we started,” she said.

French tastes of the time worked against the surf-wear sellers peddling cotton trunks with Velcro waistbands.

Into the mid-’80s, “everyone on the beach was wearing no clothes, or Speedos,” said Jeff Hakman, the co-founder of Quiksilver USA, whose footprints are immortalized in cement on a Hossegor walkway that celebrates championship surfers. “We were thinking, ‘How is this going to work?’ ”

Back in California, the surf scene was “blowing up,” said Warshaw, the historian, who just completed the Encyclopedia of Surfing. The sport’s stars, such as Californians Tom Curren and Brad Gerlach, were becoming teen idols, and their popularity grew as the surf-wear industry cranked out videos of their on-wave exploits.

The ‘Fast Times’ Roll

Then “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” hit the big screen, with Sean Penn playing slacker surfer dude Jeff Spicoli, who wore Vans checkerboard slip-on sneakers. The industry, which had expanded its line well beyond trunks and T-shirts, had a mainstream audience. “Leave It to Beaver” clothes were out; surf wear started going to school, and to the office too.

Flush manufacturers, raking in millions, began scanning the horizon for a new place to invest.

“The ripest market was Biarritz,” Warshaw said.

In 1987, Rip Curl, Ocean Pacific and now-defunct Offshore, then based in Santa Ana, all staged major professional surf contests in southwestern France, and what Hakman calls surf “fever” swept through the area. Suddenly, French youth were trading in Speedos for surf trunks with Polynesian prints. And Quiksilver and Rip Curl, the region’s pioneers, soon had a lot of company.

Most of the best-known brands have migrated to France. Now, young shoppers are asking when what they call “Urley” -- dropping the H in pronouncing “Hurley” -- will arrive, said a sales clerk at the Volcom store in Biarritz. Hurley says it plans to expand into Europe but won’t provide details.

Soccer, tennis and rugby remain Europe’s dominant sports, but since the mid-1990s, European youth have become increasingly attracted to the freedom of surfing, skateboarding, snowboarding and wind surfing, O’Neill’s Rodrigues said.

“It has an image of a real cool way of being,” he said. “They want to be with nature in general and linked with Southern California.”

Although not necessarily with actually surfing. Shopping recently in San Sebastian, across the border in Spain, Aitor Gerenu, 16, says surfing isn’t as popular with his friends as the shirts, pants and shoes from Quiksilver and Lost, by surfboard and apparel maker Lost Enterprises in Irvine. Young Europeans, it seems, aren’t so different from Americans after all.

“The clothes,” Aitor explained, “are more fashionable than the sport.”