Buzz Bonneau features in one of Alex Salz’s earliest memories, from a Marin County daycare.
“I remember meeting him and going home and telling my parents that I’d met a nice kid,” says Salz, 44.
Some four decades later, Salz and Bonneau are co-owners of a successful company that grew out of a friendship forged in pre-school and cemented surfing waves in the Bay Area while in high school and far beyond.
Their business, named FERAL after Australian slang for people who follow their own paths, sells wetsuits that have drawn raves from Surfer magazine to Vogue.
Bonneau, a mechanical engineer, and Salz, a designer formerly employed at the California Academy of Sciences, launched FERAL in 2015. They sold 150 to 200 wetsuits the first year, double that the second year. At first, they kept their jobs, but now, with annual sales — nearly all online, direct-to-consumer — in the thousands, they run FERAL full time. And it doesn’t get in the way of their surfing.
“That’s why we started it,” Salz says, “so we can surf whenever we want and make our own schedule.”
FERAL was born in the notoriously rough, cold waters of San Francisco’s Ocean Beach, where the pair cut their teeth and wished for a longer-lasting, warmer wetsuit. Orders have come in from 30 countries.
The Bay Area News Group sat down with Salz and Bonneau recently, steps from Ocean Beach, to talk about turning a friendship and love of surfing into a business, riding multi-story waves at legendary Bay Area spot Mavericks, and living the dream. Their answers have been edited for length and clarity.
What got you surfing? I started skateboarding at a young age and then snowboarding. Living near the coast, the next natural progression was surfing. We used to go to Santa Cruz every summer with my family. My dad sort of got me into it. He took me to Pleasure Point and didn’t check the swell. It seemed huge. He just took a nap on the cliff and just sent me out there. I cried and thought it was too hard.
You spent a fair amount of time out of the country — was that all about the surfing? We did a lot of shorter surf trips and then did a longer trip in Australia. We’ve been to Indonesia. We’ve been to El Salvador, Costa Rica. Mexico several times. He’s been to Nicaragua. I’ve been to Hawaii, Japan.
I’ve been to Fiji and Tahiti, and Micronesia.
Somehow you got educated between the surfing expeditions? We’re decent surfers but we were never good enough to make a career out of it. We both figured out how to have a balance of school work and surfing. I went to UC Santa Barbara. I’m not going to go to a school where I can’t surf every day. I went to Stanford, and I was a mechanical engineer. I surfed all through college. It’s not the normal school that a lot of surfers go to. I went (surfing) by myself a lot.
How did you start manufacturing wetsuits?
We used our design and engineering backgrounds to design a wetsuit and a pattern and located a factory (in Thailand) … and made a prototype. It wasn’t that great. We kept making prototype, prototype, prototype, and luckily, since we surf all the time and use the product… and surf a place that requires a ton of paddling and you need to be warm, we were able to figure out a good design.
We spent a lot of time just testing: Are these liners really warmer? Are these technologies they had, like new neoprene formulations … warmer and lighter? We would test and look at the thermal dissipation. We would literally just put one side in an ice bath and measure the temperature on the other side. The first few (prototypes) were not good. I remember saying, “I would not buy this product.” And then we got to the point where I was like, “I would buy this product over any other product.”
How did you get people to start buying your wetsuits?
That’s another bonus of surfing our entire lives: We’ve met a ton of people, and just asked our friends to get our wetsuit. And then they liked them and told their friends. Then we just leveraged every contact we had.
We didn’t sell that many the first year outside of the people we knew. But we did just well enough the first year that we could order more wetsuits the second year. By the second year we started having a lot more orders from people that we didn’t directly know.
And we didn’t quit our day jobs. We both worked full-time jobs for years and did this on the side. I quit my job in January 2019 to go full-time on FERAL.
I ran a small medical device company. I just started redirecting more and more attention towards the wetsuits until it became my job.
FERAL is just you two?
We have no employees. We’re open to growing more but we’re not open to the point where we have to manage a bunch of people … and not have a nice work/life balance.
We’ve said no to international expansion opportunities, some investment opportunities. We’ve just kept it to the two of us and kept the brand to be just what we wanted it to be when we started it.
We still do all the customer service emails.
I hear multiple times a week, “Why don’t you outsource the customer service — no company your size has the founders doing customer service.” But people appreciate it so much when they’re talking to the people who obviously know the best about the product. Alex and I rotate on customer service every week. The rotation period has gotten shorter and shorter as the volume of emails has gone up.
It’s also really cool for us to connect with all these people and recognize names and be on email strings for years with these customers who are stoked on our product. We got an email from this guy in Australia who was just so stoked on his suit. He sent us the nicest email, he sent a photo of him getting really barreled in the suit.
Alex said it doesn’t get in the way of surfing which is true, but at the same time I was lying in bed at 10 p.m. last night answering customers.
Do your kids surf?
My 8-year-old is pretty into it. He’s got a teeny tiny FERAL wetsuit prototype that he wears all the time and I think he feels pretty cool wearing.
What are biggest waves you’ve surfed around here?
Buzz has surfed Mavericks, way back in the day. I used to go film him from up on the cliff.
I think I’ve only surfed there one time in the last five years. It’s like a combination of lack of desire, fear, and family, and crowds. It doesn’t feel worth it at this point in my life anymore. I still surf Ocean Beach when it’s big.
Reviewers love your wetsuits — what’s the secret to your success?
Design a great long lasting product using the best materials and explain to our customers why it’s so good. As soon as they use it, it all makes sense.
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Buzz Bonneau:Co-founder, FERAL wetsuitsAge: 43Raised in: MarinCity of residence: San FranciscoEducation: BS (2003) and MS (2005) in mechanical engineering form StanfordFamily status: Married with sons 5 and 8.
Five things:1: Coaches both kids’ soccer teams2: Loves skiing3: Alex has gotten him into mountain biking4: Loves napping5: Whole family loves sushi and eats it probably twice a week
Alex Salz:Co-founder, FERAL wetsuitsFeral title: Design director Joke title: co-founder/creative director/junior vice intern: we do eveyrhgeithgAge: 44Grew up in: MarinCurrent town: FairfaxEducation: UC Santa Barbara BS in physical geography (2002)Family status: Unmarried with son, 11
Five things:1: Loves surfing, snowboarding and mountain biking2: Likes to eat okonomiyaki, a savory Japanese pancake3: Likes road trips and camping4: Loves design and being “creative and weird”5: Likes long conversations with friends
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