When the Golden Breed surfwear brand was created in California by former marine and creative guru Duke Boyd back in the late 1960s, the summer of love had just finished and many surfers were still trance-dancing around the sand in a psychedelic fog.
Golden Breed was created for them. “I got some designer to screw around with the gender symbols and come up with a logo,” the late founder told me back in 2006, “and then we came up with a brand story with angel-winged guys and all kinds of crap. The stoners loved it!”
The cosmic surf brand came to Australia in the early ‘70s and became famous for a poster campaign featuring, you guessed it, surfers with angel wings. It became Australia’s biggest selling surf brand well ahead of Rip Curl, Quiksilver and Billabong. And then it disappeared.
In 1999 a young Melbourne surfer and rag trader named Nick Van Der Merwe picked it up out of the dust bin of history, and almost immediately decided that Noosa was its spiritual home. He reinforced this contention by embracing the longboard culture and becoming a major sponsor of the emerging Noosa Festival of Surfing, and in 2008, as he opened key Golden Breed retail stores along the coastline, the first GB store appeared in Noosa Drive.
Nick knew instinctively that Noosa had to become, not just the brand’s flagship store but its defining statement. Last week Noosa Council approved a development application for the property right next door to the original Noosa GB store, and the dream came one step closer to reality.
Nick told Noosa Today: “What we’ve always wanted on this site is a real statement about our brand, all the elements of the DNA of Golden Breed on the one super-site, and Noosa was always perfect for that. This will be our statement that Noosa is home for the brand, with all our links to the Noosa point breaks and to longboarding over more than 20 years. We’ll create many other stores, but none as big (160 square metres of store space) or as important as this.”
Golden Breed commissioned Noosa’s award-winning Andrew Bock Architecture to plan “an iconic beach house with a few modern twists”. The twists include four-metre high ceilings and high windows “like a basketball stadium” so that light can flood in over the vast racks of all kinds of surfboards, in keeping with the Golden Breed ethos, “ride ‘em all”. Above all of this will be a spacious beachside apartment and a large roof garden.
Andrew Bock, a dedicated surfer himself, has captured the feel of a beach house that mixes old and new perfectly, judging by the artist’s impressions. And Nick Van Der Merwe is thrilled about the prospects of his “temple of stoke”, as the surf retail sector continues to perform well after a totally unexpected Covid boom in the second half of 2020, as thousands stayed home and took up surfing instead of travelling.
Says Nick: “Covid put a lot of plans on hold but the surf retail industry didn’t suffer nearly as much as we expected, so we’re back on track now and moving ahead. I think there’s a good future for vertical retail in the surf sector. Here in Noosa I’m hoping that by end June we’ll be building and we’re crossing fingers on opening for summer.”
