Follow the heart……..and your brand will follow.

So after what has now been 15 years this year since we started we thought it might be nice to share the vision of where we are going and take a little time to explain the direction Nineplus is heading in. Since 2008 when the company changed its direction following the release from its shareholding responsibilities and also headed towards the heavy CA. influence within the brand it has been increasing its following and this year will see the divide as Nineplus heads of towards a more original, vintage style and HASU takes over the more simplistic, subtle and modern approach. Why? Because on one side we have an existing nostalgic and retro image and on the other we have been holding some of the best materials & technology in our hands for a while now and are desperate to get to the forefront of design and development and take surfing products to the next level. Think a VW a 66 Split Screen & a ’11 VW Sport line Transporter – or an Aston Martin DB9 & a Jaguar E-Type. Sometimes both ends are appealing and so using the same ‘lotus flower’ logo we will unite both Nineplus & HASU as these projects continue to develop.

Scan across the surfing and sporting goods horizon and its not hard to see it gets a little blurry when watching the major players. Bulk numbers are done through major discounters, (yes honestly) while the smaller shops set the trend. Its all sell, sell, sell – and one can be forgiven to be left thinking ‘where has all the soul gone, and what happened to the style? Well it started rewarding brand shareholders who sit back and earn money for nothing other than having it to lend and then got lost trying to keep it up.

Many people take a guess and will say we are a Californian company, which is cool, but we are actually from the UK. We have a base now in CA and also Australia but most of the ideas are born at our offices deep in the Countryside of Cornwall which is in the southern west tip of the United Kingdom. Travel and an open mind mean that Nineplus & soon to be HASU pulls from travel, books, music, poetry, film and other ideas to create a its own interpretation of how surfing is seen and also felt. This then translates into products which are used and in turn make the brand take a tangible form. Over the past few years its been interesting how these areas of self expression within music and the alternative surfing scene have moved in similar currents. Maybe its the heart speaking but if you take surfing’s anti corporate following and sit it next to the same within the music industry things start looking very similar. People dress in a way that is unique which is then copied and filtered down to something that becomes a trend later on. Large companies spend huge amounts of money trying to find these trends and designers earn lots to discover them? Why – because they flow fromthe heart of creativity and money cannot make it, while the average joe wants to replicate it.

Interesting stuff – but how does this relate to Nineplus? Well firstly we only do things that we feel fit our style. Second we work from the heart. That has actually made the journey quite difficult as there has been a learning curve of trial and error which in our case has been both expensive and at times frustrating. But for what we lost we have also kept the ‘heart’ and at the end of it all and finances dismissed its the point that makes us know we wouldn’t chose to do anything else. Using this we have been looking at where the brand goes and thought after all these words we might include the pictures of the mood board that adorns the back wall of the office. Before you look through the images, the descriptive is: ‘looking back before looking forward’, using ‘British culture to a global audience’ and ‘creating nostalgic appeal through modern media’. Follow the heart……………hope you can feel it.