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ENDLESS SUMMER

1960s icon Ron Jon Surf Shop rolls out a nostalgic lifestyle brand

By Rodger Brown

In the 1960s few places in the U.S. were hotter than Cocoa Beach, Fla. The once-quiet beach town just south of Cape Canaveral on the Atlantic Ocean had become the centerpiece of Florida’s Space Coast as President Kennedy’s mission to put a man on the moon brought in engineers, technicians and astronauts.

An eccentric young surfboard maker from New Jersey came to Cocoa Beach at about the same time, though with an arguably more earth-bound goal. Let the slide-rule bunch shoot for the moon; Ron DiMenna just wanted to sell a few more boards, thanks.

DiMenna had opened his humble Ron Jon Surf Shop on Long Beach Island, N.J., in 1961, following some even more humble beginnings peddling boards from the back of a truck parked along the Jersey Shore, according to Ed Moriarty, Ron Jon’s president. “He eventually opened a little, tiny store and thought the best way to sell more surfboards was to get the surfers to talk about his store,” Moriarty said. “The surfers said they wanted a logo to put on a T-shirt to advertise where they got their board, and the rest is history.”

After Ron Jon opened its second store in Cocoa Beach in 1963, business boomed. DiMenna had caught the wave, as it were. Cocoa Beach was so glamorous it was used as the setting for the 1960s TV sitcom I Dream of Jeannie, and surfing itself became such a part of pop culture that it worked its way into the plots of such disparate TV shows as The Flintstones and The Brady Bunch. The sport was beatnik, bohemian, the perfect icon for eternal youth and visceral pleasure. Moriarty summarizes the lifestyle with such terms and phrases as “freedom,” “no hassles,” “stress-free” and “escape from everyday reality.”

Think Gidget dancing to a Beach Boys soundtrack.

The boom times at Cocoa Beach could not go on forever, of course. Eventually, Jeannie was put back in her bottle and the series canceled, the moon was reached and the Apollo program shut down. Many of the space engineers gathered their families and moved on. But Ron Jon Surf Shop, by now a landmark, did not fade. Today Ron Jon’s 52,000-square-foot flagship store there is one of the top tourist destinations in the state, attracting nearly 3 million visitors a year. The two-acre, multistory, neo-art-deco store, splashed with flamboyant lighting, is a must-visit for anyone pursuing the surfer’s quest of that perfect wave — or at least the perfect T-shirt.

The desire for souvenirs of the endless summer, of course, is the key to Ron Jon’s past success as well as the premise for its plans to double annual revenue from the current $50 million and to go public. Relatively few people surf, says Moriarty, but no matter: “It’s the wannabes who drive the business.”

Just as Playboy’s vintage rabbit-head logo was revived in the late 1990s by a new generation of hipsters as a “tongue in chic” fashion statement, so, too, has Ron Jon’s faux-Asian wonton logo experienced a revival in recent years. It is the latest of the ’60s icons to generate excitement in the world of lifestyle branding. In the past few years, the brand has been licensed for a beachside resort, a limited-edition PT Cruiser, a line of bottled water and an artificial-surf park. The product line includes gear and apparel for a range of board sports — surfing, skateboarding, wakeboarding — and the merchandise selection covers wet suits, can coolies and even home decor. “It’s one of the first authentic East Coast surf brands,” said Michael Johnson, who heads retail investment banking for Royal Bank of Canada Capital Markets. “It’s got incredible potential.”

Since Moriarty came out of retirement after a career at Disney to take the helm of Ron Jon in 1997, the company has been working to leverage the equity it has built up in the brand over 45 years. “We think we are really the only nationally and internationally well-known retail surf brand,” Moriarty said. “Anywhere from 30 to 50 percent of what we sell is Ron Jon-branded items, and that’s anything from footwear to headwear and surfboards and whatnot in between.”

This brand equity took time to develop, of course. The Cocoa Beach store grew in square footage through the 1970s and ’80s until it became the main attraction on its stretch of A1A, the scenic highway that runs along Florida’s Atlantic coast. Then, in 1998, Ron Jon opened a third store, a 25,000-square-foot unit at the Block at Orange (Calif.), followed soon after by a 23,000-square-foot shop at Sawgrass Mills, in Fort Lauderdale, that featured a 40-foot-tall facade of a wave crashing over the entrance. In 2000 Ron Jon opened a 15,000-square-foot store at Festival Bay at International Drive, a lifestyle retail complex in Orlando. Early this year the first of five 3,000-square-foot stores planned for Canada opened in Toronto.

The Key West store that opened in February, meanwhile, is a departure from the more heavily themed environments, taking up a mere 4,400 square feet in a former house in the Old Town Historic District. Stores in Fort Myers, Fla., and Myrtle Beach, S.C., are scheduled to open in the coming year.

The variety of looks for the exteriors is the result of a careful calculation. “The interiors of the stores are similar, but the exteriors vary based on what location we’re in,” Moriarty said. “We try to build according to what we think the market will be.”

The Myrtle Beach store will be Ron Jon’s seventh company-owned unit in the U.S., but opening or licensing stores is only a part of the company’s growth plan. Probably more critical are the opportunities for licensing arrangements that will extend the brand into such lifestyle ventures as resorts and theme parks. “The neat thing about Ron Jon is that it’s a brand that’s actually bigger than its business,” said Royal Bank of Canada’s Johnson. “This is a brand that you can see people wearing all across the country, and, literally, they just have one mother ship, in Cocoa Beach, Florida.”

Also scheduled for 2007: the Ron Jon Surfpark, the first of its kind in the world, the company says. The feature is going up as part of an expansion of General Growth Properties’ Festival Bay Mall, in Orlando. “It will have waves that can cut left or cut right and can replicate famous surf from around the world,” Moriarty said. The venture’s partners have yet to uncross their fingers, though, in hopes the new technology will deliver the promised experience. “We’ll be testing the ‘proof of concept’ to see if this thing actually makes the wave it’s supposed to.”

Another brand extension and likely harbinger of things to come is the Ron Jon Cape Caribe Resort, which opened this year in Cape Canaveral. This 27-acre, 200-room resort boasts a four-story water slide and some good views of docking cruise ships and the Kennedy Space Center. “We’ve been looking for ways to grow and diversify,” Moriarty said. “The resort’s a good example of that. Our brand is very well known in the state of Florida and it stands for a beach lifestyle over and above surfing.”

The strength of the brand has shown itself in some surprising ways. Last year Stellar Partners, which operates the Ron Jon airport shops, opened a Ron Jon unit at Tampa International Airport. Moriarty thought it would do well to generate $900,000 in annual sales. Instead, the unit has posted some $140,000 monthly — nearly $1.7 million for the year.

The licensed stores in the Miami, Orlando and Newark, N.J., airports have been successful too, Moriarty says. This was a surprise, he says, because the units were intended largely as a marketing vehicle for travelers. “That really is a very good illustration of the power of the brand,” he said.

Totally — a power that, were he not already retired, would have wiped Ron DiMenna clean off his surfboard.