We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Max Dimon. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Max below.
Max , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Alright, so you had your idea and then what happened? Can you walk us through the story of how you went from just an idea to executing on the idea
Wavehog surf shop was started back in 2005, by two surfers on long beach island that wanted to bring their passion of surfing to the public. I took over running Wavehog back in 2016 although wave hog was up and running it needed some work to be done to it. walking in i spent the 1st few days cleaning up getting a feel for the store and putting an idea together of what i wanted the store to look like. after spending some time i just right into the do phase and started by taking down some walls and shelving to give it a more open feel to make products more visible as well as replacing the carpet with all wood floors
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers
I actually got into the surf industry at a younger age. At 13 years old, I worked for a surf school in Seaside Heights giving surf lessons. That same year, I started fixing, as well as, selling surfboards on the side after work for some local people. I did that for about the next four or five years until I started working over at Brighton Beach Surfshop in Long Beach Island. This was where I think things started to take off for me. The owner Mike, really opened a lot of doors for me to make connections in the industry. During those years working beside and for Mike, he would have me travel to factories, and work with shapers all over the country. This is really where i learned and developed the skills to shape/glass and restore vintage surfboards.
Looking back at it now I’ve been able to take all of what I’ve learned in the past jobs and apply it to the shop today to offer a wide rang of services from offering surf lessons with a 3 step program with a high success rate witch has given us plenty of repeat customers. all the way to fixing and restoring boards thats actually led me into restoring boards for people that live in other countries . One of the favorite things ive been able to do with the shop is work with Matador surfboards thats been building surfboards since 1961 right here in new jersey giving our customers a locally built boards that are build for our wave conditions. Allot of what we do and offer can be found right on our website we even list all the new and used surfboards we currently have for sale
What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?
In essence my side hustle of fixing boards that i started when i was a kid really has turned into a full time business. when i started i wasn’t like “hey Im gonna go out and start fixing boards for everybody” it started more out of passion. What ended up happening was we really didn’t have a whole lot of money when i was younger and I really just enjoyed surfing so I couldn’t afford any new boards or used boards that were water tight so i need up getting a lot of beat down boards. So my parents had this old trailer sitting out front our house that someone just ended up leaving there So one day I cleaned it out and started fixing boards out of it a year or two later when I turned 13 and started doing lesson at the beach and hanging arounds some older kids they seen I was fixing boards and started having me fix theirs and pretty much snow balled from their. granted their was a lot of mistakes along the way some of i still make today 14 years later but ive been able to learn from most of them. i started to realizing it started going from side work to full time was when I got out of high school and had a offers to do work for multiple shops
We’d love to hear your thoughts about selling platforms like Amazon/Etsy vs selling on your own site.
I sell on a few different platforms for ecommerces i currently used ebay, Facebook marketplace, instagram, as well our website. Depending of what im selling I typically like to use ebay because its easy to use i try to stick to used items or items i can fit in a flat rate priority envelope that have a faster turn over rate. Lately Ive been rolling with our website and Facebook market place Its easy to tie two together and get the cross traffic from Fb to our website its great for our used board selection. Instagram ill typically post most of our newer or high demand products to the story witch is just an easy to use tool it always gets a great reaction from our customers because they can message use with any question right from the post
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.matador.surf/wave-hog-surf-shop
- Instagram: @wavehogsurfshop
- Facebook: Wavehog surf shop