Vela Surfboards
Pacific craftsmanship, translated for Tokyo.
Vela's founder shapes 60 boards a year by hand in a garage that smells like resin and Pacific salt. He had quiet demand from Japan he couldn't service because his brand spoke purely to Californians. He needed an identity Tokyo would treat as a craft house, not a beach store.
We rebuilt Vela in the visual language of a small Japanese atelier: numbered editions, paper-stock catalogues, restrained typography, and a website that read like a quarterly journal instead of a shop. We never used the word 'lifestyle' once.
We introduced an edition system. Each board now ships with a serialized blueprint, a signed certificate, and a black-and-white photograph of the shaping floor on the day it was made. We didn't change the product. We changed the artifact.
We rebuilt the site as a bilingual quarterly journal — Japanese-first on the .jp subdomain — featuring shaping stories, surf locations, and conversations with riders. Boards lived inside the editorial, never on a grid. Sales pages were called 'commissions,' not products.
We partnered with a Daikanyama gallery for a three-week pop-up that included six boards, the shaping documentary, and a single rack of T-shirts. Every board sold by day two. The waitlist for the next commission cycle grew to 14 months.
- 01Identity & verbal system (EN + JP)
- 02Edition certificate + numbered packaging
- 03Bilingual editorial site
- 0432-page printed catalogue (litho)
- 05Tokyo pop-up production
- 06Shaping documentary (8 min)
- Weeks 01–02Discovery + bilingual brand interviews
- Weeks 03–06Identity, editorial system, catalogue design
- Weeks 05–09Site build + documentary production
- Week 10Tokyo pop-up + launch press
"They understood what I do without making me explain it. Now I get emails from collectors I would have been too shy to email myself."
