Surf Skull & Shark Tank

Surf Skull is a surf helmet company I founded and designed end-to-end — the product, the patent-pending impact technology, the brand, and the e-commerce experience. I pitched it on Shark Tank and closed a deal with Daniel Lubetzky (founder of KIND Snacks). Sales jumped roughly 10× overnight when the episode aired.

Existing surf helmets were bulky, unattractive, and carried a stigma that kept 95% of surfers from wearing any protection at all. The safety gap wasn't a technology problem — it was a design problem. Nobody had built a helmet that surfers actually wanted to wear.

I led the physical product design from first sketch through injection-molded final unit. The core innovation is patent-pending Reeflex slip-layer technology — a low-friction membrane that reduces rotational impact forces, adapted from cycling helmets and re-engineered for saltwater. I partnered directly with material scientists, industrial designers, and overseas manufacturers to get it built.

I designed the complete brand system and built thesurfskull.com from scratch — identity, voice, packaging, photography, and the e-commerce flow end-to-end. The strategic call was to reject the clinical, fear-based tone of traditional safety brands and build something surfers wanted to belong to. The result is a consistent product + digital + physical experience that recruiters may recognize as the kind of systems thinking senior and staff designers are asked to do inside larger companies — here I just got to own all of it.

Pitching on Shark Tank is the highest-stakes stakeholder review I've ever run: five skeptical investors, a live product demo, and no second chance to explain the design. My job was to translate a nuanced material-science story and a brand strategy into a clear narrative in under ten minutes. That translation work — complex product value → decision-maker buy-in — is the same muscle I use to pitch design direction to execs at Google.

Owning a 0→1 company forced me to get fluent in the disciplines senior and staff designers usually collaborate with from a distance — manufacturing, patent filing, supply chain, e-commerce ops, and founder-level prioritization under real business pressure. It made me a sharper partner to PMs and engineers because I've had to live inside their constraints, not just design for them. And it locked in a conviction I still carry into every design review: ambiguity isn't a blocker, it's the job.