Australian surfer cuts out middle-man and gets you straight into premium rubber for peanuts…

Yamba-based surfer Ryan Scanlon, the former Senior Vice President of Global Products for Quiksilver, doesn’t wanna take over the world. He isn’t building his biz Need Essentials up with an eye to slamming it on the counter for a few mill down the line. He isn’t aggressively chasing market share or running hither and yon trying to find investors. Says he’ll even point his profits in a philanthropic direction if, when, the biz lights up.

Ryan’s play is simple. He makes premium wetsuits at around half the price or less of the major brands, with one important caveat, but more on that later. It’s a shuffle of the usual way we buy stuff.

“We are not a brand! So we don’t act like a normal brand,” he says. “We don’t advertise, we don’t brand our products, we don’t do swing-tags and packaging, we don’t wholesale and we don’t pay people to endorse our products. What we do focus on is premium product at a price point and we rely on customer satisfaction and word of mouth to promote our products. By doing this we believe we are helping the surfer that has a day job and a stack of bills to worry about and doesn’t need to fork out $500 for a premium suit to stay warm.”

Ryan started designing for  Quiksilver back in the mid-nineties after punching out his design degree. He’s 38 now, but “was always juggling work and travel. I would take 18 months off every few years and just go surfing all over the world until I had to go back to work. My passion, like most surfers, is finding waves and traveling and in my own life that tends to come before material possessions. I try to live a pretty simple life (he lives on a yacht) and Need is a reflection of that. I wanted to create something that I wish existed but didn’t. A supply chain where you didn’t have to pay for all the excess. You just pay for what you… yeah… Need.”

Hence the name.

“We make only what we believe you need to be warm, flexible and light. We don’t have all the extra components like, printing, textures, useless components, unproven technologies and fashion or fads. So what we are able to offer is a high-end suit below the cost of thelow-end branded wetsuits.”

This means you’ll buy a 4/3 chest-zip steamer for $A200. What’s that in US dollars? One fifty or thereabouts. Cheap. And your suit comes from the same factory in Taiwan (Sheico Group. Read their amazing story here) where Rip Curl, Quiksilver, Billabong and pretty everyone else gets ’em done. (You thought Japan? So wrong!)

There’s a slight sting in the story, and this is the caveat. No warranty.

“We don’t offer a warranty because we are so aggressively priced,” says Ryan. “A two-mm back-zip premium jacket is $60. That’s less than a branded hooded fleece top which doesn’t carry a warranty. So Need approaches premium wetsuits the same way you would approach clothing.”

And the game plan for Need Essentials, who’d sold their entire inventory of stock last time I looked? Wetsuits only or is there more on the griddle?

“At this point the primary focus is catching up to demand on the wetsuits and keeping people warm and happy. There is a lot more stock on the way and an extended summer line that also features one technical board short. Need will always keep away from fashion and fads and only plans to focus on surfers genuine needs… I’m not trying to make an empire with this project, I don’t need that in my life, my life is extremely simple. If Need can provide a few jobs for other surfers in Australia and also provide core surfers with their basic needs and help save them a buck then I think that’s our spot.”

Buy ’em here. (Click!)