Burn, baby, burn.
Hawaii’s Kelia Moniz is the absolute visual representation of effortless grace. The stylish longboarder is a two-time champion, multiple-time cover girl and, most importantly, surf royalty, hailing from the revered Moniz family. She is, in a word, indelible and has been a face of Roxy for nearly two decades.
As surf fans know, Roxy, along with Quiksilver, Billabong, RVCA et. al. was scooped up by licensing giant Authentic Brands Group a handful of months ago. Salaried positions were shredded, team riders cut, the very landscape changed.
Moniz, barring no holds, went directly after ABG today after getting told to take a 90% pay cut.
In a moving to-camera piece, Moniz declares the ride has been long, fun, crazy but now over before pivoting to the sad.
“Today, I’m announcing my departure from Roxy,” she says. She then thanks those who believed in her, her wonderful Roxy sisters. “This shit is real. So real, that many brands often try to replicate what we had. They’ll have a very hard time doing so because you can’t replicate real shit. You can’t replicate authentic friendship. You can’t replicate authentic stories. And that was a testament to the one and only Lisa Andersen. I’d like to thank her for paving the way on the path we all walk on today. Not just as a Roxy girl, but as a surfer. I genuinely love you.”
While the viewer is left to wipe away tears, the screen breaks then a voice can be heard asking, “So what was the real reason you’re leaving Roxy?”
Kelia Moniz, wasting no time, drops the hammer.
She explains how, after Covid, she signed a great contract, the best she had ever had. After ABG completed purchase, the contract was terminated and she was told she could come back for the aforementioned 90% off. “After years of fighting for fair pay and equality,” she says, “there was no was I was signing that deal, especially knowing I wasn’t the only athlete that this was happening to. I’m not about to be strong-armed by some corporation that knows nothing about the sport and doesn’t give a shit about it. If you’re wondering why I’m leaving, it’s not because I don’t love what I do… I’m leaving because if I sign this deal I’d be setting the industry standards for the girls who look like me and surf like me and I simply want nothing to do with that. The surf industry has been consolidated by two large corporations who don’t care that there has been a dismantling of the monetary value of a whole generation and I refuse to be part of it because it looks pretty on a spreadsheet.”
Essential.
Burn, baby, burn.
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I am low-key bummed for her. I love Roxy wetsuits. They are the only brand that has enough rubber in the right places for my pear-shaped dadbod. I hate Matuse, you have to be a MMA vegan to wear them. I’ll keep hunting Marshall’s and TJMaxx for more Roxy wetsuits.
Roxy is lame now anyway. So is Hurley, Quik, Billabong and RVCA. Actually look around and see who wears those brands. Old people that don’t even surf pick it up at Costco when they buy toilet paper and Kirkland wine.
Those brands are not surf brands anymore, they just act like it on the interwebs.
It was real mate. I knew Roxy years ago. Considering the business she was born into she could have been a right nonce and total b*tch. Credit to her folks, they brought up to be a genuine, nice, down to earth normal chick, no attitude, no air of being better than anyone. Greeny and Barb are two legends as well though. Super generous, thoughtful and giving. I did always envy the Sydney Nolan painting they had hanging up in the melb city dig. Hate to think what that would fetch at auction now. And like someone said, blokes don’t spend money on the shit. Down at Torquay you didn’t have to. Still got fkn piles of unworn DC and Quick gear. I just wish I hadn’t worn out all the Dead Companies tshirts. Never hit the market, should have, it was a play on dk and fkn great imo, Ive held onto a new era hat with the logo on the front, jello would’ve been beside himself haha. Anyway, good look to the original founders greeny and lawzy. Money doesn’t have to change people, they’re proof of that. Who gives a fk about apparel anyway? It died when Hang Ten packed it in, though rusty still produce some nice stuff.
G U
I think is was real, just quite some time ago and maybe a small part of it still is. Lisa and Steph are legitimate figures. The bit that’s not real, is that the people it’s appealing to are buying the product for the healthy/active image, not out of any deep interest in actual surfing. And that’s probably true of most blokes too, but at least we generally frown upon it.
An association of surfing professionals?
Ya just can’t buy class!!
So Blackrock have the controlling interest in ABG…….cut /burn and get those balance sheets in the Black!
I remember when Roxy and Lisa Anderson created the brand and how successful it was….the fight for real salary’s in a male dominated world took years….but definitely created the pathway for women.
Always surprises me when blokes who grew up in the grommet abuse and if you don’t surf, don’t start era, start talking about ‘real salaries’ and ‘creating pathways.’
haha, yeah if people had to deal with , “the old school codes of behavior and consequences , ” today you’d be arrested /jailed and be an outcast of society!!
yep evolution can sometimes be a bitch .
Roxy created Roxy from her kindergarten desk did she? 😂 Maritxu created the brand mate. She just named it after greenies daughte.
Need to call Uncle Eddie to give their CEO slaps and get her back on the team!
I tried for years to get my son to come for a surf, no pressure,, he just wasn’t into the beach, now he’s at the second oldest law fac in the world, and explaining how they are already trying to work out how to control AI,, and to think he could have been a great surf instructor,,,
Sounds like it was a good run not having to play grown-up… Sorry if this is cancelable, but I’m sure from the company point of view, the brand might want to go in a younger direction?
This is a business and they can’t keep them all on the payroll forever…
Nah, they are running the standard corporate game plan. Buy a cool brand, gut the payroll, make shit super cheap and slap the logo on it. Cash in on the name brand for a few years before people realize it is not cool anymore and the quality sucks. Next thing you know they are the next Gotcha or OP.
Wonder how Rell would act in these glory days..?
She should start her own company
That’s sooo 2023
Burn baby Burn. Not a good choice of words considering the Maui Genocide. I feel like this is some kind of CIA super solider bloodline.
Imagine a world with no proffesional surfers.
As i understood it she thinks a surf brand is “real shit” , what she really means is getting paid to surf by one of the major lables that helped set the demise of lifestyle surfing by ripping out its culture and spewing it against the wall all for the mighty dollar is “real shit”. Get a life you sad kook bitch.
That’s a bit harsh, no?
No
I like Kelias!
https://youtu.be/x4c_GdUat-…
You guys realllllly missed it, should have been here in the Roaring 90s.
I think the only Surf Company still under control of the founding family is O’Neill wetsuits.
Just about every other company is Under the Umbrella of people who don’t go to the beach.
If it wasn’t for that deep pocket angel pro surfing wouldn’t exist either.
I used to preach to those kids to still get an education. Now, it just makes me sad.
At least the ones you are referring to were all from HB so F-‘em.
“who was dat add’a roxy chick? send her in…again…”
HALT! It’s Taco, Burrito and Tuesday…But we’re smoking on a Sunday Joint…
SUNDAY JOINT
The Betty Heldreich story is long and cursive and for the most part incredibly, relentlessly buoyant and can-do and uplifting. Setbacks and challenges land before her. Betty—Utah-born and raised, tall, boyish, a bit gangly—schemes and works her way through it all. She is at once nimble and long-range and has an unerring knack for knowing when to break away from whatever she’s working on to be physical, to run, swim, whatever it takes to be in her own body, and we’re skipping over a lot here, but this is how Betty moves to Hawaii with her husband and two daughters and takes up surfing at age 40, and less than three years later finishes runner-up in the 1956 Makaha International, which in turn presents an opportunity for her to fly to Lima to represent Hawaii in the Peru International contest.
Peruvian contest organizers agree to cover expenses for the visiting Hawaiian surfers, except they have to pay their own airfare. Betty has enough. The other three—Rabbit Kekai, Conrad Cahna, Ethel Kukea—do not, and it takes a furious couple of months of GoFundMe-style cup-rattling to raise the necessary $2,500 for plane tickets. Then off they go, geev’um brah and good luck, Betty wins the contest (as does Cahna), and a fantastic time is had by all.
Except for the incredibly awkward fact that the third woman on the trip—a dark-haired Canadian-born beauty and Waikiki Surf Club official named Anne Lamont—was having a barely-clandestine affair with Ron Heldreich, Betty’s husband. The shot you see here ran in the Honolulu Advertiser, just before the Hawaiian team left for Peru. That’s Anne on the far right, with Betty directly behind her, and great job all around with the big happy flashbulb smiles but, damn, that had to be an uncomfortable photo op.
Back in Hawaii, after the Peru contest, Betty ditched Ron, bought a VW bug, moved to a beachfront vacant lot at Makaha she picked up in the divorce, took delivery on a Lindal Cedar prefab house, built it herself, and lived happily ever after. It’s a little more complicated, but not much. “When you make a mistake,” Heldreich once said, and Bob McTavish might throw his neck out nodding in agreement, “the fun is getting yourself out of it.”
Betty died in 2011, at 98. The Makaha house is still there.
READ FULL JOINT @ EOS