THE FROGHOUSE STORY
VOLCOMS FIRST RETAIL ACCOUNT
10/3/2007
Froghouse Story (continued from other page):
TK's Formative Moments
"Early on," said TK proudly, "when Frank Jensen was the owner, I was just a peon working behind the counter. I did the lowest grade work when I started working there in 1967.”
"I grew up in Titusville, Florida and started surfing in 1961. That was an experience in itself, surfing the East coast then. It was an embryonic stage for surfing which started in the mid fifties in California. It was a brotherhood of surfers then. If you were driving down the road and saw a car with surf racks parked at the beach you would stop and park next to that car, paddle out to the guys in the water that you had never met before. They would be thrilled to have you show up as opposed to today where they might flatten your tires or throw something at you."
"In 1967 my father who worked for McDonnell Douglas at the Space Center, got transferred to Huntington Beach much to my thrill. I was halfway thru my senior year in high school, came out here and enrolled at Huntington High. This was a school that had 4000 students and I'm coming from a town that only had 6000 people total. But I was already planning on going to Surf City upon graduation and this was my ticket there. I was absolutely thrilled." "I met this guy Charley Ray at school who was a "Team Rider" for the Frog House in Newport Beach. He brought me down to the shop and I immediately loved the place."
"In junior high I had decided that when I grew up I was going to own and operate a surf shop. I got a job at the Frog House and I was thrilled to be here. I worked hard and did whatever menial task I was asked to do. This was my foot in the door to the surf world."
TK takes the Reins
"I had been managing the shop for 4-5 years exclusively,” spoke T K, "and Frank Jensen had been spending less and less time in the store. His love had gone into sailing. He had a 106-foot wooden sailboat called the "Ranger." That took up all his time and since he didn't surf, all his love had gone to the sailing circles. I was running the shop and had gotten married to my lovely wife, Linda. I was considering having children and I needed to make more money than I could earn working behind the counter at the Frog House. So I approached Frog and gave him a warning, "Frank, I'm going to open up my own surf shop. You've taught a few things about business thru the years and one of the things you said was that if I could open up next door, and take the clientele with me, I should do that."
"I told him I would look for a place close by if that was a possibility and I would open up next door if I could. I didn't feel any responsibility to protect him."
"So Frank comes to me and says, TK let me sell you half of this business and we will be partners. I said, ‘Frank, I've been around here long enough to know that being a business partner with you means, I do all the work and we split all the money. I'm not interested. I have been doing that for a long time.’" "He agreed to sell me the business. So I gave him thousands of dollars in cash from a real estate sale and put in an application for a loan at the bank for the rest. Then I sat here and answered every phone call for days waiting for the bank to verify my employment. I gave myself a glowing employment report. I scraped and worked and even borrowed $400 from my wife Linda (who I wasn't married to at the time). To this day, after 31 years of marriage, when she gets mad at me she's liable to bring up the fact that I still owe her $400 that I never fully paid back."
"I gave Frank Jensen the money to roughly cover the inventory that was on hand in the building at the time. He had purposely run it down to a low amount. He then financed the purchase for ten years. I promised to pay $100,000.00 for the good will, nothing else, just the name. We actually played a series of 3 poker hands to decipher what rate of interest I would pay. I won all three hands. He was bummed about that but happy to be out of the shop. It was not until some years later that I calculated and realized how much each of those poker hands were actually worth.”
"A few years later when I wanted to buy the property he said he was not interested in selling. I asked him if it was for sale for five hundred million dollars and he said of course and I said, ‘Okay then it is for sale. Let's just talk about a price.’ That was 1987 and we negotiated it to a deal."
Surfboards and the Frog House
"When I first started working here around 1967, I was sitting on the floor playing poker with Frank." TK explained. "He had been nicknamed Frog by that time. A guy walked in the door this particular day with two boards under his arms. They had no logos on them. One was a red one and the other blue and he wanted to sell them. Frog asked him where he had gotten the boards and he said I made them myself in my garage. They were really good boards and Frog liked them. Up to that point, The Frog House had only sold used boards and a few wetsuits (which were still relatively new product at the time)."
"The guy who brought the boards in was Frank Petrillo. So Frank "Frog" Jensen and Frank Petrillo entered into a contractual agreement where Petrillo made boards with his name on them and we sold them exclusively on the West Coast out of the Frog House. That was our first venture into selling new surfboards."
"That went along great for 2-3 years and we sold a lot of boards. Petrillo was a big name then, but then the two Frank's had a falling out. Frog thought too many boards were being sold out the back door of Petrillo's glass shop. Petrillo moved to Texas to build boards there and we started manufacturing SMALL FACES Surfboards. The concept was that instead of one person's name on a board there were a lot of small faces that worked to make these surfboards, interchangeable faces, plus Rod Stewart's band, Faces, was popular at the time."
"Our shaper back then was Steve McGregor, who shaped for us maybe 4-5 years, then a guy name Bobby Kazanis. He shaped for years. He is one of the best shapers on the West Coast to this day, but he never had the political acclaim in the industry and didn't play well in that circle. But he has the abilities of any of the top shapers from that era. He still shapes today in Huntington."
"By the 70's we were making thousands of boards using other people’s glass shops."
More Surfboards
"The funny story I tell nowadays and I have told before was that in the old days, the 60's, each shop manufactured their own surfboards and that was their personality and recognition. It was your authenticity that you were a surf shop. We had Petrillo and Small Faces Surfboards. Somewhere back in that mid 70's time frame a guy named Al Merrick showed up at the front door with a surfboard called Channel Islands. It was a very beautiful looking surfboard of high quality and he wanted us at the Frog House to sell them."
"Well I told him along the lines of something like he ought to take the surfboards back to Santa Barbara where he came from and sell them there! I would keep my Small Faces boards right here and I wouldn't bother trying to bring them up to Santa Barbara to sell them there."
"I think he left the store that day vowing never to sell us a surfboard no matter how successful he ever got, or how desirable his line was and I have suffered for 15 agonizing years trying to get Channel Island Surfboards to come back to the Frog House."
"Somehow they never had room to sell us any surfboards. Now, that all changed about a year ago when that same story showed up in a surf magazine. When I originally talked to Merrick it wasn't meant to be a put down on him or his surfboards. It was just me, trying to hold on to the established tradition that surf shops make their own surfboards.
In the interim I realized that my clientele wanted to buy these nationwide and worldwide brands. I sell Channel Islands, I sell Lost, I sell Rusty out of here. All three are real popular brands."
"At the same time I try to keep a selection of local manufacturers here. You can find Dano and Baltierra Surfboards as well as Ron Romanovsky Kneeboards. And by the way we are seeing a re-infestation of knee riders coming to a surf break near you. We use to sell 4-5 kneeboards a week in the 60's and 70's. By the 80's and 90's we only sold 4-5 a year and now we are selling 4-5 a month. You know they are around because the handicap parking is so full at the beaches around here. Only kidding knee riders, we love you."
The People
Why do you think the Frog House always has such unique people that come in, we asked Brimer? "HAHAHAHAHAHAHA," said TK. "It's like moths to the flame around here. As the years have passed by and we've changed very little and the quote "surf industry" unquote has changed so much we have become more and more unique in our style of business and our business establishment and all that. That uniqueness calls out to the people that don't fit in other places and they seem to come in here all the time."
"Sure we have strange people that visit us. We have the guy that has his entire car covered with Frog House stickers. Must be two or three thousand stickers on it. That adds up to hundreds of dollars of free stickers on his car. His big claim to fame was his car actually got used in the doomsday movie were the big wave hits New York City, a tidal wave. If you play the movie slowly enough you can see his car get tumbled by the wave.
On the bad side I have had people come in and show me business cards he has had made with my name on them, TK Brimer, in Ontario, California. Then people come in and say, "Hey, I know the owner here!"
The Frog House has always had that Aura about it where you were either going to come in and buy something or you were going to be insulted. "No doubt," T K said with a wry smile, "We try to keep things on a really personal level. Sometimes it seems that when you go in to the plastic, corporate surf store and someone greets you with their very well manicured and coached, "Good morning sir, May I be of assistance" speech, well we kind of feel that many need to go the other way with, "Hey dumbshit, what do you need?" (Laughs)
"Of course anytime you work with the public you get one out of 2500 people that are just @#$%^&* and sometimes we do tell people they need to find another surf shop."
"But really we wouldn't use that kind of greeting unless we had some past history with that person. If you have been coming here for a long time, you're liable to have a nickname and we are liable to treat you the way your brother or sister would treat you. Like someone that was real familiar and friendly. It's all with good love. We enjoy the people that come in here very much. And that's one of the reasons I still run this place, because I have so much fun interacting with the people that come in."
Touch and Feel versus Smash and Grab
There have been many outrageous shoplifting stories over the years. TK calls it the 12 best shoplifting stories. From the German girls to petty theft and everything in between here are just a couple classics. And for those that got away over the years, the Frog is always watching and waiting.
"One of the early shop lifting experiences we had was this," said TK, "The checkout counter at the Frog House use to be in the back third of the building. We had the surfboards in the front with no presence of sales people. What had happened already a couple of times was a kid would grab a surfboard and run out the front door with it."
"This one particular time we ran out after a guy who had gone down the sidewalk and then around and down a side street, but when we went after him he flat disappeared. A block behind the shop we have a salt-water channel that runs back there. We found the surfboard stashed underneath the dock at the end of Grant Street. The surfboard, but no kid. He stashed it there and escaped. So Frog decides that we are gong to set a trap for him cause he knew the guy was going to come back later for the board. So during the work hours one of us had to stand back there keeping an eye out that the guy didn't get the board during the day. We suspected he would come back at night."
"Frog use to drive an old converted Milk Truck Wagon and he volunteered to buy all the pizza and beer we could handle if we would sit with him and wait for the shoplifter to come back. So Bobby Caltabiano, Frank (Frog) Jensen, and myself sat in the Milk Truck parked at the end of the street, incognito, watching out the windows to see if anybody showed up. We drank beer, ate pizza and planned our attack."
"I had a brick as my weapon of choice, Frank had a full-blown machete and Bobby had a baseball bat. We ate, drank and around one am both Bobby and I were asleep. It was a drunken sleep out. Suddenly Frog wakes us up. Here comes a four door Buick cruising down the street with its lights off, real slow."
"They pull down to the end of the street. We can see a driver and another guy. The passenger jumps out, runs down and grabs the board, comes back and tries to stick it thru the window into the back seat of the car. We jump out of the Milk Wagon and Frog runs over and breaks the front windshield with his machete while Bobby is beating on the side of the car with the bat. The passenger drops the surfboard and is trying to crawl into the car as the driver is spinning the tires. Frog smashes the drivers side window, and I throw the brick at the side of the car once and then twice leaving big dents. The car leaves as we are laughing. We spent the next half hour wondering what story these guys are going to tell their mom and dad about this smashed up car. It was obviously their mom’s car."
"That was my first shoplifting intro. Over the years we have had many, many others."
"Bobby Caltabiano was the manager of the Frog House for the first six years I worked there. He was the manager and I was the grunt. Once again with the counter in the back some kids had parked in the front, run in, grabbed a bodyboard, and ran back to their car stuffing the board in. We ran out as they were driving away up Coast Highway. I ran to my car to give chase and realized I didn't have the keys. I ran back in the shop, back to the car and started after them. They were long gone and I didn't know which way they went as I headed north to Huntington.
“I came to the BrookHurst Street intersection and had to make a choice. Go right, inland, or keep heading along the coast. I headed into Huntington Beach hauling as fast as I can guessing along the way to Main Street. Lo and behold, there is the station wagon stuck in traffic five cars back from the light and I'm another 25 to 30 cars back from them. I shut the car off, run up the middle of the street, reach in the open window on the drivers side, grab the kids keys out of the ignition and start yelling, ‘Your under arrest for shoplifting!’”
"It is a crowded Saturday and I go back to my car, park it, and then call the cops from the lifeguard headquarters across the street. By the time the cops show up, the car's still there with the driver, but all the other kids have run away. He is crying and screaming and professing his innocence. Busted!" "Another story involved Bobby Tang our shop employee. He caught some guys doing the same thing. As he chased them down the street the driver hits the gas as the other guy grabs the car door. He gets dragged barefoot for about 25 yards down the street with his toes down. The driver stops the car to collect him and Bobby Tang is right on his ass and I'm ten yards back. The driver takes off again, hitting the gas and drags the guy again for 25 yards. The guy stops again and the injured one climbs in. Just then a Newport Beach ambulance comes by and asks me what's going on.
We tell them the story and they tell us not to worry and head off with lights and sirens blaring. I get a phone call from the Police to come identify them. When I got there the paramedics were bandaging up the guys feet and were taking him to the hospital for his injuries. It was the first day of summer after school had let out and it turns out these guys had borrowed mom and dad's car to go to the beach."
"One thread of continuity about the shoplifters," smiled Brimer, "is that after they are caught, these big, bad brave boys turn into crying babies."
Body Boarders and the Demise of the Mat
"I have lived thru so many phases of the surf quote industry and sport. When Morey came out with the first body boards that came in a kit you put together, they worked great and looked like crap. Then the BE172 showed and it was the only body board in the whole world and it put the blow up raft business out of business immediately. That was a big part of the Frog House's business. We always ran rafts. One of my first jobs was to blow the 18 rafts up. I had to drag the rafts down to the gas station, half a block away, inflate them and carry them back to the Frog House. You couldn't drag them back. I wasn't' allowed to drag them."
"Immediately Bodyboards were better items then the rafts. We'd buy 600 to 800 at a time. One brand, almost all the same color. It was easy to sell cause they all were the same. There were no 14 brands to choose from then. It was a simple time, we'd get a big shipment and they would be stuffed everywhere in the building. Then competition came and new lines sprang up. Some great new manufacturers showed up in the marketplace.
Then Morey sold out to Kransco, they mass merchandised and ruined the profit structure for us small shops by selling to all the giant big box retailers in the world. It is still a good industry and I always have at least one quality bodyboarder working for us to talk to our bodyboarding customers."
Vendor Relations - TK, you have had a huge history with your vendors!
"Oh yeah, and not always positive. It's very lucky for me that the Frog House is located here in the middle of the surf world and if you don't think Newport and Huntington Beach isn't the middle of the industry, then you have another thing coming. It isn't South Africa or Australia, it is here. Luckily I've been on a first name basis with some big time surf industry owners and also my biggest stroke of luck is that these manufacturers by and large consider the Frog House to be a very important image store. They treat us very, very well and handle our account very specially, meaning slow Pay (laughs) and taking into consideration no pay sometimes.
They give us big breaks that are reserved for the large accounts and I'm not a large account with any of those guys. I don't do mega dollars from this small little store. But I'll tell you right now, nobody in the surf world sells as much rubber as we sell at the Frog House. If you’re buying a wetsuit and your not buying it at the Frog House, your probably making a mistake. We sell a ton of rubber out of here."
"We sell hard goods and our reputation is that we sell stuff that surfers use to surf with. You can buy a t-shirt here or a pair of trunks and we love you buying these things. But primarily we sell surfboards and wetsuits. There is not a store in our area that is as authentic surf as our shop is. You can also come in here and find the boys drinking a beer behind the counter. But nowadays (laughs) we try to keep it till at least 5 o'clock. And yes, young women still come in here and find young men working behind the counter. Thank goodness I'm not a young man anymore."
Employees - Why do they Stay
"You have to realize that the Frog House pays all or our employees weekly," smiled the owner, "I mean extremely weakly. It's a good concept."
"The first employee I hired when I bought the Frog House in 1977 was Mikey Beho. His real name is Mikey Flores but he lived in Montebello and we started calling him Mikey Montebello, but it was too much and so thru the years it turned into Mikey Beho."
"He had a brother, Glennie, who I offered a job to years ago. He was a real good guy but he had a better job then coming to work at the Frog House but said he had a brother named Mikey who would be perfect for me. I had never met Mikey but when he showed up to interview he had this hair that went half way down his back. That meant it was three foot of hair cause Mikey was only 4'6" tall. I took one look at him and said this is not the guy I want. He doesn't look like a surfer. What do I want him for?"
"Bless that Mikey. He has been with the Frog House for 26 years now. He has been a great asset for us. The most trustworthy, personable and wonderful guy. We love him here. But we did have one period where he left for a few years to go out on his own to open a shop at Canyon Lakes. But he discovered how disagreeable it is to operate a business and I realized how much I missed him being around here."
"We have been accused of being a comedy act and it is nothing that is planned or rehearsed. We enjoy each other and what we are doing. We try to make a person's day when they come to shop here. When we are having a good time and people walk in and see us, we tell a few jokes and have a few laughs with them. When a person walks out with or without a purchase in their hands, they feel like they have been loved and cared for and have been part of a unique experience. And that unique experience is part of what keeps us going. With our longevity, we are seeing third generation customers coming in here, Grand kids of original customers."
"I feel sorry for those people who haven't been in a shop like ours and have missed out on a bit of the flavor of the 60's surf thing. The reality we give them is about being "real."
"If they ask my opinion about a product, I'll tell them I think the product sucks if it does."
"When I was a kid and I went into a surf shop it seems there was some jerk head behind the counter who thought he was cooler than I was and that he had to prove it by de-meaning me somehow. So when I have a new employee here one of the first things I go thru is that the customers are way more important to me then my employees. I can get an employee any day I want, but getting a new customer isn't easy. I always try to impress upon the employees that the reason they are getting that free wetsuit is not cause they are such a hot surfer, but it is because they work at the Frog House and we sell a lot of wetsuits."
"As soon as you’re not working here you won't get anything. I never want someone to walk out of the Frog House thinking that they were not as important as the guy standing behind the counter."
The Frog Lifestyle - Tongue in Cheek or Hardcore to the Bone
"It's all about lifestyle, more so then any of the shops around that I know of. But my hats off to Russell down at Russell Surfboards in Newport. He still operates a "Lifestyle Surf Shop." Other than that there is not many of them around. It's all about high-octane retailing and jamming product down the throat of the next young surfer gremmie idiot that comes along."
"It saddens me to see what the industry itself has turned into and that people go in and purchase and feel akin to the surf and sport stores with all the fancy stuff and 14 sales people on the floor that half of them don't even surf and work for owners and ownership that I don't feel really shares the love for the sport of surfing that I do. But I guess that is progress. I'm glad we are not part of that."
"Do I consider myself a dinosaur?"
"I was called a dinosaur a few years back by a guy who was trying to sell Billabong down the street. He presented them with a representation letter and pointed out that the Frog House was a dinosaur that couldn't relate to the young people and the surfing industry as it is today. I take great pride in the fact that his business lasted about a year and a half. That was about 10 years ago and this old dinosaur is still kicking around and proud of it."
"I'm not ready to retire just yet. I love my wife very much but I don’t want to retire and go spend twenty-four hours a day at her side. I would think Linda feels the same way!"
Luck or Genius
I asked TK Brimer, Is that how you survived in the Newport/Huntington retailing Surf Wars?
"I've always thought we survived the retail wars because I'm so much smarter and better then the other guys." He said with smile. "But every once in a while it comes down to realizing it is LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION, baby and we are sitting on one great location. I think maybe it is a stroke of luck more than a stroke of genius."
TK's Formative Moments
"Early on," said TK proudly, "when Frank Jensen was the owner, I was just a peon working behind the counter. I did the lowest grade work when I started working there in 1967.”
"I grew up in Titusville, Florida and started surfing in 1961. That was an experience in itself, surfing the East coast then. It was an embryonic stage for surfing which started in the mid fifties in California. It was a brotherhood of surfers then. If you were driving down the road and saw a car with surf racks parked at the beach you would stop and park next to that car, paddle out to the guys in the water that you had never met before. They would be thrilled to have you show up as opposed to today where they might flatten your tires or throw something at you."
"In 1967 my father who worked for McDonnell Douglas at the Space Center, got transferred to Huntington Beach much to my thrill. I was halfway thru my senior year in high school, came out here and enrolled at Huntington High. This was a school that had 4000 students and I'm coming from a town that only had 6000 people total. But I was already planning on going to Surf City upon graduation and this was my ticket there. I was absolutely thrilled." "I met this guy Charley Ray at school who was a "Team Rider" for the Frog House in Newport Beach. He brought me down to the shop and I immediately loved the place."
"In junior high I had decided that when I grew up I was going to own and operate a surf shop. I got a job at the Frog House and I was thrilled to be here. I worked hard and did whatever menial task I was asked to do. This was my foot in the door to the surf world."
TK takes the Reins
"I had been managing the shop for 4-5 years exclusively,” spoke T K, "and Frank Jensen had been spending less and less time in the store. His love had gone into sailing. He had a 106-foot wooden sailboat called the "Ranger." That took up all his time and since he didn't surf, all his love had gone to the sailing circles. I was running the shop and had gotten married to my lovely wife, Linda. I was considering having children and I needed to make more money than I could earn working behind the counter at the Frog House. So I approached Frog and gave him a warning, "Frank, I'm going to open up my own surf shop. You've taught a few things about business thru the years and one of the things you said was that if I could open up next door, and take the clientele with me, I should do that."
"I told him I would look for a place close by if that was a possibility and I would open up next door if I could. I didn't feel any responsibility to protect him."
"So Frank comes to me and says, TK let me sell you half of this business and we will be partners. I said, ‘Frank, I've been around here long enough to know that being a business partner with you means, I do all the work and we split all the money. I'm not interested. I have been doing that for a long time.’" "He agreed to sell me the business. So I gave him thousands of dollars in cash from a real estate sale and put in an application for a loan at the bank for the rest. Then I sat here and answered every phone call for days waiting for the bank to verify my employment. I gave myself a glowing employment report. I scraped and worked and even borrowed $400 from my wife Linda (who I wasn't married to at the time). To this day, after 31 years of marriage, when she gets mad at me she's liable to bring up the fact that I still owe her $400 that I never fully paid back."
"I gave Frank Jensen the money to roughly cover the inventory that was on hand in the building at the time. He had purposely run it down to a low amount. He then financed the purchase for ten years. I promised to pay $100,000.00 for the good will, nothing else, just the name. We actually played a series of 3 poker hands to decipher what rate of interest I would pay. I won all three hands. He was bummed about that but happy to be out of the shop. It was not until some years later that I calculated and realized how much each of those poker hands were actually worth.”
"A few years later when I wanted to buy the property he said he was not interested in selling. I asked him if it was for sale for five hundred million dollars and he said of course and I said, ‘Okay then it is for sale. Let's just talk about a price.’ That was 1987 and we negotiated it to a deal."
Surfboards and the Frog House
"When I first started working here around 1967, I was sitting on the floor playing poker with Frank." TK explained. "He had been nicknamed Frog by that time. A guy walked in the door this particular day with two boards under his arms. They had no logos on them. One was a red one and the other blue and he wanted to sell them. Frog asked him where he had gotten the boards and he said I made them myself in my garage. They were really good boards and Frog liked them. Up to that point, The Frog House had only sold used boards and a few wetsuits (which were still relatively new product at the time)."
"The guy who brought the boards in was Frank Petrillo. So Frank "Frog" Jensen and Frank Petrillo entered into a contractual agreement where Petrillo made boards with his name on them and we sold them exclusively on the West Coast out of the Frog House. That was our first venture into selling new surfboards."
"That went along great for 2-3 years and we sold a lot of boards. Petrillo was a big name then, but then the two Frank's had a falling out. Frog thought too many boards were being sold out the back door of Petrillo's glass shop. Petrillo moved to Texas to build boards there and we started manufacturing SMALL FACES Surfboards. The concept was that instead of one person's name on a board there were a lot of small faces that worked to make these surfboards, interchangeable faces, plus Rod Stewart's band, Faces, was popular at the time."
"Our shaper back then was Steve McGregor, who shaped for us maybe 4-5 years, then a guy name Bobby Kazanis. He shaped for years. He is one of the best shapers on the West Coast to this day, but he never had the political acclaim in the industry and didn't play well in that circle. But he has the abilities of any of the top shapers from that era. He still shapes today in Huntington."
"By the 70's we were making thousands of boards using other people’s glass shops."
More Surfboards
"The funny story I tell nowadays and I have told before was that in the old days, the 60's, each shop manufactured their own surfboards and that was their personality and recognition. It was your authenticity that you were a surf shop. We had Petrillo and Small Faces Surfboards. Somewhere back in that mid 70's time frame a guy named Al Merrick showed up at the front door with a surfboard called Channel Islands. It was a very beautiful looking surfboard of high quality and he wanted us at the Frog House to sell them."
"Well I told him along the lines of something like he ought to take the surfboards back to Santa Barbara where he came from and sell them there! I would keep my Small Faces boards right here and I wouldn't bother trying to bring them up to Santa Barbara to sell them there."
"I think he left the store that day vowing never to sell us a surfboard no matter how successful he ever got, or how desirable his line was and I have suffered for 15 agonizing years trying to get Channel Island Surfboards to come back to the Frog House."
"Somehow they never had room to sell us any surfboards. Now, that all changed about a year ago when that same story showed up in a surf magazine. When I originally talked to Merrick it wasn't meant to be a put down on him or his surfboards. It was just me, trying to hold on to the established tradition that surf shops make their own surfboards.
In the interim I realized that my clientele wanted to buy these nationwide and worldwide brands. I sell Channel Islands, I sell Lost, I sell Rusty out of here. All three are real popular brands."
"At the same time I try to keep a selection of local manufacturers here. You can find Dano and Baltierra Surfboards as well as Ron Romanovsky Kneeboards. And by the way we are seeing a re-infestation of knee riders coming to a surf break near you. We use to sell 4-5 kneeboards a week in the 60's and 70's. By the 80's and 90's we only sold 4-5 a year and now we are selling 4-5 a month. You know they are around because the handicap parking is so full at the beaches around here. Only kidding knee riders, we love you."
The People
Why do you think the Frog House always has such unique people that come in, we asked Brimer? "HAHAHAHAHAHAHA," said TK. "It's like moths to the flame around here. As the years have passed by and we've changed very little and the quote "surf industry" unquote has changed so much we have become more and more unique in our style of business and our business establishment and all that. That uniqueness calls out to the people that don't fit in other places and they seem to come in here all the time."
"Sure we have strange people that visit us. We have the guy that has his entire car covered with Frog House stickers. Must be two or three thousand stickers on it. That adds up to hundreds of dollars of free stickers on his car. His big claim to fame was his car actually got used in the doomsday movie were the big wave hits New York City, a tidal wave. If you play the movie slowly enough you can see his car get tumbled by the wave.
On the bad side I have had people come in and show me business cards he has had made with my name on them, TK Brimer, in Ontario, California. Then people come in and say, "Hey, I know the owner here!"
The Frog House has always had that Aura about it where you were either going to come in and buy something or you were going to be insulted. "No doubt," T K said with a wry smile, "We try to keep things on a really personal level. Sometimes it seems that when you go in to the plastic, corporate surf store and someone greets you with their very well manicured and coached, "Good morning sir, May I be of assistance" speech, well we kind of feel that many need to go the other way with, "Hey dumbshit, what do you need?" (Laughs)
"Of course anytime you work with the public you get one out of 2500 people that are just @#$%^&* and sometimes we do tell people they need to find another surf shop."
"But really we wouldn't use that kind of greeting unless we had some past history with that person. If you have been coming here for a long time, you're liable to have a nickname and we are liable to treat you the way your brother or sister would treat you. Like someone that was real familiar and friendly. It's all with good love. We enjoy the people that come in here very much. And that's one of the reasons I still run this place, because I have so much fun interacting with the people that come in."
Touch and Feel versus Smash and Grab
There have been many outrageous shoplifting stories over the years. TK calls it the 12 best shoplifting stories. From the German girls to petty theft and everything in between here are just a couple classics. And for those that got away over the years, the Frog is always watching and waiting.
"One of the early shop lifting experiences we had was this," said TK, "The checkout counter at the Frog House use to be in the back third of the building. We had the surfboards in the front with no presence of sales people. What had happened already a couple of times was a kid would grab a surfboard and run out the front door with it."
"This one particular time we ran out after a guy who had gone down the sidewalk and then around and down a side street, but when we went after him he flat disappeared. A block behind the shop we have a salt-water channel that runs back there. We found the surfboard stashed underneath the dock at the end of Grant Street. The surfboard, but no kid. He stashed it there and escaped. So Frog decides that we are gong to set a trap for him cause he knew the guy was going to come back later for the board. So during the work hours one of us had to stand back there keeping an eye out that the guy didn't get the board during the day. We suspected he would come back at night."
"Frog use to drive an old converted Milk Truck Wagon and he volunteered to buy all the pizza and beer we could handle if we would sit with him and wait for the shoplifter to come back. So Bobby Caltabiano, Frank (Frog) Jensen, and myself sat in the Milk Truck parked at the end of the street, incognito, watching out the windows to see if anybody showed up. We drank beer, ate pizza and planned our attack."
"I had a brick as my weapon of choice, Frank had a full-blown machete and Bobby had a baseball bat. We ate, drank and around one am both Bobby and I were asleep. It was a drunken sleep out. Suddenly Frog wakes us up. Here comes a four door Buick cruising down the street with its lights off, real slow."
"They pull down to the end of the street. We can see a driver and another guy. The passenger jumps out, runs down and grabs the board, comes back and tries to stick it thru the window into the back seat of the car. We jump out of the Milk Wagon and Frog runs over and breaks the front windshield with his machete while Bobby is beating on the side of the car with the bat. The passenger drops the surfboard and is trying to crawl into the car as the driver is spinning the tires. Frog smashes the drivers side window, and I throw the brick at the side of the car once and then twice leaving big dents. The car leaves as we are laughing. We spent the next half hour wondering what story these guys are going to tell their mom and dad about this smashed up car. It was obviously their mom’s car."
"That was my first shoplifting intro. Over the years we have had many, many others."
"Bobby Caltabiano was the manager of the Frog House for the first six years I worked there. He was the manager and I was the grunt. Once again with the counter in the back some kids had parked in the front, run in, grabbed a bodyboard, and ran back to their car stuffing the board in. We ran out as they were driving away up Coast Highway. I ran to my car to give chase and realized I didn't have the keys. I ran back in the shop, back to the car and started after them. They were long gone and I didn't know which way they went as I headed north to Huntington.
“I came to the BrookHurst Street intersection and had to make a choice. Go right, inland, or keep heading along the coast. I headed into Huntington Beach hauling as fast as I can guessing along the way to Main Street. Lo and behold, there is the station wagon stuck in traffic five cars back from the light and I'm another 25 to 30 cars back from them. I shut the car off, run up the middle of the street, reach in the open window on the drivers side, grab the kids keys out of the ignition and start yelling, ‘Your under arrest for shoplifting!’”
"It is a crowded Saturday and I go back to my car, park it, and then call the cops from the lifeguard headquarters across the street. By the time the cops show up, the car's still there with the driver, but all the other kids have run away. He is crying and screaming and professing his innocence. Busted!" "Another story involved Bobby Tang our shop employee. He caught some guys doing the same thing. As he chased them down the street the driver hits the gas as the other guy grabs the car door. He gets dragged barefoot for about 25 yards down the street with his toes down. The driver stops the car to collect him and Bobby Tang is right on his ass and I'm ten yards back. The driver takes off again, hitting the gas and drags the guy again for 25 yards. The guy stops again and the injured one climbs in. Just then a Newport Beach ambulance comes by and asks me what's going on.
We tell them the story and they tell us not to worry and head off with lights and sirens blaring. I get a phone call from the Police to come identify them. When I got there the paramedics were bandaging up the guys feet and were taking him to the hospital for his injuries. It was the first day of summer after school had let out and it turns out these guys had borrowed mom and dad's car to go to the beach."
"One thread of continuity about the shoplifters," smiled Brimer, "is that after they are caught, these big, bad brave boys turn into crying babies."
Body Boarders and the Demise of the Mat
"I have lived thru so many phases of the surf quote industry and sport. When Morey came out with the first body boards that came in a kit you put together, they worked great and looked like crap. Then the BE172 showed and it was the only body board in the whole world and it put the blow up raft business out of business immediately. That was a big part of the Frog House's business. We always ran rafts. One of my first jobs was to blow the 18 rafts up. I had to drag the rafts down to the gas station, half a block away, inflate them and carry them back to the Frog House. You couldn't drag them back. I wasn't' allowed to drag them."
"Immediately Bodyboards were better items then the rafts. We'd buy 600 to 800 at a time. One brand, almost all the same color. It was easy to sell cause they all were the same. There were no 14 brands to choose from then. It was a simple time, we'd get a big shipment and they would be stuffed everywhere in the building. Then competition came and new lines sprang up. Some great new manufacturers showed up in the marketplace.
Then Morey sold out to Kransco, they mass merchandised and ruined the profit structure for us small shops by selling to all the giant big box retailers in the world. It is still a good industry and I always have at least one quality bodyboarder working for us to talk to our bodyboarding customers."
Vendor Relations - TK, you have had a huge history with your vendors!
"Oh yeah, and not always positive. It's very lucky for me that the Frog House is located here in the middle of the surf world and if you don't think Newport and Huntington Beach isn't the middle of the industry, then you have another thing coming. It isn't South Africa or Australia, it is here. Luckily I've been on a first name basis with some big time surf industry owners and also my biggest stroke of luck is that these manufacturers by and large consider the Frog House to be a very important image store. They treat us very, very well and handle our account very specially, meaning slow Pay (laughs) and taking into consideration no pay sometimes.
They give us big breaks that are reserved for the large accounts and I'm not a large account with any of those guys. I don't do mega dollars from this small little store. But I'll tell you right now, nobody in the surf world sells as much rubber as we sell at the Frog House. If you’re buying a wetsuit and your not buying it at the Frog House, your probably making a mistake. We sell a ton of rubber out of here."
"We sell hard goods and our reputation is that we sell stuff that surfers use to surf with. You can buy a t-shirt here or a pair of trunks and we love you buying these things. But primarily we sell surfboards and wetsuits. There is not a store in our area that is as authentic surf as our shop is. You can also come in here and find the boys drinking a beer behind the counter. But nowadays (laughs) we try to keep it till at least 5 o'clock. And yes, young women still come in here and find young men working behind the counter. Thank goodness I'm not a young man anymore."
Employees - Why do they Stay
"You have to realize that the Frog House pays all or our employees weekly," smiled the owner, "I mean extremely weakly. It's a good concept."
"The first employee I hired when I bought the Frog House in 1977 was Mikey Beho. His real name is Mikey Flores but he lived in Montebello and we started calling him Mikey Montebello, but it was too much and so thru the years it turned into Mikey Beho."
"He had a brother, Glennie, who I offered a job to years ago. He was a real good guy but he had a better job then coming to work at the Frog House but said he had a brother named Mikey who would be perfect for me. I had never met Mikey but when he showed up to interview he had this hair that went half way down his back. That meant it was three foot of hair cause Mikey was only 4'6" tall. I took one look at him and said this is not the guy I want. He doesn't look like a surfer. What do I want him for?"
"Bless that Mikey. He has been with the Frog House for 26 years now. He has been a great asset for us. The most trustworthy, personable and wonderful guy. We love him here. But we did have one period where he left for a few years to go out on his own to open a shop at Canyon Lakes. But he discovered how disagreeable it is to operate a business and I realized how much I missed him being around here."
"We have been accused of being a comedy act and it is nothing that is planned or rehearsed. We enjoy each other and what we are doing. We try to make a person's day when they come to shop here. When we are having a good time and people walk in and see us, we tell a few jokes and have a few laughs with them. When a person walks out with or without a purchase in their hands, they feel like they have been loved and cared for and have been part of a unique experience. And that unique experience is part of what keeps us going. With our longevity, we are seeing third generation customers coming in here, Grand kids of original customers."
"I feel sorry for those people who haven't been in a shop like ours and have missed out on a bit of the flavor of the 60's surf thing. The reality we give them is about being "real."
"If they ask my opinion about a product, I'll tell them I think the product sucks if it does."
"When I was a kid and I went into a surf shop it seems there was some jerk head behind the counter who thought he was cooler than I was and that he had to prove it by de-meaning me somehow. So when I have a new employee here one of the first things I go thru is that the customers are way more important to me then my employees. I can get an employee any day I want, but getting a new customer isn't easy. I always try to impress upon the employees that the reason they are getting that free wetsuit is not cause they are such a hot surfer, but it is because they work at the Frog House and we sell a lot of wetsuits."
"As soon as you’re not working here you won't get anything. I never want someone to walk out of the Frog House thinking that they were not as important as the guy standing behind the counter."
The Frog Lifestyle - Tongue in Cheek or Hardcore to the Bone
"It's all about lifestyle, more so then any of the shops around that I know of. But my hats off to Russell down at Russell Surfboards in Newport. He still operates a "Lifestyle Surf Shop." Other than that there is not many of them around. It's all about high-octane retailing and jamming product down the throat of the next young surfer gremmie idiot that comes along."
"It saddens me to see what the industry itself has turned into and that people go in and purchase and feel akin to the surf and sport stores with all the fancy stuff and 14 sales people on the floor that half of them don't even surf and work for owners and ownership that I don't feel really shares the love for the sport of surfing that I do. But I guess that is progress. I'm glad we are not part of that."
"Do I consider myself a dinosaur?"
"I was called a dinosaur a few years back by a guy who was trying to sell Billabong down the street. He presented them with a representation letter and pointed out that the Frog House was a dinosaur that couldn't relate to the young people and the surfing industry as it is today. I take great pride in the fact that his business lasted about a year and a half. That was about 10 years ago and this old dinosaur is still kicking around and proud of it."
"I'm not ready to retire just yet. I love my wife very much but I don’t want to retire and go spend twenty-four hours a day at her side. I would think Linda feels the same way!"
Luck or Genius
I asked TK Brimer, Is that how you survived in the Newport/Huntington retailing Surf Wars?
"I've always thought we survived the retail wars because I'm so much smarter and better then the other guys." He said with smile. "But every once in a while it comes down to realizing it is LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION, baby and we are sitting on one great location. I think maybe it is a stroke of luck more than a stroke of genius."