Craig Anderson is a unique character. His surfing, of course, is world class. He’s one of the few surfers in the world who is recognizable by silhouette alone. He, with a little help from Hayden Cox, turned the Hypo Krypto into the world’s best selling surfboard for a while there. His surfing is loud, but Anderson is not. He’s famously camera shy. Famously not into interviews. The guy just wants to surf and cruise with family and friends, but his surfing is so good that the world is constantly clamoring for him.
“Craig has never been one to hog the limelight,” writes Db, purveyors of some very fine surf and ski bags, in its most recent installment of Pack Heavy, Chase Light. “In fact, he was pretty uncomfortable being followed around New York by Sam and his camera, though that could have been thanks to the ‘morbid’ hangover he was nursing.”
In this episode, Anderson talks the viewer through a pretty monumental decision: he turned down a contract that would have put an enormous pile of cash in his pocket to start his own business venture. That, of course, is FORMER, which Anderson partnered with Dane Reynolds, Austyn Gillette, and Dylan Rieder to start. But as with any new venture, there were a handful of mistakes made along the way.
“I turned down a contract which was probably the most amount of money I could have ever made,” Anderson said. “With FORMER, I guess the main reason we started it was just so that we could kinda do whatever we wanted and have total creative freedom.”
Those mistakes weren’t huge ones, and now FORMER is in a decent spot. “Without the huge marketing budget of the household names,” DB wrote, “FORMER took a while to get out of the starting blocks, but Craig and the guys kept chipping away and now, they’re in a pretty good place. Now, they’re able to support talent the way they want to, and spend their days chasing waves in remote locations.”
