Soul Buddha clothing label goes online

The surfing, boarding and club wear design collective, Soul Buddha, has gone online. In a strategic B2B move to provide designs to retailers 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, they have created an online ordering via the award winning online retailer CafePress.

Spokesperson Alex di Savoia, commented: "We did extensive research into creating an online presence to sell our clothing lines. That included running through numerous parameters about how we wanted the online business to run. Did we want to create and maintain our own branded website? How would we handle the manufacturing side of operations? Did we really want to jump through numerous hoops to set up merchant accounts and deal with tariffs for export? We are surfers and explorers on the go. We didn’t want to be tied down by excessive administration.

"CafePress offered an ingenious solution. They handle the operational side of things which covers manufacturing, distribution, shipping, ordering and payments. The quality of their textiles is excellent - even covering organic materials. All of these are important factors for us. Their baseline wholesale prices are also highly attractive."

di Savoia continued, "We can also offer retailers discounts through a voucher system through CafePress. It's a flexible service and it certainly answered many quality control and business issues we had raised amongst ourselves. Our end of the bargain is to sit on a beach or a mountain slope or the middle of a jungle and upload our designs with our laptops. The Soul Buddha collective are all avid surfers, snowboarders, skateboarders and travellers - so this arrangement allows us to expand our business and we get do the things we love to do. We wanted to ‘do the business’ but we didn’t want our lives to be all about the business. It’s a delicate balance we seem to achieved. "

Soul Buddha happened when four life-long mates left a tiny seaside town for an adventure. Their travels took them to London, where two became rising young guns in the worlds of PR and advertising. The third started down the road of becoming a very promising music journalist and the fourth a very talented young merchant banker. They partied and life in the capital was good. But the bright lights and the big city couldn’t quell the desire for something different.

So the four set forth from London to travel far and wide; surfing, snowboarding and trekking in some of the most awe inspiring parts of the world. As good as the surf, the slopes and places they visited were there was an undiminished urge to move on. To see something new. To broaden the horizons, so to speak.

A few years down the road and a wisely managed nest egg was considerably less than it had been in the beginning. Desk jobs and the cut and thrust of their respective careers had lost something of their lustre. The foursome came upon a simple and ingenious plan…to produce clothing designs - inspired by the places and sights they had seen - and sell them informally in the places they visited. With beaches and mountains for offices, it was an inspired solution. And they enjoyed quiet success, slowly building a name for themselves by word of mouth. And all without a brand name or a logo. It was just cool to see sk8ers,snowboarders, surfers and ravers wearing their kit.

With a bit of success under their belt, and returning to some locations more than others,
they decided to push the boat out an approach local retailers of surf, sk8er and raver wear. Retailers loved the designs but always asked the same thing: ‘what’s the name of the company’. The four could never quite agree and it never seemed as important as catching another perfect set of waves or another sweet slope. Then, one day, these four adventurers caught the most perfect set of waves they had ever caught on Australia’s Gold Coast.

Riding high afterwards, they spent the night on the beach with newfound mates philosophising, chatting, watching the stars and dancing around a bonfire to old skool r&b and classic soul tracks. A brief chill out session to the tunes of Barry White and one of the four uttered the phrase "this dude is just pure Soul Buddha". The four just looked at each other and there wasn’t a need to say anything further.

Blame it on Barry White, blame it on some great Australian lager, those waves or just that instant in time. Soul Buddha was born.