our story
we made the chair we wanted to own.
SUN'Y started with a broken Tommy Bahama on a Saturday on the Balboa Peninsula. The chair gave up halfway through the morning, and the rest of the day got worse from there. We figured the upgrade would be easy to find. It wasn't.
newport beach, 6:42am
01 · the morning
It was a Saturday. The chair was a Tommy Bahama. It broke.
Not the broken Tommy Bahama, obviously. This one came later.
We were on the Balboa Peninsula. The kind of morning where the marine layer hangs off the water until about nine, then burns off into the bluest sky you've ever seen. We'd packed the car the night before. Coffee, towels, the kids, the dog, the wrong amount of sunscreen. The Tommy Bahama backpack chair was about three years old. It had done its job.
Until that Saturday, when the hinge gave on the recline and the seat slumped forward and we spent the rest of the morning sitting on a towel. Which was fine. The towel was fine. It was the realization that bothered us. We'd been carrying around a piece of equipment that we'd never quite trusted, and we'd been ignoring that feeling because we didn't know what to replace it with.
That's when we started looking. We figured: a beach chair. Solved problem. There must be twenty good ones. It turns out there are not twenty good ones.
There's the chair that's light and falls apart. There's the chair that's sturdy and looks like a parking-lot chair. There's nothing in between.
the gap we set out to fill
02 · what was wrong
Every option we looked at was on a spectrum. We didn't want a spot on the spectrum.
We spent about three months looking. We tried the ultralight ones that fold to the size of a baguette. The seat fabric was always something thin and slick that you slid off of. The frames bent if you leaned. The cup holder was an afterthought. The eco story was usually a tag on the package and not in the material.
We tried the heavyweight ones. The ones with the canopy and the side table and the seven cup holders. Sturdy enough. But twenty pounds and a parking-lot aesthetic. The kind of chair you put in the trunk and then resent having to carry across a hundred yards of sand. Built for tailgates, not for the trips you actually wanted to take.
the light end
Folds to a baguette. Fails by the second season.
Thin seat fabric, bendy frame, missing the small details. Cheap in the way that costs more.
the heavy end
Built like a fortress. Looks like a parking lot.
Twenty pounds, canopy you don't use, seven cup holders. Sturdy but resented every time you carry it.
Escapes in Nautical Navy. Beechwood armrests. Aluminum frame. Recycled ocean bound plastic fabric.
03 · what we made
A chair you'd want to look at on the console table at home.
Most beach chairs are designed against a price point. We designed ours against a feeling: the one you have when you set up gear that you trust, made of materials that feel like they belong outside.
Beechwood armrests, because real wood ages well and plastic gets brittle by July of year two. An aluminum frame, because it lives in salt air and steel doesn't. Four recline positions that get you from upright to your reading angle without trying to be a bed. A MOLLE attachment system on the back, so the pouches and umbrella ride with you instead of hanging off your shoulder.
The fabric is woven from recycled ocean bound plastic. Nineteen bottles per chair, diverted from the Pacific. The eco angle isn't the lead. The chair is the chair you'd want anyway. It just costs the ocean less to make.
And then we made the towel. Because nothing else we owned folded to the side pouch on the chair. And we made the umbrella, because nothing else we owned clipped to the MOLLE on the back. The kit grew out of the chair, the same way the chair grew out of the morning on the Balboa Peninsula. Each piece was made because the next piece needed it.
where we work
Newport Beach, California. A few blocks from the water.
We design from Newport Beach. The studio is small and the windows face the harbor. The chairs get tested down at Corona del Mar and at Crystal Cove. The towels get tested in the kitchen when the kids spill juice on them. The umbrellas get tested in November wind because there's nothing like a Santa Ana to find every weak point in a beach umbrella.
We're not a Newport Beach brand the way a logo on a hat is from a place. We're from here in the sense that the work happens here, the testing happens here, and the people who make the decisions live within sight of the beaches the gear was made for. That's the only definition we've ever cared about.
what we believe
five things we hold onto.
The short list, because long manifestos rarely change anyone's mind.
Build what you'd want to own. Not what tests well. Not what hits a margin. The thing you'd actually put on the console table.
Material first, decoration second. Beechwood ages. Aluminum doesn't rust. Recycled ocean bound plastic doesn't pretend to be cotton. The material should be the story.
The eco angle is true. It's not the lead. We don't oversell it. We mention it because it earned the mention.
Don't run sales. The price is the price. If we want to introduce a number, we do it through a kit, not a discount.
Quiet beats loud. No exclamation points, no ALL CAPS shouting. The chair speaks for itself by the second weekend you own it.
what we're building
The chair was the start. The system is the work.
Three things we're building now, on the same drawing.
Escapes
The everyday line.
The chair, the towel, the umbrella, the pouches. The default. Built to disappear into the trip.
see the kitOcean Impact
The material story.
Where the recycled ocean bound plastic comes from, how it gets here, and what we won't claim about it. Documented.
read the storyThe values
The way we work.
Build what you'd want to own. Material first. The eco angle is true, not the lead. The price is the price. Quiet beats loud.
build your kitkeep reading
the rest of the story.
Two pages where the chair becomes a kit, and the material becomes a record.
the kit
Three things, one decision.
The chair, the towel, the umbrella. Designed together, priced together. The way we'd buy it ourselves.
see the kitocean impact
Where the material comes from.
Recycled ocean bound plastic, traced from the coastline to the chair. The claims we make, and the ones we won't.
read ocean impactthe line we keep coming back to
beach more, worry less.
The chair, the kit, every last detail. Everything we make is built around one idea: more time at the beach, less fuss getting there.