Rip Curl: Torquay's Surf Contemporary to Billabong

calendar Aug 4, 2026 / · 8 min read · Rip Curl Billabong Quiksilver Torquay Wetsuit History Surf Industry Cluster Brand History Australian Surf and Skate  ·
Share on: linkedin copy

Two Torquay Surfers, One Shaping Bay, and the Start of Rip Curl

Gilbert Street in Torquay doesn't look like much today, but in March 1969 it was the site of a chance run-in between two surfing friends that turned into one of Australia's defining surf companies. Doug "Claw" Warbrick had just finished a summer shaping stint with Fred Pyke; Brian "Sing Ding" Singer was teaching science. When Warbrick asked Singer if he wanted to start making surfboards together, Singer resigned from teaching within a couple of days, and Rip Curl was underway. The pair set up in a garage at 35 Great Ocean Road, where Warbrick shaped boards and Singer handled sanding and fin work, and by April 1969 they were turning out four boards a week for Torquay's best surfers.

By November that year the garage wasn't enough. The two moved into the Old Torquay Bakery at 5 Boston Road for $10 a week rent, setting up a proper shaping bay along with glassing and sanding rooms and lifting production to twelve boards a week. The Torquay Museum Without Walls history of the local surf industry describes the company's earliest days as literally improvised — foam blanks stacked on racks that had once held the bakery's loaves of bread — a detail that captures how far the operation still was from anything resembling a global brand.

From Boards to Wetsuits — and a Second Company Born in the Same Building

In December 1969 a third local surfer, Alan Green, joined the operation. Green had worked as an accountant at a Melbourne dive-equipment supplier and had seen imported neoprene diving suits there; he brought that knowledge back to Torquay, and the trio started making wetsuits to complement the boards, working out of the basement of a house on Beale Street behind the Torquay pub. They sourced a "Pfaff 138 zig-zag" sewing machine capable of working the thick sheet rubber they brought in from Clayton, on Melbourne's outskirts.

What happened next is one of the more remarkable coincidences in Australian surf-industry history. Green's own business idea was taking shape in the very same building he'd just started sewing wetsuits in. According to Tracks magazine's account of the period, prototype boardshorts for what would become Quiksilver were being designed in a corner of the Boston Road bakery in the summer of 1969–70, while Rip Curl's wetsuits were being cut by a suit-maker named John "Sparra" Pyburne just a few trestle tables away. Tracks put the relationship plainly: the two brands "were born more or less twins in Torquay." Green left Rip Curl in April 1970 to run his own venture full-time.

The Long John That Made Rip Curl the Market Leader

The wetsuit side of Rip Curl's business kept accelerating after Green's departure. The Torquay Museum's account records that the remaining partners invested in an old pre-WWII sewing machine — originally used to sew flying boots for airmen — bought more rubber, and hired a small crew of locals to sew full-time, eventually moving the wetsuit operation into the house behind the old bakery once it became available. By 1973, Rip Curl was the market leader in Australian Long John wetsuit sales, turning out roughly 100 suits a week at a profit margin of around $10 per suit.

Tracks' account fills in the technical breakthrough behind that jump: the turning point came when Singer and Green sourced a long-arm Singer sewing machine that let them cut 3mm long johns, which paired with a long-sleeved 3mm vest to function as an effective 6mm steamer. Warbrick told Tracks the effect on the local market was immediate: "Every surfer in Victoria had to have one, and we started to do good business." By the time professional surfing arrived in Australia in 1973, Rip Curl Wetsuits was positioned to sponsor the first Rip Curl Pro at Bells Beach — by Rip Curl's own account, the first professional surfing event any surf company sponsored.

Shared Land, Shared Shares: How Tangled Rip Curl and Quiksilver's Early Ownership Was

The Torquay relationship between the two brands went further than shared premises. Rip Curl's own company history describes Green forming Quiksilver in April 1970 with Warbrick and Singer initially on board as equal partners in the new venture, before the three eventually decided to focus on one business or the other. Singer later recalled swapping his Quiksilver shares for Green's half of a block of land behind Bells Beach — the two men reportedly settling the valuation dispute with a coin toss — while Warbrick sold his own Quiksilver shares back to Green, who then issued them to his new business partner, John Law. It's a level of early cross-ownership that's easy to miss if you treat Rip Curl and Quiksilver as separate stories rather than two branches of the same Torquay origin.

Boardwear, Snow, and the Limits of the Diversification Record

Rip Curl's own account of its history describes the company as having been "at the forefront of the surf and snow scenes since its creation" — a diversification lane that runs from wetsuits and boardshorts into broader boardwear and winter-sports gear. That's a useful data point for anyone comparing Rip Curl's expansion pattern to Billabong's, but it's worth stating plainly rather than papering over: the publicly available record used for this piece does not document a Rip Curl skateboarding or surfskate push comparable to what Billabong built with Bad Billy's, its skate and streetwear sub-label launched in 1987. The honest comparison isn't "Rip Curl's own skate label" — it's that two Torquay companies born in the same bakery took different roads outward from surf and wetsuits, and a Queensland company took a third.

Why Torquay Became a Cluster, Not Just Two Competing Companies

The fact that Rip Curl and Quiksilver started in the same building, months apart, sharing labour, know-how, and eventually company shares, is more than a quirky footnote — it's close to a textbook example of what economists call an industry cluster. A 2008 paper in the International Journal of Sport Management and Marketing, by Bob Stewart, James Skinner and Allan Edwards, applied Michael Porter's cluster theory of competitive advantage directly to Torquay, asking why two brands from one small Victorian coastal town became global surf-industry leaders.

Based on interviews, document analysis, and field trips to the region, the paper's finding was that Rip Curl's and Quiksilver's international growth wasn't just a consequence of a historically strong local surf culture. It also came from the two companies' capacity to innovate on product design, the inter-organisational synergies that developed between businesses working in close physical proximity, and the international exposure both brands got through their association with the Bells Beach contest Rip Curl had sponsored from 1973 onward. Rip Curl itself moved premises twice in the years that followed — into a new Geelong Road facility in 1976, with Quiksilver opening next door soon after, then across the road to its current headquarters in 1980 — proximity that kept reinforcing itself well past the original bakery years. In Porter's framework, a cluster is a group of interconnected companies that make each other stronger simply by being co-located. Torquay wasn't lucky enough to produce two great surf companies by coincidence; it produced the conditions that let two companies sharing a bakery become two of the most recognized surf brands in the world.

What the Torquay Cluster Means for the Industry Bad Billy's Entered

Billabong, the Queensland surf brand that launched Bad Billy's as its skate and streetwear sub-label in 1987, wasn't built inside the Torquay cluster the Griffith research describes — it grew out of a different regional base entirely. But the broader pattern that research identifies is still the right context for understanding the industry Bad Billy's stepped into. By the mid-1980s, Australian surf companies weren't isolated garage operations anymore. They were competing, cooperating, and diversifying in an industry that had already proven — through Rip Curl and Quiksilver's shared Torquay origin — that a surf brand could scale from a rented bakery to global recognition inside a few short years. That's the environment a Queensland surf label was operating in when it decided a skate sub-label was worth the bet: not an unproven category, but one where the state of the art, a decade and a half earlier, had been two guys with a tail-planer and a rented garage.

For collectors and researchers tracing Bad Billy's own history, the Rip Curl comparison is also a reminder of how unevenly Australian surf-brand history has been preserved. Rip Curl's founding story — the names, the dates, the specific sewing machines — is unusually well documented, thanks to the company's own archive and independent local-history projects like the Torquay museum. Bad Billy's, as a smaller in-house sub-label rather than a standalone company, doesn't have that same institutional record. The gap isn't evidence that Bad Billy's mattered less; it's a predictable consequence of the difference between a company that has kept its own archive for more than fifty years and a sub-label that operated inside a parent brand's broader business.

References

Posts in this series