Our First Collaboration! Wow, it’s hard to believe that Daydream has been around for 8 years and we have yet to do a collaborative collection. We’ve done small collabs with a single product like the Duke Swim Shorts that we released last Summer but we have yet to do a full capsule collection like this. Needless to say, Becca and I were super excited when our friends at the Costa Mesa based brand, Slowtide, brought up the idea over a year ago in January of 2024. Becca’s wheels were immediately turning, she designs our revered quilt towels on a regular basis but the shop that knits those towels has a set number of colors we are able to use as well as materials. Designing a collection with a company like Slowtide means we could use any color we could dream up, have an extensive selection of materials to choose from, and could design custom, intricate patterns to be woven!
Becca hit the ground running pulling inspiration from her myriad of quilting books, thoughtful sessions with her Pantone fabric swatch books, and days upon weeks locked into Illustrator making hundreds of quilt patterns. After sifting through nearly a thousand options, she showed me her favorites and we narrowed down our selections to submit to Wylie at Slowtide.
Rewind back to 2010, I was sponsored by Ezekiel and made regular trips to their headquarters in Irvine to check in. One day I walked in and saw a new face in the creatives section, the part of the office that wasn’t down for cubicles but rather sprawling desks in the middle of a large open floorplan, that’s when I got to meet their new Art Director, Wylie. He was friendly and had a good sense of humor, I felt like we hit it off and I’d regularly come hang and chat with him inside and outside of the Ezekiel offices. Our paths diverged, I got accepted to UC Berkeley and he got hired by Nike. Little did we know that we were soon to start businesses of our own within the next five years.
When we first opened Daydream in 2016 the decision to add Slowtide to our shop was a no brainer. To us, they seemed to be the first movers that really took towels into a space that made them feel like art. If Costa Mesa Ceramics can change your perspective on how amazing your interaction with a cup can feel, Slowtide was doing the same thing with towels. What was an empty looking bathroom was now being shaped by art forward towels designed by Wylie himself or collaboratively with other artists with Wylie at the helm.
Fast forward back to 2024, we submitted our designs to Wylie and he helped shepherd us with his input that reflects his years of experience. The next thing you know our samples are in production. We are blown away by the look and feel of the first samples, after a little back and forth fine tuning each piece, we are all in agreeance that the collection is looking top notch! Now that the products are developed and signed off the next steps were for Slowtide to take the collection to their wholesale partners to see if what we designed could attract popularity from retailers.
Great news landed, we found out that this collection was one of the hottest selling collaborations Slowtide has ever done! They had orders from shops small and large all over the US! Now that we had the backing from tons of accounts wanting a piece of our collection it was time to talk with the Slowtide team about how we wanted to roll out something both of us were quickly becoming proud of. This was around late fall, early winter 2024 and the collection was launching in March 2025 so we had plenty of time to dream big. As anyone reading this probably knows, Daydream loves to throw parties, so of course we wanted to have a big party for the release of this collection at our shop. We were also lucky enough for Slowtide to offer up the idea of creating some video content surrounding the project. We were so excited and connected our insanely talented friend, Dana Shaw, with Slowtide in hopes that they could strike a deal and we could work with Dana to create a video that embodies the collaboration.
It was on! Slowtide was able to hire Dana to make the piece just in time for a super fun swell that was forecasted to hit the Bay Area, where Dana was living. We had a super fun day of surf in San Francisco. We started at high tide on the inside bars as the swell was filling in. Very quickly the inside was overpowered and started washing through from the outside bars. We hopped in the car and drove south to find some incredibly beautiful waves on the outside sandbars. With offshore winds forecasted for the rest of the day, I had a blast feeling out the new board that I was riding and surfed until I couldn’t paddle anymore, I’d estimate the better part of four hours.
There was a little bit of carnage. The waves felt like they wanted to barrel but there were so many waves where the barrel was really pinched and warbly which made it difficult to tuck into although the waves themselves had a nice sized face to them, the tube was restricted to the top half of the wave on many occasions. I got clamped by a couple pinched barrels, on one of them I fell on my side and felt my arm stretched so far that it felt like it was about to pop off my body. Luckily it wasn’t dislocated, most likely a mere hyperextension, and I was able to keep surfing with only slight discomfort.
I found myself in a similar situation on another wave, I pulled into a barrel but got caught too deep to make it out. As I was swirling around under water, I could feel that my board was nearby and whirling around like a boat propeller somewhere way too close for comfort. Next thing I know, my fin slices into my foot before resurfacing. My feet were pretty numb at this point, I didn’t think much of it and grabbed my board to prepare for my beating on my way back to the outside. As I was paddling back out, I could feel a loose flap of skin dragging from my foot which couldn’t be good. I pull my foot up and examine a sizable flap of skin with blood expelling from underneath it. The flap was really uncomfortable so I decided to tear it from my foot and keep surfing for another few hours.
Dana and I were both exhausted. Filming at the wave we were at is very demanding, there’s tons of current which makes it hard for the subject you’re filming to maintain positioning that reflects the angle that you set out to shoot from. The waves are also really far off shore so you have to have your eye glued to your lens to maintain connection to your surfer. All in all, we had a great day and were excited to see what Dana was going to create with the footage.
What was meant to be a three minute short turned into a seven minute mini documentary on Daydream and the beautiful collection that Becca so artfully designed. We fully trust in Dana and his story telling skills through the art of cinema and we were so happy to see the first cut of his video. Everyone loved it and the extra four minutes were happily approved with zero revisions on Slowtide’s end. Meanwhile, Becca and I were doing R&D testing our beach blanket, oversized bath towels, and turkish towels in our daily lives. We were feeling so good about every part of this project.
All that was left now was to plan a fun party and roll out the towels! We called upon party extraordinaire Wesley Herron aka DJ Jungle Jungle of Reverberation Radio to see if he’d be available to spin his immaculate collection of world funk vinyl. He was able to make March 15 work! Next we called one of our favorite chefs, Ivan Trejo of Mastica and he was also down to join the fun!
Poster by Brett Heffner
Now we are just a few days away from the launch party and we couldn’t be more excited. We hope that you’ll join us in the celebration of our FIRST COLLAB launch this Saturday, March 15th from 6-9pm. As previously mentioned, we’ll have Reverberation Radio curating the musical experience and Mastica on culinary. We’ll also be screening the shot Dana made for this project with a little Q&A. Free refreshments will be available courtesy of 805 and Ghia as well. We’ll have a little after party at our wine bar down the street, Semi Tropic Wines, for anyone that wants to keep the party going.
A massive thank you to everyone involved with this project - the amazingly small but mighty Slowtide team, my incredible wife and business partner, Becca, Dana Shaw for his cinemagraphic storytelling, all the workers that meticulously crafted each towel that was produced, all the shops retailing these towels, and a future thank you to everyone that picks up a cherished piece from this collaboration.
Love,
Kyle (Daydream Surf Shop Owner)
PS: We have another collection in the works for this coming holiday season…