I grew up in Chicago, next to Lake Michigan. A beautiful, large body of water where you can't see the other side. Just not the kind with surfable waves.
My freshman year of high school, I visited a friend at a boarding school outside of Santa Barbara. Kids were doing homework in hammocks. Reggae was playing in the background. That's when I first discovered Yellowman. And I heard that surfing was an elective. As a girl from the landlocked Midwest, it was the coolest thing I'd ever heard.
That trip started a ripple. It would take years to become a groundswell.
The Long, Slow Paddle Out
Over the years, I took the occasional surf lesson in Maui. That's where I learned pretty quickly that surfing was a lot more than just standing up on a board. A couple of lessons on vacation weren't going to make me a surfer.
Then in my mid-thirties, I signed up for an all-women surf camp in Malpais, Costa Rica, run by Pura Vida Adventures. That week changed everything. Learning with all women felt comfortable and supportive in a way that made me want to keep going.
I came back to New York and decided I was going to surf. I remember going to a surf shop in the city to buy my first wetsuit and coming home with a men's suit. There was a little extra room in places I didn't quite need it. The shop didn't carry women's wetsuits.
Meanwhile, On Land
At the same time, I was building my career as a creative director. I spent nearly two decades working with brands including J.Crew, Faherty, Away, and ILIA Beauty. At J.Crew, one of the things I especially loved was creating influencer gifting programs. I would curate products around a launch and think about how everything worked together, from the products themselves to the packaging to the experience of opening it.
The Gift That Started It All
A few years ago, a seaster sent me a Christmas gift. She had put real thought into it. A curated collection of surf products, the kind of things that actually make a session better, along with a few personal touches that only made sense to us. Pizza socks, because we once ate pizza out of a box in a parking lot after a really good session. That kind of thing.
I used every one of those products. They made it into my personal surf kit, and eventually some of them ended up making it into The Nami Box.
That gift stayed with me. I loved the idea of giving someone a collection of things they might not have discovered on their own, but would actually use. Products that were discovered, tested, and genuinely worth sharing.
Why The Nami Box
Eventually, the different parts of my life started to connect. My creative background. My experience with gifting. Surfing. The products I had come to rely on and the independent brands behind them.
Nami means wave in Japanese. It reflects my heritage as a third-generation Japanese American, and it felt right for something built around the ocean and what it gives us.
The Nami Box started as a way to share what I had discovered: curated surf kits featuring independent brands and products that make a session better, from a quick local paddle-out to a flight across the ocean. But it was also about creating a way to support smaller brands and introduce them to a wider surf community.
It has grown into something bigger. I'm constantly discovering new products, meeting the people behind them, testing things, and finding the ones I genuinely want to share with other surfers. The more I do it, the more I see The Nami Box as a way to bring people together around the brands, products, and experiences we share in and around the water.
The wetsuits fit better now. My surf world has gotten a lot bigger. And the lineup keeps growing and becoming more diverse.
