Searching for the ultimate ride, Gardner Wade and a buddy drove a car named "George" from Seattle to San Diego to surf in 1984. Soon a shaping room was built behind the Avalanche Jetty in Ocean Beach. Gardner picked up a Skil 100 planer and began shaping surfboards.  Mitch sold him blanks and glassing was done through Canyon in Ocean Beach.  The new underground label, Avalanche Ocean Technology, survived until Avalanche Snowboards sent a cease and desist letter. The main jetty and the cliffs provided solid training grounds for surf adventures to Hawaii, Central America, Mexico and Japan.

Gardner rented out the shaping bay to locals and focused on college. Marcio Zouvi from SharpEye got his start in the Avalanche Shaping Room. While studying plastics, industrial engineering, sculpture, design and film, Gardner worked the South Mission tower as an ocean lifeguard and eventually ended up Production Manager for American Film Technologies in La Jolla. After burning through Ted Turner's MGM film library, he married and moved to San Clemente where his two sons, Curren and Garrett, were born to be watermen. Surf was never far away and El Ninos were epic.

In 1996, Gardner went to Tahiti and got tubed at the End of the Road: Teahupoo. He did not know how to pronounce the name but he knew that this was the sickest wave on the planet. Then the world came to see the impact of the 1997 Gotcha Contest and later, Laird's wave. Corey Lopez, Garrett, Slater, Hobgood, Raimana and Poto shocked the surf world and the images burned into our brains. Impossibly perfect! Gardner realized that this was the brand opportunity of a lifetime. Just like Pipe in 1962. After 9 years working as the Director of Engineering at Oakley, Gardner realized it was time to finish what he started in 1984. Build a core lifestyle brand that would force him into insane surf with good friends. A brand that would represent the pure stoke of the heaviest wave on the planet. Teahupoo.

The problem was, no one could pronounce it! The Aussies started calling it Cho-pu and that just pissed off the Tahitians because it means soup. Gardner sought out the Parker family, Victor and Erline, who own land near the point in Teahupoo, for advice and guidance. He crashed at Mommy's and met Josh Humbert, founder of Mana pearls: www.Tahitimana.com. Josh suggested spelling it CHO-PO, the correct Tahitian pronounciation, and the rest is history.

Raimana Van-bastolaer, the legend, agreed to be the Vice President of Sports Marketing after several rounds of sushi and Hinano. He knew the brand had power and he was the man to host it for the world.

The CHO-PO brand is committed to deliver only the highest performance surf products to the athletes who understand pure, core surf stoke. There is no other wave like CHO-PO.  Today only a few other brands in the world remain dedicated to the true ocean lifestyle. This keeps us in the water, having fun, charging hard. 

CHO-PO just makes good products...by surfers, for surfers. No corporate BS and no compromises.

Thanks for your support and we'll see you in the lineup!