Whalebone — 45 Years of Surf Shop Success
Excerpts from original article, SHOP, by Alain Mazer, published by SURF EXPO in 2006.
There wasn’t a street sign, traffic light, or lawn in Nags Head, North Carolina, when Jim Vaughn set up shop. But this little town on the Outer Banks — 130 miles of barrier islands southeast of Virginia Beach, Virginia — had pristine beaches and perfect, peeling Atlantic wind swell. That was all a young surf-retailing pioneer needed.
“In 1975, I had a job with a big construction company,” Vaughn recalls. “I was making really good money, but I was getting fat, I wasn’t surfing and I felt like a hypocrite, so I quit.”
According to Vaughn, that was the second time in his life that he quit something. He was for three-and-a-half years the highest-ranked cadet in his class at The Citadel military college in South Carolina, but Vaughn realized midway through his senior year that the martial way was not for him. Vaughn left the Citadel and, in 1970, transferred to the University of South Carolina to study Far Eastern philosophy and religion.
After college and leaving his first and only nine-to-five job, a friend and owner of Jupiter, Florida-based Resincraft Surf Shop suggested Vaughn join him at the Outer Banks to set up a new store, manage it, surf and “hang-out”. Vaughn had been going to the Outer Banks to surf since the ’60s, it was one of his favorite surf spots and, in March ’75, he drove to Nags Head to seek his fortune as a surf shop proprietor. He hasn’t quit anything since.
Vaughn and his business partner rented an 800-square-foot house from a Catholic priest who had converted the dive bar next door into the Holy Trinity church. Vaughn carpeted the attic above the shop and called it home. After-hours, the neighboring church played host to an array of surf films. “Jim Plimpton used to make surf films and, for beer, he would play really outstanding Super-8 movies for us,” Vaughn recalls. Plimpton eventually retired from the movie biz after breaking both his heels while hanging upside down from a homemade kite that his brother, “Berzerko Bob”, was pulling behind a boat.
During Vaughn’s first year in and above the store in North Carolina, he attended his first trade show in Virginia Beach. According to Vaughn, nearly every brand in the nascent surf industry was there, including Sundeck, Op, Hang-Ten, California T-shirts, and Eeni Meeni Bikinis, Vaughn’s first women’s line. In the winter of ’76, Vaughn bought out his business partner and changed the name to Whalebone Junction Surf Shop.
As Vaughn recalls, between ’77 and ’78, Lightning Bolt was the №1 brand in and out of the water, but a new champion was emerging. In 1983, a sleeper hit blew into Kissimmee Florida, with the Surf Expo trade show, where Vaughn came upon West Coast surfboard shaper Bob Hurley and industry notable “Joe K.” sitting in folding chairs behind a bare card table displaying a pair of boardshorts.
“I asked Bob, ‘What ‘cha got?’” Vaughn says. “Bob held up this pair of Billabong boardshorts, and when I asked them what else they had, he held up another pair and said, ‘We have this color too.’” Bob Hurley went on to start his own company, Hurley, in 1999.
Throughout the early ’80s, Whalebone stood strong in the face of numerous hurricanes and torrential Nor’ easterly winds, while simultaneously enduring the vicissitudes of a regional market that, according to Vaughn, garners nearly all its yearly revenue on weekends from March through June. “I was in this seasonal area with absolutely no shoulder season,” Vaughn says. “In the slow years, I would ask myself, ‘What am I doing wrong?’ And I would sit there in the middle of winter, literally banging my head against the wall.”
In the lean years, his head aching, Vaughn drove back to Florida and puddle-jumped to Puerto Rico to surf. In the good years, he closed shop in mid-November and took off for Hawaii. Regardless of whether he was retreating to the Pacific or the Caribbean, each February Vaughn returned to North Carolina dead broke, only to be met with a pile of bills, letters, and jury duty summonses.
“My wife, April, took my ‘piling’ system and turned it into a filing system,” says Vaughn, who convinced his bride to quit her real-estate job in 1983 to come on board as his partner in Whalebone. “It’s hard enough to be a business partner with somebody, but you have to be really lucky to have a marriage and partnership,” says Vaughn. “I’m happy to say April and I have managed both for nearly 38 years.”
In 1991, Vaughn charged toward Whalebone’s manifest destiny, opening a 3800-square-foot freestanding shop in Nags Head. Since then it’s been business as usual, with Whalebone continuing to sail under clear and optimistic skies.
And what does a man with 45 years of surf retailing under his belt see as his future? He and April would be living in a tent camp (they love camping) or above the Nags Head shop, like the old shop. They would work via iPhone and computer and he prognosticates renewed interest in at least one fad of the past: “In ’66, everyone was wearing Jams, “Vaughn says, “and in 1986, our little shop was empty except for Jams. You do the math — I’ll be dusting off my old racks to make room for Jams in year 2020. Where does the time go.”
