Filling the country with surf style

Deepa Bharath

Michelle Gardner is a classic example of a one-woman show.

She runs her Hawaiian bedding business from her beach cottage on

the Balboa Peninsula. Her closets and her bedroom are stuffed with

beautiful fabrics rich in color and surf motifs.

And she sells all of it over the World Wide Web.

Gardner doesn’t even use a shipping company. She personally goes

over to the neighborhood post office and sends off the goods to her

customers throughout the country.

“It helps keep the prices down,” the 37-year-old entrepreneur

said.

Gardner started her business in January, and it’s all gotten a lot

busier than she expected. She sells between three and 11 items per

day.

“I have customers now from all over the country, even places like

Alaska, Maryland and Kansas,” she said. “It seems people who live

there love the idea of surf although they don’t have any where they

live.”

Gardner makes an entire line of surf bedding from shams and duvet

covers to pillows and blankets. She started off with a sewing machine

in her home, but then she couldn’t keep up with the increasing

demand. So now, she contracts that job to a person in Santa Ana,

Gardner said.

The raw material comes from a variety of sources.

“I get the fabric from China,” she said. “I import the wooden

buttons with the hibiscus engraved on them from India. The fleece for

the surf blankets comes from Turkey.”

And they all converge in Balboa and are shaped by Gardner’s

imagination.

The biggest challenge, she said, is to find good fabric.

“It needs to be 100% cotton, and the price has to be right,”

Gardner said. “It’s also quite a challenge to get it all made in

time.”

Gardner wants to expand her line to include lamps, shower curtains

and other items, but she said that is not going to happen any time

soon.

“It’s just too busy now for me to even think about that,” she

said.

She is originally from England. Her family moved to New York City

10 years ago, and their love for the ocean brought them to Balboa

five years ago.

“We’re a surfing family,” Gardner said. “My husband, son and

daughters all surf. And I’m learning to surf. The theme is local to

where we live. It’s what our community is about.”