Kassia Meador is a professional athlete who has parlayed her success into a lifestyle brand. That may not sound revolutionary. But in women’s surfing, Meador is a trailblazer.
at a contest in Queensland, Australia, to the 17-year-old Caroline Marks, who took home $100,000.
Meador grew up in Agoura Hills, the oldest of three children. She always wanted to be at the beach. In summer 1997, when she was 15, her parents started dropping her off at First Point. Meador’s first invitation to surf in an international competition came from the Rabbit Kekai Longboard Classic in Costa Rica. Her parents didn’t have the money to send her. So Meador bought candy at Smart & Final and sold it to her classmates at a markup. She made $1,500 — enough for the ticket to Costa Rica.
In previous decades, if women appeared in surf films, they were usually in bikinis on the beach. “I would be the girl in a film with a lot of guys, or one of two girls in a film with a lot of guys,” Meador recalled. Meador rode for Roxy for 14 years, competing in contests, appearing in surf films and shooting ad campaigns all over the world. She also dabbled in wetsuit design. Before Roxy, women’s wetsuits were practically nonexistent. Andersen, who’d worn men’s board shorts and wetsuits early in her career, had demanded better gear, designed for the female form. Roxy obliged with what were essentially smaller versions of men’s wetsuits, cut to similar tailoring.
Meador stepped away from contests and her other professional surfing obligations. She wanted to create her own wetsuits on her own terms. More than this, she wanted to reevaluate her relationship to the sport she loved. By this point, a reckoning was rippling through the surfing world. In 2011, Cori Schumacher, then the reigning longboard champion, boycotted the Assn. of Surfing Professionals World Longboard Tour for planning an event on Hainan Island, China. In a letter to the organization, Schumacher cited China’s human-rights violations, “specifically those in violation of women.”
When Meador launched Kassia + Surf, in 2015, women’s surfing was hungry for a new message. With every neoprene tote bag and swimsuit she made, Meador promoted an inclusive vision in her social media feeds: Here are women of all skill levels enjoying the surf, in gear that won’t free the nipple or make its way to a landfill in a matter of months.the Committee for Equity in Women’s Surfing
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