Interview with Warren Smith
Warren Smith vanished. Well, we knew where he was. But he wasn’t where he normally is. He was mysteriously back in his hometown on the Gulf Coast of Florida eating too much Taco Bell and squatting at a local Starbucks working on a top secret project.
The project is a new wave park for the Gulf Coast of Florida called Shell Point Beach and Surf Club. Last week it was unveiled after winning a unanimous approval vote to start the build. The park’s announcement was accompanied by some really fun visuals featuring Blair Conklin, Alex Knost and Justin Quintal ripping and tearing on a remote patch of sand off Panama City Beach that is the model for the new Shell Point Surf Club.
This is all a long way away from where we’re used to seeing Warren — the mastermind alongside Grady Archbold who brought you Welcome Rivers, some of the early work with Former and you of course remember him from Nti Sheeto, the cult classic surf film by What Youth.
We called Warren now that the duct tape is off his mouth and he can discuss this new wave park project he’s been working so hard on between Waffle House visits and Jimmy Buffet soundtracked Mai Tais. Warren has been located.—Travis Ferré
INHERENT BUMMER: How did you get involved in creating a wave park in your hometown?
WARREN SMITH: It really started with Waco. I went there six or seven years ago and just lost my damn mind. I was like, "I've got to figure out how to get this in my hometown." I came back and started chatting with people, thinking I'd be this sort of middleman between the surf world and development world here.
Fast forward six months, and I had a vague idea of how these things were being put together. I had enough business sense from Welcome Rivers to make me just stupid enough to think I could give this a shot. I partnered up with my good friend Cole Davis - he's been a lifelong friend and he's more on the business and development side of things and a super savvy dude. I brought the creative stuff and surf industry connections. We started putting our heads together and thought, "Why don't we give this a crack ourselves instead of just linking people together?"
Five years down the road, we've put together a crazy team of developers and people who do this stuff and are a lot smarter than me. Somehow we've bumbled our way into a wave park.
What's the current status of the project? When will you break ground?
We're aiming for breaking ground at the beginning of 2026. The announcement we're planning will be that we've got city approvals and we're allowed to build this thing.
We've been working on this for five years, kind of in secret. I moved back here to be with my girlfriend Lindsey and work on this, and I've been surfing with my lifelong friends without telling hardly any of them why I'm actually here. So I've been bursting at the seams to let them know.
We did it maybe backwards from a lot of other projects where they announce and then hope the pressure will convince the city to approve it. We built the entire thing first, and now we're seeking final approval. We'll be announcing the day after we get city approval. We did have to soft announce recently because the news caught wind of what we were up to and came asking for interviews.
What was it like moving back to your hometown for this project?
Coming back here, it's where I grew up, so I love it. But the no-waves part is the hardest. Knowing that what I was working on was trying to fix that felt really rad. I'm coming back to a place where I grew up that I kind of left because of it not having waves, and now I'm bringing waves.
How has the community responded to the project?
When I walk into Starbucks, they just hand me my order now. I've definitely got more random people that I do not know at all coming up to me talking about the wave park now that it was on the news. I honestly can't walk 10 steps without someone coming up and telling me how excited they are.
You're talking about a place absolutely loaded with beach culture. We've got gigantic tourism and tons of t-shirt shops, but we don't have any surf. We're one of the few places in the world that has an absolutely beautiful coastline with zero waves. Well, not literally zero - I'm being unfair to my hometown - but it's pretty rough compared to most coastlines around the world.
In business 101, they say you need a problem to fix. I don't think anyone's really trying to fix a problem with wave pools elsewhere - maybe there's a supply issue in California. But the problem here is there's actually literally no wave. So I really am fixing a problem by bringing waves to a place that doesn't have any.
Has anybody been pushing back? What are the challenges on a project like this?
I think it's a lot different in other places. In California, people freak out about water usage and environmental stuff, and a lot of that is just based on confusion. You're always going to have anti-development people no matter what.
The neighborhood next to us was confused about what we were building. That neighborhood's been around forever, so it's a bit of an older slice of humanity. A wave pool doesn't sound much different from a waterpark to them, so they thought it was going to be giant slides, screaming tourists, and a mess. Once we cleared up the confusion, there's been a lot less pushback.
It's down to that 10% of people who hate anything no matter what. Almost everybody else is really psyched. We're going to be a much better neighbor than some alternatives - a big pool with a wave in it compared to a 6-story condo with a Harley Davidson bar at the bottom of it. Those are very different things.
In the broader community, people are incredibly excited. Anytime you see a news story go up online, if you look at the comments, it's just loaded with hatred normally. But it was like 95% positive comments on every news story about our project. That's the first time I think I've ever seen that in my life.
I think what makes me skeptical sometimes is when wave pools feel like country clubs or golf courses rather than something authentic to surf culture.
I get why surfers are sour when wave pools look and feel like real estate development projects. It's like, "That looks like a country club or a golf course," and you're like, "Wait, that hurts, that stings a little bit. I've lived and breathed this my whole life."
If surfers and the surf industry are taking part in wave pool development, we can maintain some of those core values that we all know and love. With Shell Point, it's completely inspired by Shell Island, which is the most pristine place you can go to in our town. It's beautiful - white sand, natural landscaping, dunes, emerald green-blue water - and there's zero waves.
My whole idea was to take that and put waves on it. The inspiration is the most epic day at the beach that we all know and love - those days where you walk over the sand dunes, the water's crystal clear, and you paddle out in trunks and catch some waves with your friends. That's exactly what I'm trying to recreate here.
If people want to do another project where they build million-dollar homes around it, I'm not here to say don't do that. But our project, hopefully because I grew up surfing my entire life, feels a little bit different than those other ones.
I think the more that surfers and the surf industry can take part in these wave pools, the better they're going to be. You can immediately tell when one announces that surfers aren't a part of it. The more we can take part in that and help shape it and maintain some of our culture, the better off these things are going to be.
Tell me about the visuals of Shell Island that inspired this project.
When we started working on marketing, we didn't actually have a pool yet to shoot in. I saw Ben Gravy's video where he came to our town and got this big jet ski boat here called the Sea Screamer. They just drove around that area, and I thought, "That's exactly it!" The project is already named after the island, so we flew in some friends - Alex Knost, Justin Quintal, and Blair Conklin - and rented that boat to take photos and video.
That was our marketing, because the project is inspired by that look anyway. But as these developments go, one minute you're knocking the ball out of the park and the next minute you're eating dirt. We went into the eating dirt phase of the project and had to shelf everything for a while. That was two years ago, and now we're back on track.
Now there are pools of the technology we're using that are in the ground elsewhere, so we don't necessarily need that footage anymore, but we're sitting on all this rad stuff of those guys shredding behind a boat at Shell Island and it looks epic. We're just going to launch everything all at the same time.
Did you know the boat wake would create such good waves?
There's no natural wave at Shell Island - it's in the middle of a huge boat channel. But there's a part where boats launch and have to go around this bend, and since we were kids, people have tried to surf that wake because it's been tiny. Kids try to skim it when they wait for the boats.
The story goes that my buddy's kid, Aiden Gorman, filmed one of those little novelty drive-by-the-point-wave boat wake things and sent it to Ben Gravy. Ben lost his mind and was like, "I could ride that for sure!" Then they put it all together, and I saw Ben's video and thought it was perfect for our marketing.
We decided to fine-tune it and get some other people here with more practice runs with the Sea Screamer. I think Cody and those Sea Screamer guys have been doing this for a while without telling anybody because they were pretty damn good at making these waves. But it's completely illegal, so it's not like we're starting a new wave pool product!
I think your point about a surf community in a place without waves is important.
Exactly. This isn't like we're just dropping it somewhere because land is cheap and saying "come to us if you're rich." We're solving a problem to connect the dots. The majority of people that will surf our park will probably surf the ocean anytime there's the possibility.
We have a large community all along the Gulf Coast, from Alabama all the way to Tallahassee and beyond to Texas, who are struggling to surf. This will help solve that problem.
I don't think anyone, especially me, is saying this is going to replace any aspect of real ocean surfing. This is just an additional way to participate in surfing. You're never going to replace your first trip to Costa Rica or going to Hawaii - that's not the point of these things. They're fun. That's
Is it considered the South where you are?
Yeah, for sure. Deep South right there. In Florida, the furthest south you go, the less southern it gets. We're called Lower Alabama or Redneck Riviera. If you go east past Tallahassee into Jacksonville, that's southern too. You'll find rednecks all over Florida, but the further away you get from the panhandle, the less likely you are to find the southern culture. You go down to Orlando and they don't even have sweet tea.
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I think it's interesting to consider the future of surf culture with these wave pools.
Being a lifelong surfer and taking part in this evolution, maybe there's some responsibility in that. I don't want to put my head in the sand and watch the world pass me by. Figuring out what a dude who has never surfed before wants to wear when he surfs Shell Point and gets out of the water and wants to buy a shirt - what does that shirt look like? That's kind of fun.
Shell Point is going to have a clothing aspect to it, and I've done that forever. But what do people from out of town like to wear? What do people from Atlanta who just started surfing at the spot that I created like to wear? That's a fun thing to think about.
Photo: Glen Thaxton
Warren Smith is the co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of Shell Point Beach and Surf Club, a wave pool project coming to Florida's Gulf Coast. Previously, he was part of the clothing brand Welcome Rivers. The Shell Point project is expected to break ground in early 2026.
