A Conversation with Warren Smith
The Welcome Rivers architect takes on a new project as Chief Creative Officer and Founder of Shell Point Surf Club on the Gulf Coast of Florida.
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 your hometown's wave park?
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.
So what's the current status?
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, so I had to do a bit of that to avoid confusion in town.
Of the three things we needed to do for approval, we've got one more left, and we've had unanimous approval so far, so we're looking pretty good.
What was it like moving back to your hometown?
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 we're bringing waves.
You're going to be a local legend. You'll never have to buy Taco Bell again.
Oh hell no! When I walk into Starbucks, they just hand me my order. 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 you bring up a good point. I can be skeptical of surf parks sometimes, because if you're a purist or traditionalist, it might seem like they're missing the full picture of surfing. But your point about a surf community in a place without waves is important. I've been to places like Charleston where there are surf shops but hardly any waves. There are people who understand the culture but don't get to participate often.
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 it.
I look at someone like Blair Conklin, who runs around the world riding everything from dirty water runoff to a pool in Palm Springs to freezing his ass off in a German river. He's having the absolute blast of his life. That looks epic. Just because a pool comes in doesn't mean everyone's going to stop traveling to surf.
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!
At least there's some renegade aspect to it. We're still criminals.
Oh yeah, full pirate operation.
So now you're a wave pool magnate. What's the status of Welcome Rivers, which is a brand many of us are big fans of?
I definitely got pulled away from Welcome Rivers while chasing this opportunity with the wave park. I was in the clothing industry for years, and this wave pool thing started to get some legs beneath it, so I chased the opportunity and Welcome Rivers suffered from that. It's a bummer, but it doesn't mean it's dead and gone. It just means it's on a bit of a pause, and maybe the resurrection happens the day after the surf park opens.
It's basically the world's best blog as of right now. Welcome Rivers just looks like the world's most well-curated Tumblr.
Oh man, I know! Grady [Archbold] did all that, and I got so excited to see it. It's like looking at your stacks of What Youth and Surfing magazines that you've been a part of, all in one spot. It was really cool to see that me and Grady, with some help from other creative people, did all that on our own. Even looking at the stuff we did with Former - it's cool to see what we dedicated our passions to. Seeing it all in a Tumblr form, I almost shed a little tear.
Tell me about your lifestyle where you're living now. It's so different than LA or other places.
Currently I'm in the middle of bike week, so this week might not be the best representation. We're flooded with extremely loud Harleys that all listen to Little Jon for some reason - it's really bizarre.
But between that and spring break, it's a beautiful place where you can walk barefoot into Winn-Dixie, and there are parts of the beach that don't have hotels on them. It's killer. The one thing missing is surf - I definitely don't get to surf every day.
I work so much on the wave park, and my office is the two Starbucks here. I go back and forth between them, and they all know my name. They've seen me there for the past five years, and now they're like, "Oh, that's what you've been doing in here every day for six hours."
It's a beautiful spot in the world. When I was young and it was like MTV spring break, I hated it and couldn't wait to get away, but it's changed a lot. To maybe be a part in that change and putting something here that's actually rad - that's pretty cool.
Is it considered the South?
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.
What's your food scene like down there?
We're definitely known for our oysters, so anything that's seafood - shrimp, oysters, catfish, grouper - that's our cuisine. And it's amazing and delicious, but you don't get much variety. We don't have many Thai restaurants, there's a couple of Mexican restaurants, but we're mostly known for seafood.
A killer thing we have here is Waffle House. Those aren't everywhere. We've got 18 Waffle Houses in our town - there's one every half mile, for real.
What's your Waffle House order?
Double hash browns with chili cheese and onions. Or double hash browns with cheese and two eggs on top. But if I'm being real naughty, I go Texas bacon cheesesteak melt with hash browns, and then you take some of the hash browns and put them inside the cheesesteak.
That takes a special hour of the day to concoct!
Yeah, that Texas cheesesteak bacon melt - that's definitely the witching hour. That's the naughty hour.
One thing I'm curious about - coming back to your hometown, has it influenced your style? You’re still wearing all black, right?
I've been leaning into the whites a little bit. Colors are maybe still a bit hard. But I'll tell you what did get me real good here - Jimmy Buffett. It took me a while to realize that I actually like Jimmy Buffett. I had no idea I was a Jimmy Buffett fan, and now he's one of my favorites.
We embrace where we're at. That's good.
Colors are still a stretch, but I'm leaning into some whites. I've got some white linens that I wear.
I think it’s interesting to consider the future of sure 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.
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 from Atlanta 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.
What are you up to the rest of the day?
I already spent my four or five hours at Starbucks working with Blair [Conklin] on the marketing, so the ocean's calling my name. I'm looking at a little knee-high dribble, and I'm going to go grovel.
That sounds fun.
If there's something to grovel on, that's a good day. Either that or it's completely flat and I skim around on the beach.
Warren Smith is the Chief Creative Officer and Founder 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.
