MEET MATT AKA MATUSE

Matt, co-founder and namesake of Matuse, has never followed a conventional path. He exists at the intersection of art, culture, surf, and design. His pursuit of better materials and thoughtful designs is the engine of Matuse aka Premium the Ichiban Game. We sat down with Matt to learn more about his influences and the journey that shaped the brand. Read part one below and part two, "MATUSE WORLD VIEW," here. 

Where did your relationship with the ocean begin?

My relationship with the ocean began at Muir Beach near San Francisco when I was about a year old. From a very young age, I fell in love not only with the ocean but also with simply being in the water. Before surfing, before wetsuits, and before all the equipment, there was just the feeling of being surrounded by water, and I loved it.

I have always felt completely at home in the ocean, almost as if the water were where I truly belonged and land was simply a place I visited. That feeling has never left me. To this day, the ocean remains one of the most important forces in my life. Nothing washes away the gravity of the day quite like being in the water.

Where did the name Matuse come from?

The name Matuse comes from a childhood nickname given to me by my uncle Charles, a linguistics professor at the University of Washington. He spoke about seven languages fluently and could get by in nearly a dozen more, so he naturally loved playing with words and sounds. His playful way of saying Matthew was “Matuse,” always stretching out the “tooose” at the end, which never failed to make me smile. The nickname stayed with me, and when it came time to name the brand, Matuse felt perfect: personal, memorable, and completely unique.

What was the inspiration for Matuse?

Matuse started with a simple insight: a growing number of surfers wanted to know more about their wetsuits. Wetsuits were being sold based on added features and price tiers, not on the quality of the rubber itself. Brands kept piling so-called technologies onto their suits, making them heavier and bulkier. In that gap, we saw an opportunity to start with better materials.

So we built Matuse around premium Japanese limestone rubber from Yamamoto and made it our job to explain why it matters: it is lighter, warmer, longer lasting, and absorbs less water. We drew a clear line in the sand. Every Matuse suit would be built from premium foam. No guesswork, no gimmicks, just a better material at the core. 

At the time, the industry was dominated by a handful of major brands. Very few independent companies were trying to challenge them through innovation. We came in to disrupt that thinking. Pricing a wetsuit above five hundred dollars in the U.S. was unheard of, and a lot of people thought we were crazy.

We even coined the term Geoprene because we wanted consumers to understand that this was not standard neoprene. It was something fundamentally different. Nearly twenty years later, the conversation has completely changed.

Today, most premium wetsuit brands use some form of limestone rubber. That shift validates what we believed from the start. If you educate consumers and build a better product, the industry eventually follows.

Do you remember the moment Matuse changed from an idea into something real?

Before Matuse, I worked as a consultant, whatever that meant. Mostly, I had ideas. Several brands invited me to participate in their design roundtables, and I would arrive with a complete audit of what they were doing, where they could improve, and where I saw white space in the market.

I pitched the idea behind Matuse to many of the larger companies I worked with. I believed the surf industry was ready for a deeper conversation about wetsuits: how they were designed, how they were made, and why materials mattered. I felt that if surfers were given more knowledge about the technical side of a wetsuit, they would respond. At the time, nobody else thought it was a particularly good idea.

After pursuing several different paths, I eventually met the co-founding team that helped bring Matuse to life. It was exciting, completely new, and honestly, a little terrifying.

Our first tops, the Chapter 1 and the Philo, arrived late in September 2006 and were sold through Mitch’s Surf Shop. Despite the mid-summer timing, they performed incredibly well. That was the moment Matuse became real to me. I felt we had drawn a line in the sand and begun to change the way the surf industry thought about wetsuits forever.

#lovematuse