Shawn Stussy grew up in Southern California. In 1965, when he was ten years old, he took up surfing just as the sport was gaining wide recognition in popular music and movies. By the age of 13, Stussy began to design and shape his own surfboards in the family garage. He was so talented that as a 15-year-old high school student he was hired by a surfboard manufacturer. After graduating from high school in the early 1970s, he lived a free lifestyle, spending the winters living in a trailer and working as a ski instructor at Mammoth Mountain and summers making surfboards at Laguna Beach. Aside from his interest in surfing and skiing, Stussy was further influenced by his love of punk rock music, which led him to wear orange-spiked hair and affect what he called an "anarchic, do it your own way" attitude that spilled over into his approach to fashion design as well as business practice. In 1979, when he was 24 years old, Stussy gave up his itinerant ways and settled in Laguna Beach to establish a regular surfboard business. To brand his handiwork he took a large marker and scrawled his signature on the finished boards. It soon became his trademark and logo. I had the logo screen-printed on T-shirts and sweatshirts, but it had nothing to do with producing clothes. I was trying to promote the boards." During this early period of his career, Stussy shaped surfboards in his Laguna Canyon studio during the days and at night boxed his T-shirts for sale in area surf shops. He drifted further into the apparel business by simply being involved in finding clothing that he and his friends liked to wear. While Stussy may have viewed his clothing ventures as a sideline that helped spur the sale of his surfboards, an old friend named Frank Sinatra, Jr. (no relation to the family of the famous singer) saw greater potential. They had surfed together as teenagers, but now Sinatra was an accountant and possessed the business expertise that Stussy lacked. As the apparel side of the company began to grow, the surfboard business faded in importance and was ultimately turned over to a licensee for small-scale production. Shawn Stussy continues to shape boards in his spare time for himself and friends and was known to cancel a business trip should the wave conditions prove too irresistible.