About

Rosie is the best!

MATTHEW & RHOSANNA

WE RUN A CAFE/BAR, MAKE SURFBOARDS, CLOTHING & WHATEVER ELSE EXCITES US

Rosie (Rhosanna) and I met in the Swansea University surf club in 2015. Very early on, we started working on creative projects together: screen printing t-shirts, building our own skateboards, an art exhibition, a magazine, events and inevitably, making surfboards (the first, in our student house kitchen). Now, we run a cafe/bar in Aljezur, Portugal, which also acts as a selling point for our surfboards and anything else we decide to make. It was born out of the desire to diversify from undervalued manual labour and create a healthier workplace alternative for ourselves (to put it bluntly). But in reality; the idea of opening a shop or cafe was not new, we had considered doing so in Lagos, but realised that not only did we want to live on the West coast, but there seemed to be a wider gap in the market for something we could bring. A need for good coffee, a place to hang out and into the evenings drink affordable cocktails and listen to music.

OUR STORY

HAPPY CHEMICALS FACTORY 2021-2024

Following a short stint of making surfboards in a hostel pool shed (longboards would stick out the door), we moved out of town and opened the doors of Happy Chemicals factory. An illegal warehouse set amongst the carcasses of abandoned cars, with a landlord that embodied the definition of "sketchy". Inside the 120m2 warehouse I built a two storey workshop with 4 shaping bays on the ground floor and a laminating bay with 4 racks upstairs (Rosie's domain). We created a communal space dedicated to building surfboards, learning the craft and sharing knowledge. Under one roof we made life long friends and collaborated instead of competing. There were of course many years leading up to this moment, spent learning from other shapers such as Olivier from Cachalot Surfboards and Sam from Bob's boards, as well as (quite essentially) attempting to hone my own skills through self motivated practice. After what felt like a lot of failure and a lack of long term openings, Happy Chemicals came as the inevitable solution. I wrote up a quick business plan that would later turn out to be based on assumptions that were completely wrong, (how many business plans aren't?) It must have been fate that the first person I sent it to for an opinion would actually end up lending money to start the project.

WE RAN HAPPY CHEMICALS FACTORY FROM Jan 2021 - Sept 2024

In that time we also hosted plenty of international guest shapers; the Conklin brothers, Nick Melanson and Max Caldwell, Barrett Miller, Rachel Lord, Ziran surboards, Aqua fruits and Cachalot surfboards.

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JUNE 2023

There was some overlap in our decision to open our shop/cafe/bar and close our factory. This meant making surfboards during the week and running a bar on the weekends, driving home to Lagos at 2:30am. Fuelled by extremely cheap cocktails and a lack of any other options the local community let loose that summer. Later that year we opened the cafe 5 days a week and made our move to the West Coast. It feels important to state that we were very much learning on the job and did not know what we were doing, with any of it really.

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FROM 120M2 TO 12M2

I bought two collapsable containers to store the materials I had saved when closing Happy Chemicals Factory. But the need for a place to make surfboards never went away, so in January 2025 I decided to sacrifice the materials to the elements and turn 12m2 into a micro factory. Considering the huge spacial downgrade for surfboard production I had to use ingenuity and compromise to make it work. So now, I shape boards in 6m2 and laminate in the other 6m2. I decided not to do any of the sanding in my space to avoid clouds of noxious resin dust in such a small space. The space has been totally thought through for functionality and ease despite its limitations. It is more akin to a well organised cave really, but its only a stop on the way to a perfect workshop one day. In the meantime, if I need to make a longboard or want to do the final sand, I visit the new Happy Chemicals Factory run by our good friend, Andrea Bonelli.

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