This CCO Has Surfed 6 Continents (and Makes Surfboards, Too)

Ross Clugston has surfed every continent except Antarctica, and he used to track hurricanes to plan his visits to East Coast beaches. “The dream was to go from Florida to Nova Scotia, but we never actually did it because it requires dropping everything,” he said, which is not easy now that he has a family and responsibilities as chief creative officer at WPP’s Design Bridge and Partners. Born in Australia, Clugston was about 5 years old when he first got on a surfboard, but it wasn't technically the first time he had surfed. “I remember being on my dad's back when I was, like, 3 and him body surfing and losing me, and my mom having a meltdown. And I'm just like, ‘Why are you guys screaming? This is the best.’” Clugston got his start in advertising at a boutique ad agency in Perth, Western Australia. When Clugston was plotting his next move, Mark Braddock, co-founder of local branding firm Block, encouraged him to think big. “And I was like, ‘Oh, you mean go to Sydney or Melbourne?’ And he was like, 'No, no, no. Have you thought about New York or Amsterdam?’” So Clugston flipped a coin and landed in New York. Unfortunately, it was the end of 2008, when every contact he’d made had been fired because of the financial crisis. But, like surfing, “I figured it out.” He made his home in the Rockaways, which has a vibrant surfing scene between September and March, when the waves are highest. “Going into the water in New York City in the winter is a good time, but it's different,” he said diplomatically. You might, for instance, be pulling on your wet suit in your car with the heater on and heading to a silent, snow-covered beach. “It's like surfing on Mars," he explained. "And you only really have the ability to catch five or six waves because it's so cold. And then you finally get out of the rubber and the suit, and you get in the warm shower and you come back from the edge of hypothermia.” He left New York in 2021 to work at Superunion in Los Angeles, a move motivated by giving his kids the same kind of outdoor childhood he had in Australia. After some extensive spinal surgery, he’s been channeling his passion for chasing waves into designing and building surfboards. Clugston creates boards for art shows, as gifts for friends, and—on one memorable group trip to Sumatra—he built five boards to use for a week and then left them behind for the local community. That gesture hints at how the broader surfing community is changing. “Surfing did a really shitty job of being inclusive in any manner for a long period of time,” he said. “People of color, to start with, and then women in general have been treated terribly as well. "There's a lot of things going on in Rockaway, with organizations like [queer surf collective] Benny's Club, that are doing the best job in the world at changing that.”

Off the Clock

This CCO Has Surfed 6 Continents and Even Makes the Surfboards

To say Design Bridge and Partners' Ross Clugston loves surfing would be an understatement

Eva Kis

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Eva Kis