Thembi and Wyn are couple of young creative talents who are navigating the modern freelance lifestyle; working and playing on the move. Thembi is a designer, creative director, and co-founder of Emocean Magazine. Wyn is a professional photographer by trade. They have both worked for big brands respectively, but their passions remain rooted in celebrating real surfers and their stories. They’ve lived all over for work and waves, but have settled in the small town of Ojai, California (for now at least). Here is a glimpse inside their world.

Who are you? Tell us a little about yourselves.

Thembi: I’m an Australian creative director and graphic designer, and founder of Emocean magazine. I moved to America in 2010 and spent many years living in NYC, before moving to California in 2019. I started out working for high fashion in-house and agency-side, and over the years pivoted into tech, beauty, and now surf. I was most recently the global creative director of Billabong Women’s in 2022/2023.

Wyn: I’m a photographer from Boulder, Colorado. I shoot mostly documentary style work of travel, food & beverage, and occasionally surf. I’ve lived all over but have been in California about 10 years now.

How did you two first meet?

Wyn and I first met through out mutual friend Peter. I used to live with Peter in Rockaway Beach, NYC. Peter posted a photo of me on his IG that Wyn saw, he may have slid into my DM, and the rest is history. We long distance dated for a while before I knew for good that my time was done in NYC. Wyn had also lived in NYC before, and the lifestyle in California was way more aligned for both of us.

Describe your relationship with surfing and surf culture. When did you first get the surf bug and how has it guided your careers / lifestyle?

Thembi: Despite growing up in Australia, I ended up being an adult learner surfer in Rockaway Beach of all places! Me and a group of close girlfriends all moved out there one summer as an experiment away from big city life (but still connected via the subway haha) and all fell in love with it. We were getting up at dawn to squeeze in an hour’s surf, then we’d be on the subway with seaweed still in our hair going to our silly fashion jobs downtown. Two totally different worlds. Despite having Emocean, I’ve always felt like a bit of an outsider to surf culture (not in a ‘poor me’ way), I just never had all that historical context when I started surfing. Mariah, my Emocean business partner, is a wealth of surf history knowledge, as is Wyn. They’ve both taught me so much. Obviously there are things I really dislike about ‘surf culture’ at large: misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia. Unfortunately these themes run through so many other subcultures. They’re not unique. So my relationship with it is a little love / hate sometimes. There are so many wonderful things I love though. Surfing in general has influenced so much of my life: where I live, the job opportunities I’ve said yes to and that have aligned for me, how I think about my future. It affects every aspect of life.

Wyn: I was born in San Francisco, so as a kid in Colorado I always had this idea that I was actually a Californian. I had a subscription to Surfer Magazine before I had ever set foot in the ocean. Snowboarding helped scratch the itch, but I wanted the real thing. Eventually I convinced my parents to send me to Richard Schmidt surf camp in Santa Cruz every summer and that was my first real surfing experience. Life took me elsewhere when I left home. I travelled for a couple years before settling in NYC. I tried to surf a bit there but I sucked and it wasn’t a priority. The desire to one day confidently call myself a surfer remained. Through a twist of fate, I ended up leaving NY for Byron Bay, Australia and there I really threw myself into becoming a surfer. At the time I was pretty oblivious to the cultural and historical significance of the Byron area to surfing, to me it was just a subtropical paradise with nice sand bottom points. It wasn’t until I left that I got really into surf dorkery and learned about Byron’s place in surfing’s back to nature movement and the shortboard revolution. When my Australian visa expired I moved back to California and here I really started getting into surf history and culture, which was especially fitting as I had settled in Malibu. These days however, I find myself surfing less, but relishing the days I do more. I look to focus more on my relationship with the ocean than other surfers. A week might go by without me checking the report. I won’t go unless I know I’m gonna leave the beach happy.

What first brought you to Ojai and how long have you been living here?

Thembi: We’ve been living in Ojai since April 2020, right when the pandemic went down. We signed our lease while the world was still normal, and then had to move right as lockdown happened. Previously, Wyn and I lived separately in Malibu and Venice respectively, and we wanted to move in together to a place that was quiet, full of nature, and still close enough to some great surf breaks.

Wyn: During my time in Byron I had a friend who lived in the hinterland above Byron, his set up kinda became my blueprint for the life I wanted in California. I would think of him winding down through the rolling hills to surf Broken Head and I would think, “where can I have that in California?” I was also heavily influenced by Morning Of The Earth. I wanted to live somewhere that grew food, had wild animals and nature. Somewhere I could really immerse myself in all the spoils of the natural world. When Thembi and I first decided to move in together and I pitched her the idea of moving to Ojai, she had never even been. She said “Can we go stay a couple nights and check it out first??” I guess she liked it…

What are your favorite parts of your home?

Thembi: I love the morning light in our place, it lights up the kitchen and the living room in a way that wakes me up so gently and peacefully. I love being walking distance from basically anything, from mountain hikes, to cafes, shops, and even an art supply store. I love the view from my desk in my office, I can see our lush front garden but also the comings and goings of people on our street.

Wyn: I love that our home feels like this little oasis even though its right downtown. Our yard is full of plants and feels so private and its so quiet at night. From our front doorstep we can walk into a national forest almost as easily as we can walk to a grocery store.

What are your favorite parts about Ojai / Ventura County and the area in which you live?

Thembi: My favorite thing about the Ojai / Ventura area is that there’s just space… pretty much from Malibu south to the border, the coastline feels packed so tight with people and buildings. I find it hectic and overwhelming. Being able to drive ten minutes up the 33 and find a quiet spot to myself for a dip in the creek is my idea of luxurious peace. You can also score fun, albeit tiny days at Rincon with only a few people out when the season is over and no one’s really paying attention to it.

Wyn: The community we’ve found in Ojai/Ventura is really wonderful, I love being so close to so many great friends. There’s not a ton of places where its easy just to bump into people you know throughout your day and even fewer that you can do so at a random swimming hole at the creek. Having Rincon as your local is pretty cool too.

Thembi, how did you get into design and art direction in the first place? What has been your career path to date?

I got into design first through studying graphic design in uni in Australia. Art direction and pulling together photoshoots came as my roles progressed in the companies I worked for. I started out working in house for luxury contemporary brands 3.1, Phillip Lim and Rag & Bone. Then I made the switch to freelance once I moved to Rockaway to have more flexibility, and mostly worked at fashion ad agencies like Laird & Partners, Wednesday, and Chandelier. I got an email completely out of the blue one day from Apple, who had seen my folio on a job site. I pivoted into tech and started doing stints with them, living temporarily in San Francisco and commuting to their offices in Silicon Valley. When I moved to Venice I worked for the clean beauty brand, Beauty Counter. And most recently in 2022/2023 I took the global creative director position at Billabong Women’s, which was a really exciting new experience. Unfortunately with the sale of Billabong, Quiksilver, Roxy etc. to ABG, myself and many many others were laid off, so it ending up being a short but sweet ride.

Tell us more about Emocean. What is the backstory for how you founded the magazine? What is the overall concept / intention?

Emocean is an independently published surf magazine that I create in partnership with Mariah Ernst, our editor in chief. I’m the creative director. The idea started brewing in 2020, amidst growing frustration that existing surf media had a very narrow point of view. I sent out a Google survey (lol) to a bunch of surfer friends, one of whom was Mariah (though we’d never actually met in person, and had only exchanged a handful of messages over DM). She got back to me within 24 hours and was like ‘if you’re thinking of making a surf mag, I’m in!’ The rest is history! Our overall mission began with the inclusion of a more diverse group of people: women, BIPOC, LGBTQ+ folks. That has naturally evolved into a mission statement/tagline of “the new momentum in surf culture.” Diversity will always be inherent in everything we do, but we don’t want to be pigeonholed or categorized according to that, which happens very easily. A lot of people mistake us for only being about women’s surfing. We want to bridge the worlds of many different people who surf, and model a brighter vision for the future of the culture.

What have been the biggest challenges of running your own business?

There are so many challenges! My only formal education has been in graphic design, so running a small business has been full of learning curves! I think figuring out social media feels like the most challenging thing to me. It feels like you need to be pumping out constant content, and we’re also figuring out how to translate these in-depth articles into the most appealing bite sized pieces when we post on social. It’s definitely a challenge!

On the other hand, what have been the greatest rewards?

The greatest rewards have been the community that’s formed through the magazine, and having a physical, printed object out there in the world as an expression of pure creativity. It’s amazing but also very scary creating something where you don’t have anyone to answer to – no clients, no investors, no big bosses. I’m really proud of what we’ve made.

Wyn, when did you first get into photography?

My mom studied modern dance at NYU and my dad used to photograph her concerts. He had a Canon AE 1 which was a real fancy camera in the 80s. I think I found it in a box of old stuff when I was in high school and decided I wanted to try it out. I ended up taking a lot of photo classes my senior year and got pretty good at printing in the darkroom. After I graduated I spent a couple years traveling and I started to consider photography as a career path mainly because it seemed like a good way to keep traveling. When I moved to NY I was planning on going to school but I started assisting a photographer who also taught at School of Visual Arts. He told me if I could get my school deposit back to just work for him and he’d allow me to use his studio and mentor me.

What are your favorite projects / assignments to work on?

Any job that I get to shoot real people in their field of expertise gets me excited. Be it their job, sport, hobby etc. Anything where they feel comfortable, the camera falls away and they are just present. I feel like my strength is to be in service of a story and not making egocentric work.