Nolton Haven, Wales is home to the world’s smallest surf shop. It’s a tiny little shack called Ripple Effect that takes up nine square meters in the tiny hamlet with a single stretch of beach.
“There’s one in Tokyo. Zap Surf Shop,” points out Lucas, Ripple Effect’s owner. “That’s 13-square meters.”
He’s claiming an unofficial title, to be fair. Lucas doesn’t know for sure that his surf shop is the actual smallest in the world but consuming less than 10 square meters to run the tiny little business is a safe bet. And his day-to-day routine as well as how the shop operates is a great reminder of how much joy simplicity can bring to life.
“If you go to the surf shops in Cornwall, there’s just racks of all these boards, second hand boards, that no one wants to surf because they’ve gone out of shape and out of date,” he says, touching on our habit of over-consuming. So his business is focused on reviving those out-of-date boards — the ones that aren’t “necessarily dead, but they’re in retirement villages and old people’s homes,” as he puts it. It’s a fancy way to look at what most of us would just brush off as a ding repair operation, but Lucas’s appreciation for it all is infectious. The shop is filled with secondhand boards people gave him and projects for restoration, and Lucas even offers handmade skateboards. All of it “by appointment only.”
As a transplant from New Zealand, Lucas finds that his little shop and the boards he’s restored have helped him set some roots in the local Nolton Have community. It’s not glamorous, living “on cans of beans and toast sometimes,” but, as he puts it, all that “just floats over.” Because he’s not trying to run an uber-profitable business, he’s just trying to support a lifestyle. And apparently he only needs nine square meters and change to do that.
