Treeswax Update: What Matters - Sticks!

Written By Doug Erickson

Treeswax’s recent momentum reads less like a quarterly update and more like one of those quiet turning points that only looks obvious in hindsight. Not a breakout moment exactly. More the steady accumulation of proof. Orders. Partners. Small risks taken seriously by people who know the terrain. Underneath it all is the simplest claim Treeswax makes: here is a reef-safe wax for surfers who love the ocean enough to stop coating themselves in chemistry that does not belong there.

The company is in the middle of a friends-and-family raise, $400,000 on a SAFE with a $5 million cap. More than half of it is already spoken for, with $220,000 committed. That detail matters less for the number than for the signal. Early believers do not write checks because of decks. They do it because they have held the product, used it, watched it move through the world with a kind of inevitability. For an environmentally minded surf product, credibility is always the main currency. “Reef-safe” is easy to print and hard to earn.

That movement is now literal. In Japan, Treeswax has partnered with Maneuverline, the country’s most established surf and action sports distributor. The first purchase order is shipping this week. A co-branded proof of concept is rolling out with Oshman’s, a premium retailer with twelve flagship locations and shelves shared by brands that have earned their place slowly. Six thousand bars in the opening order: 3,000 core bars plus 3,000 Oshman’s SMU. Enough to test not just demand, but repeat behavior.

On the U.S. East Coast, distribution has launched with Eastern Skate Supply, pushing Treeswax into a dense web of surf and skate shops that still care deeply about what they stock and why. In Europe, accounts are live in Italy, Spain, and France, with distributor conversations underway and one potential partner beginning to separate from the pack.

Back in the Pacific, Treeswax is now the official wax sponsor of Wave of the Winter. That puts the product under the feet of surfers operating at the far edge of control. It also puts it on the shelves at North Shore Surf Shop and other Oahu retailers where legitimacy is not negotiated. It is assumed or denied.

There are quieter experiments too. Blade Butter, the company’s hockey stick wax, is seeing early traction in the Northeast, where gear choices are made with the same scrutiny as surfboards. A direct-to-consumer giveaway tied to a Fiji surf trip is pulling new customers in through QR codes on packaging, the website, and social channels. Packaging itself has been refined. The bars look better now. They move faster, without sacrificing margin.

Treeswax is also testing new products, expanding carefully, the way surfers explore unfamiliar reefs. One step, then another. No rush. Just attention. But now the attention is coming back from the outside, too, in the form that matters: repeat orders, new distribution, credible shelves. This is what scale looks like when it is earned instead of manufactured. It is also why Santa Cruz Works singled Treeswax out as one of the Santa Cruz Companies to Watch in 2026, not for hype, but for the plain evidence of a reef-safe product finding its way, efficiently and stubbornly, into the hands of people who actually use it. Wax on!

Related Articles

Doug Erickson
Next

In Memory of Rod Caborn