Buzz Bonneau, left, and Alex Salz, right, co-founders of FERAL Wetsuits at Ocean Beach on Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024, in San Francisco, Calif. Buzz Bonneau features in one of Alex Salz’s earliest memories, from a Marin County daycare.
Some four decades later, Salz and Bonneau are co-owners of a successful company that grew out of a friendship forged in pre-school and cemented surfing waves in the Bay Area while in high school and far beyond. Bonneau, a mechanical engineer, and Salz, a designer formerly employed at the California Academy of Sciences, launched FERAL in 2015. They sold 150 to 200 wetsuits the first year, double that the second year. At first, they kept their jobs, but now, with annual sales — nearly all online, direct-to-consumer — in the thousands, they run FERAL full time. And it doesn’t get in the way of their surfing.