Pico Surf Club
We freed a surf retreat from the algorithm — and gave them back €34,000 in year one.
There's a version of this story that's just about money. Booking.com was taking 18%. GetYourGuide 22%. Airbnb, for the accommodation component, 15%. Before João had paid a single staff member or bought a single tank of gas for the boat, nearly a fifth of every booking had already walked out the door.
But the money was only part of it.
The deeper problem was invisibility. When you book through a marketplace, the platform owns the relationship. João and Catarina had no way to reach guests before they arrived — no welcome pack, no pre-trip briefing, no chance to say bring a wetsuit with at least 4mm neoprene, the water is not what you're expecting. There was no path to upsell the kayak day trips or the diving programme they'd quietly built up over three seasons. And their "brand" — to the extent one existed — was whatever cropped thumbnail and star rating each platform decided to display.
The identity itself was its own problem. Wave logo. Blue and orange. A font that looked like it came with the template. Nothing wrong with any of it, technically. But it looked like every other surf school from Fuerteventura to Goa. It said nothing about Pico. And Pico — the black lava coastline, the caldeira rising 2,351 metres out of the Atlantic, the endemic hydrangeas along the road to the surf break, the whale flukes you can see from the breakfast table on a clear morning — is not a backdrop. It is the entire argument for the place.
They had an extraordinary story. Nobody outside their repeat guests knew it.
Client: Pico Surf Club Founded: 2019 Location: Ilha do Pico, Azores, Portugal Industry: Surf retreat / boutique hospitality
Pico Surf Club is a week-long surf retreat experience on the most dramatic island in the Azores. Founded by João Faria and Catarina Melo — two former competitive surfers who left the circuit to build something quieter and more deliberate — the club accommodates a maximum of thirty guests per week in a converted farmhouse above the black lava coastline. The offer: expert coaching, ocean immersion, whale watching at dawn, cold-water rituals, and the particular silence that only comes from being somewhere genuinely remote.
Their guests are 28–42-year-old professionals from Northern Europe: Stockholm, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Hamburg. People who've already done Bali. People who want the ocean without the Instagram crowd.
Brand personality: Raw. Considered. Alive.
Services
- Brand identity
- Art direction
- Photography
- Film production
- Copywriting
- Website design & development
- Direct booking integration
- Email marketing
- Phase 01
Story Excavation
We spent a week on Pico before opening a design file.
We interviewed João and Catarina separately — their stories of leaving the circuit diverge in interesting ways and the tension between them is actually what makes the brand human. We shot behind-the-scenes: the pre-dawn drive to check swell, the chalk session debrief on the terrace, the moment a guest stands up for the first time and the entire lineup cheers. We documented the physical environment with obsessive attention — the way black lava absorbs heat and radiates it back at golden hour, the endemic flora that only exists in this altitude band, the cold-water outdoor shower that has become a post-session ritual guests talk about for years afterwards.
The brief that came out of that week was a single sentence: Pico is not a backdrop. Pico is the product.
Everything that followed was an answer to that brief.
- Phase 02
Brand Identity
Full rebrand, from the ground up.
The wordmark was drawn by hand — or rather, drawn to look as though it had been: slightly imperfect letterforms, a weight that sits between editorial and utilitarian. The kind of thing you'd find stamped on the inside of a good wetsuit from 1974. Alongside it, a secondary stamp mark — circular, worn at the edges — for use on kit, packaging, and anything that needs to travel.
We built a set of hand-illustrated icons: a wave conditions scale (1 through 5, with the 5 being a small screaming figure), tide charts, activity symbols, guest vignettes. The kind of illustration language that feels like it belongs in a dog-eared field guide.
The colour system came directly from the island. Volcanic black lifted from the lava fields. Atlantic ink for depth — the exact shade of the ocean on a cloudy afternoon. Terracotta from the rooftops of the farmhouses along the ridge. Bleached off-white from the dried grass of the caldeira in late summer. No wave emojis. No gradients.
The system extended to stationery, to the towels guests arrive to find folded on their beds, and to the welcome kit packaging — a kraft box with a stamp, a hand-signed note, a small printed island guide, a local honey.
- Phase 03
Content & Photography
We art directed a three-day shoot with two photographers: one water, one land.
The water photographer works with a GoPro mounted to a 6-foot pole and a Sony A7 in a housing for slower moments — the kind of footage that shows wave faces and board fins and the particular way light moves through the break at Pico. The land photographer shoots on Leica. Portraits, landscapes, details. The texture of the lava. The fog coming off the caldeira at six in the morning.
Output: over two hundred selects and eight short films — one ninety-second hero film for the website, seven activity clips for use in booking flows and email sequences.
We wrote all copy. Retreat descriptions that tell you what a week actually feels like rather than listing features. An island guide covering twelve locations — not the tourist board version, but the version João gives you on the first night over wine. The founder story, which required three drafts before it stopped sounding like a press release and started sounding like João.
- Phase 04
Website & Booking System
The site is built in SvelteKit. Fast, precise, easy for a two-person operation to maintain.
Direct booking runs through Checkfront for availability and scheduling — it handles the retreat calendar, the capacity limits, the blackout dates — with Stripe handling payment. The booking flow includes add-on selection: kayak day trip, diving programme, whale watching dawn session, morning yoga. Previously these were sold informally on arrival. Now they're selected at the point of booking, which changed everything about average order value.
The design language translates the brand system into screen. Off-white paper texture as the base. Grain overlay via SVG filter — not as decoration but as a material signal: this is not a tech product, this is a physical place. Wavy SVG section dividers that echo the ocean without illustrating it literally. Lenis scroll throughout for a weight that matches the pace of the site's content. An ambient ocean sound layer, opt-in, triggered after thirty seconds if you haven't scrolled — subtle enough that most people leave it on.
Key pages: Home (immersive hero film, immediate context), Retreat (the week programme, what's included, what to bring), Pico (the island guide, twelve spots with coordinates and notes), Coaches (João and Catarina's stories in full), Gallery (the full shoot), Book (calendar, add-ons, payment).
The retreat calendar is displayed as a season overview — guests can see at a glance which weeks have spaces and which are full. Scarcity made visible, without manufactured urgency.
- Phase 05
Results
Direct booking share went from 12% to 71% in the first season after launch.
Commission savings in year one: approximately €34,000. That figure is conservative — it doesn't account for add-on revenue that previously didn't exist.
Average booking value increased 40%, driven entirely by add-on selection at checkout. Guests who book the kayak trip and the diving programme before they arrive are, predictably, more committed guests. Fewer no-shows. Better week for everyone.
The site received an Awwwards Honorable Mention in the Travel & Lifestyle category. Monocle Travel featured Pico Surf Club in their annual round-up as one of "Europe's most considered surf retreats" — the write-up specifically mentioned the website as evidence of the club's seriousness.
They're now booked eight weeks in advance for the coming season. The waitlist is a waiting list.
- 01 Brand identity system (wordmark, stamp mark, illustrated icon set, colour system, typography)
- 02 stationery system (letterhead, business card, envelope)
- 03 welcome kit packaging design and production spec
- 04 photography brief and art direction
- 05 three-day shoot
- 06 200+ image selects
- 07 eight short films
- 08 SvelteKit website
- 09 direct booking integration (Checkfront + Stripe)
- 10 add-on upsell flow
- 11 pre-arrival email sequence (4 emails)
- 12 post-retreat email sequence (2 emails + review prompt)
- 13 island guide content (12 locations)
- 14 all website and brand copywriting
Rebrand first, website second.
The client came to us asking for a website. We spent the first meeting convincing them the website was the wrong place to start. A new booking system bolted onto the existing brand identity would have improved conversion marginally and changed nothing fundamental about how the business was perceived. The rebrand gave the website something real to say. It also — and this matters — gave João and Catarina something to be proud of. Brand confidence is not a soft metric.
Grain as material signal.
Texture on screen is usually a decoration choice. Here it was a positioning choice. The grain overlay tells you before you've read a word: this is analogue, this is physical, this has weight. It differentiates from the frictionless surfaces of the major platforms in a way that copy alone can't. When everything else in hospitality is trending toward smooth digital minimalism, leaning into the handmade was a competitive move.
Make the island the hero, not the surf.
Most surf school sites are about waves. This site is about Pico. The island guide, the founder story, the photography — all of it is structured around the argument that you're not coming here just to surf. You're coming here because this particular place, at this particular latitude, does something to your nervous system that Bali and Sri Lanka cannot. That argument is what makes the 40% price premium defensible.
Transparent availability.
Showing the full season calendar — including which weeks are already full — was a deliberate choice that some clients resist because it exposes capacity limits. We pushed for it because scarcity, made visible honestly, creates urgency more effectively than any countdown timer. Guests seeing that only two weeks remain in July book faster. The data confirmed it within the first month.
The first direct booking came in at 2am on a Tuesday — I was asleep and woke up to a Stripe notification. I showed Catarina in the morning. We'd had hundreds of bookings before but this one felt different. That was our money. No one had taken their cut. I did the maths on what we'd been losing for five years and it was hard to look at. But what I think about more is the guests — the ones who book now send us questions before they arrive, they've already watched the films, they arrive knowing the island. The whole week is better. The site did that.
See the website in full.
A faithful in-browser recreation of the Pico Surf Club site as launched.
See the website →