Helleroy was a personal hardware project developed between New York, Puerto Rico and Bali in early 2014. I worked on it with industrial designer Jeabyun Yeon and Ana Maria Moreno, as co-founder and the person leading product, UX and the business.
Surfing had been part of my life since I first tried it in the cold North Sea at Scheveningen while I was at college. It changed how I lived, where I travelled and who I met, but one thing about it had always remained strangely separate from the rest of the day: surfing was quiet.
In January 2014, a few of us were sitting on our boards in Ecuador while the Pacific refused to produce much of anything. After hours of staring at the horizon, someone said, āI wish we had some music with us right now.ā
The comment caught me because music followed us almost everywhere on land, yet none of us had seriously considered taking it into the water. We did not know whether surfing with music would be wonderful or awful, so we tried to find out that same day.
Our first prototype was five ziplock bags containing a Jawbone speaker and my iPhone, held together with someoneās neoprene knee support. It looked ridiculous, but it answered the immediate question: the music worked surprisingly well with the movement, wind and water, and made the session feel more intense.
That feeling was enough to make the problem interesting, but not enough to make it a company. The more useful question was whether a genuinely waterproof, portable speaker could fit the habits and culture of water sports well enough to justify building one.
The Yes That Wasnāt Quite a Yes
The available products left room for an idea. Waterproof options tended to compromise on sound, while better speakers were too bulky or too vulnerable for the water, and nearly everyoneās music already lived in cloud services such as Spotify and SoundCloud rather than on a dedicated MP3 player.
Back in New York, I spent nights and weekends talking to surfers, kayakers, stand-up paddleboarders and canoe enthusiasts. Some were friends, while many others came from Meetup groups after I sent them cold messages asking for a phone interview.
I was not only asking whether they liked the idea. I wanted to understand the world around it: where they lived, how often they went onto the water, why they did it, what worried them, which other sports they practised, how they bought equipment and whether music had ever entered the experience.
After almost 100 interviews, the signal was confusing. Nearly everybody listened to music avidly, yet most had never thought of bringing it onto the water, and the reactions split between emphatic enthusiasm and emphatic rejection rather than forming the reassuring middle I expected.
About three quarters were willing to try the idea, which looked encouraging enough to keep going. I estimated a potential US market of roughly 12 million peopleāthanks, business schoolāand we began developing the product while continuing the conversations.
Jeabyun brought industrial-design experience, knowledge of high-performance materials and a strong visual instinct. Over the next six to eight weeks, we drew, tested, discarded and rebuilt dozens of ideas, from rough sketches and cardboard models to detailed renders and 3D prints.
We kept a group of around 15ā20 people close during this phase, including some of the most passionate sceptics. Their feedback made the trade-offs harder to ignore, which was exactly what we needed while the object was becoming increasingly seductive.
The direction we settled on was a waterproof iPhone case with a built-in speaker and interchangeable mounts for different activities. A single clickable dial would handle volume and track controls, while one standard screw point would connect the case to the different mounts.
It was a coherent product, but coherence exposed the constraints. Good bass required physical space, different phone sizes reduced the addressable market, and people who had already lost GoPros in the water were understandably nervous about putting an iPhone inside another piece of sports equipment.
The source of the music was an equally awkward decision. Putting MP3s on the speaker felt disconnected from how people already listened, while keeping Spotify or SoundCloud meant taking the phone into the water.
We explored an RF alternative that could transmit music from the beach to a remote speaker. The RF engineers we spoke with warned that interference would make it a difficult technical problem, so the apparently cleaner solution introduced another large development risk.
Taking the Prototype to Bali
By then, we were working on Helleroy full-time and estimated that finishing the product and starting production would require around $1 million. Before making that kind of commitment, we needed more than stated enthusiasm and an increasingly polished prototype.
We chose Bali because we could keep our costs low and meet surfers from many countries in one place. For three months, across three or four beaches, we showed prototypes, asked questions and tried to understand whether this product belonged in their lives.
Those conversations changed the picture. Many of the surfers we met used little technology, did not shop online and had no interest in adding another device to the experience; one response captured the attitude neatly: āAll I need is my board and the wave.ā
The more important discovery was social rather than technical. A surf line-up is a shared, emotionally charged space where people compete for waves while trying to preserve a certain amount of peace, and someone broadcasting their own soundtrack could easily make that space worse.
This was the part that our first experiment had hidden. Music could improve one personās session and still be the wrong product for everyone around them, because testing whether an experience feels good is different from testing whether it belongs in its real context.
Headphones appeared to solve the social problem, but created new ones. Surfers still needed to hear their surroundings, controls had to work in the water, and an earpiece had to stay secure under pressure without becoming uncomfortable or unsafe.
By this point, the original opportunity had fragmented into several difficult products. We were no longer only building a waterproof speaker; we were solving sound quality, phone protection, cloud playback, attachment, social acceptability, situational awareness and underwater interaction at the same time.
What We Decided Not to Build
Across more than 300 interviews in the US, Puerto Rico and Bali, the pattern became hard to dismiss. The surf speaker carried more market and technical risk than our early willingness-to-try numbers suggested, and we were not comfortable putting roughly $1 million behind it.
The idea may have worked better for a less territorial activity such as stand-up paddleboarding. But we did not have enough conviction in that market to build a hardware company around it, and moving to an adjacent audience simply to keep the product alive would have been the wrong reason to continue.
We stopped before implementation and production. I remain glad that we pushed the research until it challenged the object we had already spent months imagining, because the renders were becoming more convincing at exactly the moment the business case was becoming less convincing.
What stayed with me was the difference between curiosity and commitment. Someone saying they would try a product is useful, but it tells you very little about whether they will buy it, carry it, risk an expensive phone for it, or accept the way it changes a shared environment.
Back in Ecuador, the silence had looked like an obvious gap in the experience. By the end of the project, I understood that it was also part of what many surfers had come to the water to findāand that was a much more valuable thing to learn than how to manufacture the speaker.
You can also watch the original Puerto Rico test and Bali research video. The original Helleroy case study remains available as the complete source archive.