Founder Work — 2025 → Present
Tropical
Trash
Founder & Creative Director
A living social + eco art experiment, growing into a real brand — and a sustainable water company. Tropical Trash is a surf-and-beach lifestyle label and store born on the Oaxacan coast, funding real recycling infrastructure in the world's best surf communities. I founded it, built the brand from zero — naming, identity, the website (designed and built myself, AI-assisted, end to end), the store, the product — and direct it all, now growing it with my business partner Taryn.
Someone discovers a wave. Surfers follow, tourism follows the surfers. And tap water is often undrinkable in these places — so every one of them reaches for the same single-use plastic bottle, all day, every day.
Tropical Trash exists to hold surf culture accountable for the impact it creates on the ecosystems and communities of its favourite beach towns. Starting with our own.
A surf brand building better recycling infrastructure in the world’s best surf communities — starting in Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca. Bins, collection, sorting, education: real infrastructure costs real money, and good intentions don’t pay for it. So 10% of every sale does.
A business that cleans up after itself, and makes recycling cool instead of guilt-driven.
The visual language — 80s-90s inspo. surf, skate, beach culture, unmistakably tropical trashy.
They already know how to recycle. They just have nowhere to do it.
Our customer comes from somewhere recycling is normal and lands somewhere it isn’t. That gap creates a specific, daily guilt: you’re standing there holding an empty bottle and there is no right answer.
They’re educated, they’ll pay more for a better product, and they want to do something — but they feel helpless as individuals, and nobody has ever handed them a way in, let alone a cool one. The brand turns eco-anxiety into something you actually want to be part of, and makes caring about the beaches you love contagious.
The wordmark in every colourway it ships in — acid on cyan, cyan on acid, white on hot pink, outline on ink — plus the core palette. Built to survive a sticker, a can, a hand-painted sign and a phone screen without losing the shout.
I designed and built the entire site myself — vibe-coded, AI-assisted copy, start to finish — with Shopify running the store behind it. Every word, every layout decision, mine.
The physical home for the brand — La Punta, Puerto Escondido. Built myself: disco balls, checkerboard floors, neon signage, a rack of the collection.
A double entendre. Tropical Trash = the problem and the play — loud, colorful, free. Most sustainability brands lead with guilt; this one leads with a party, and the impact rides shotgun. Voice and copy run bilingual, English and Spanish, because the coast it's built for is too.
In a surf town, your shirt or your hat is the billboard. That makes the souvenir the marketing — which means it has to be something people actually want to wear home, not the printed junk in every airport shop.
It started as the best surf and skate vintage we could curate for our town. It’s growing into a sustainable lifestyle line built on the best eras of surf and skate fashion, with no plastic in the clothing and recycled materials at the centre of the business rather than bolted on at the end.
Sustainable swimwear, sunglasses, sunscreen, wax, hats, tees, towels — partnering with people already making sustainable things instead of pretending to be experts in all of it. Limited editions, their expertise, our audience.
The pivot: canned water done right. Two formats launching first (sparkling and spring), funding the same mission every can sells.
10% of every sale funds recycling infrastructure, built with local partner Comunidad NIT — whose bin system is already running on the coast. Ours go in this season.
