About Mokan

Mokan grew out of a love of the ocean, the feeling of frustration when not being fully prepared in the surf and the inkling that life is about more than the 9-5 grind.

After the death of a close friend In 2013, the two of us (co-founders of Mokan) were left weighing up what’s really important. Should we really be spending the best years of our lives working long hours away from family, friends and the ocean to progress up career ladders when it could all end in the blink of an eye. We felt our surfing time and fitness as well as our everyday sense of wellbeing decreasing as other things got in the way. We’d seen others move away from the sea, stop surfing and get stuck in a rat race - earning money from jobs they hated to buy things they didn’t need to impress people they didn’t like. We were determined that that wouldn’t be us. The idea for the company grew in our minds while travelling through Southern Africa in 2014 with our two young kids and family from South Africa.  We were leading a very simple life with only the basics and had that sensation that we could be more happy with less stuff.

Leaving the coast of Namibia we went inland on Safari, we were using our dry bags from our luggage as basic kettlebells to keep fit while not in gym or the ocean. We could see that a few changes in the design would improve their functionality. When we got back to the UK we started working on the improvements and “Drybell” - our first product - was born.

Since then our family and business has grown. We’ve produced products we’ve needed and we want to use. The company is still small and we’re still working our other jobs. But since reassessing our priorities, those jobs are less about career progression and pay and more about life satisfaction. Our love of surfing is stronger than ever and we are striving to build new products that help us optimise the surf time we have.

As Mokan has grown, more cool people become involved we’ve found common ground with so many folks who have the same mindset about life and surfing. We’re not going to sell you the lie that you have to have this gadget to be happy, or you have to be surfing that tropical break to be fulfilled. We know that happiness is internal, it’s how you respond to conditions life throws at you, not about the condition itself.

We build products that we need and we use. We figure if we need them other people probably do too! 

We know that not every surfer out there is going to be a highly competitive athlete on the WSL. We also know that a lot of really great surfers avoid competition altogether and choose to surf because they love it, but like us we always want to grow and surf better.  Mokan was born from that desire to improve our surfing and the aspiration to take the appreciation of the present moment that surfing gives us out into the rest of life. We want to surf our best and be ready for what the ocean, and life may throw at us.

We hope you’ll join us on this ongoing journey to Live Life Stoked!