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In the 1930s, Hugh Severson was working out of Los Angeles as a traveling salesman for AC/Delco auto parts. On family trips down the coast, they discovered San Clemente, the “Spanish Village by the Sea.” It was a small town with a slower pace, a beautiful coastline and an ocean that would end up shaping the Severson family story.
In the 1940s, Hugh moved the family to San Clemente for good. His sons John, Jimmy, Jerry and Joe helped shape the Southern California surf scene. They became lifeguards, surfers and artists, part of a small community at the epicenter of what surf culture would become.
John left the biggest mark on surfing's early history. Surfer, painter, photographer and filmmaker, he made some of the first surf films, and in 1960 he printed a 36-page booklet to promote one of them, Surf Fever. He called it The Surfer. It grew into SURFER, and for decades it was where surfers, photographers, artists and writers told their stories and, in the telling, defined the culture.
His younger brother Joe was an influential surfer and artist in his own right. Joe's 1961 high school yearbook has a classic image of him leaning into a stylish soul arch bottom turn. Decades later, that photo became the Severson Originals Soul Arch logo. In 2026, Joe and John went into the Board Builder's Hall of Fame together, the first year the Hall made room for artists.
Brothers Benji and Dan Severson grew up in the middle of all of it: surfboards, photographs and paintings, stacks of old surf magazines, stories from the beach, and a family archive full of artwork from an era most surfers only know secondhand.
After more than 30 years each in the surf industry, the brothers figured they were sitting on something worth sharing. It was never going to be just a brand; it was a piece of their family's surf history. Severson Originals started with a simple idea: take the art, attitude and spirit handed down through the family and bring it into the modern surf world, honoring the past while creating something new.
From Baja to Makaha, from San Clemente to wherever the next swell takes you, every piece carries a little of the Severson story. Old surf imagery finds new eyes, and the creative stoke that has always run through surfing is passed down to another generation.