February 08, 2024
Avantika Mishra(Founder of Sun Mud) in Action.
We had a quick chat with Avantika Mishra(Founder) about Sun Mud and how she came along with her surfer owned brand. This is what she had to share :)
Avantika’s Story:
Sun Mud has come to rise along with the surf movement in India. In 2018 Sun Mud was a person(me) who moved Chennai to teach English to first generation learners of theTamil fishermen villages. I discovered surfing through them. As I started to surf in Kovalam (a small fishermen village full of surfers), as a person with genes of the plains (I come from UP) my skin started to burn. During these years, I discovered the true joy of being outdoors.
I decided to keep feeling this happiness; left my corporate job and moved to Andamans to train and become a dive instructor. All this while, I was observing a ‘zinc’ based sunblock that a lot of international tourists brought to India. It was very expensive, and the ingredients looked incredibly simple. In a desperate need of not being able to afford good sun care, but needing it, I decided to start making a batch at home in 2019.
Over the next few years, Sun Mud was just a home project. A surfer friend Shashank (also a great musician, has his own band the F16s) designed the logo, other surfer friends from Bay Of Life (a surf school where I was volunteering) were the first users. Since it worked beautifully, more and more people wanted it. As more and more people wanted it, I had to perfect the formula before making it accessible to the larger sports community.
First sun mud batch - 2019 (instructors of bay of life surf school using it)
2 years ago, I realized Sun Mud can’t run from a home kitchen. After visiting and studying formulation industry in India, and talking to and working with different mentors and people who were doing inspiring work in the industry, I was able to craft a formulation that was truly safe for skin and prevented sun damage, while providing least harm to our waters and reefs.
What is Sun Mud, brand or a movement?
A year ago, when Sun Mud was at the brink of becoming a real entity in this world, an old friend of mine came to see a Sun Mud pop up at the hilltop market. I’ve seem him build his own company named Barefoot Education from scratch, transforming the lives of children in rural schools.
I told him about Sun Mud. He knew I had disappeared from Delhi right after college. I told him that I moved down south to the east, close to the fishermen villages on the Tamil Nadu Coast to work with children in schools. I had discovered surfing by chance, and it kept transforming my life. That’s where Sun Mud was born.
That day, I told him about Sun Mud and he said something that I am hoping to be the backbone of what Sun Mud needs to become 5 years from now 'Some companies launch a product, and some start a movement. 'That has to be it. Sun Mud is not the Zinc Sun block it sells right now. It’s a movement, that wants to direct affect the lives of the fishermen community in India, the pioneers of the rising surfing (or water sports in general) movement. If things move, sun mud will be able to do that for other sports as well.
The First Generation of Indian Surfers: Think about the impact of surfing on these villages that were otherwise culturally invisible from our digital sight. This is where the first generation of Indian Surfers bred. The sons and daughters of the fishermen, started to learn how to surf by watching you tube videos, watching foreigner surfers ripping it on the waves that crash in front of their homes.
These young surfers chose to break away from an ancestral career path of becoming fishermen. They were able to bypass the traditional community jobs like fishing. Most of the surfers used to work for companies like Swiggy, Dunzo, or Zomato pulling in millions of lower middle class work-force to join a labor-intensive, non-growth type of job system.
In simpler words, the fishermen surfers of the indian coasts were the first to start surf schools in India. They broke out of a traditional job role i.e becoming fishermen, but landed at a beautifully passionate, yet profitable future full of opportunities that helps them demand the future they deserve, as equals in this shark-like economy of our world.
There are people from the surfers community that the world now knows. There’s Kamali, Mumu, Appu .... And many more. Then there’s the movement that has become so big that the 3 day surf festival in Kovalam attracts 20k people each year. You have to make it once for this event, its really amazing to see all beautiful people from all over the world come together and participate in this lively event :)
The Sunmud Story:
An example that I have close to my heart:
Kavi was 16 when he joined bay of life (a surf school) to become a surf instructor. He learnt how to surf, became really good at it, picked up english, and by the time he was 20, he was a full time instructor at the surf school and spoke enough English to take a surfing lesson, clearly, and chit chat with you at the beach a little bit. He was earning 20k a month and it was a huge deal for him. His parents were proud that he was a surfer.
But during Covid the lockdowns came, the surf schools shut, and Kavi had to find a way to make money. A lot of the surfer boys suffered more than I can ever imagine, but time went by. As the lockdowns slowly opened, everyone was eager to open the surf school back again. And they did, but not all the local surf instructors from before the lockdowns returned. Kavi, joined as a life guard for the blue flag beach work at our surf beach. The Kovalam river mouth beach (our home break) was chosen to become a blue flag beach. Lot more construction, roads, parking space, and cementing to be done at the beach now. The panchayat was promised lots of jobs for the young fishermen of the village. One of the reasons the project felt widely welcome at first. What were these jobs like? Mostly laborious, hidden in the garb of job positions like ‘life guard’, ‘ on-site worker’ etc. Some early mornings when I went out to surf, Kavi would be at duty already. But he’d come climb the rocks (the huge rocky groyn structures) and hoot for me in the water, encouraging me to catch the next wave. I didn’t see him surf for months. He didn’t have time. He tried to come once or twice, but he told us that his seniors scolded him for it.
Then one day, when he felt sure that lockdowns are gone for good, he quit his job and joined the surf school again. He still works at bay of life. I always felt like I wanted to be one of them. But I was reminded of my privilege so strongly at that time. I was a full time water sports professional too, during the lockdowns. But I had a modern college degree. I was able to go back to finding a work from home job in the EdTech space, and earned enough to get by. But the loss of surfing and hence the community, and connection, was hard on us all. Sunmud - an outcome of my life surfing, was the thing I held on to as a reminder of the life it symbolizes. From there on, Sunmud only grew :)
Checkout Sun Mud here.
Our other Homies & Stories article:
The Miramar series story
Nunkima Homecoming :)
The Sunmud Story
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