Almost from its first stitches of fabric, Quiksilver carried the art of beach life in its DNA, before swiftly adding the snow to its iconic logo.

From pareo prints inspired by Polynesia to bold polka dots, tribal patterns, and urban collages, the brand’s look has always been in motion.

“It’s all about attitude,” once said artist Simon Buttonshaw, one of the original creative voices behind the brand.

“You don’t start from a position of creating a new look. You just think of new ways of voicing an attitude.”

That attitude came alive in Torquay, Australia.

In the late 1960s, the small surf town was buzzing with young surfers who wanted nothing more than to live by the waves.

Among them were Brian Singer and Doug Warbrick, who set up Rip Curl in an old bakery.

Around the corner, another surfer, Alan Green (1947-2025), was experimenting with wetsuits and then boardshorts.

At first, the shorts came with an accidental logo.

“I went to a place called Cash’s, a big label company in Australia, and they showed me a bunch of designs, including a swan. It looked like a duck to me,” Alan Green later revealed in the book “The Mountain and the Wave.”

“I didn’t pay much attention to it until we’d made a couple of hundred pairs of boardshorts with a frickin’ duck on them! That’s when I thought, we have to be able to do something better than this.”

By 1973, Green took Quiksilver shorts while Singer and Warbrick focused on Rip Curl wetsuits. The time had come for a new symbol.

The Birth of the Mountain and the Wave

Eager to change his original logo, Green sketched a curling wave with foam drifting off the lip.

To balance it, he added a snowcapped peak beneath.

Alan drew inspiration from a famous Japanese print, Katsushika Hokusai’s “The Great Wave off Kanagawa,” of Mount Fuji rising against a great wave.

The result became the Quiksilver logo, a design that fused sea and mountain into one image.

At first, the two icons – surf wave and alpine mountain – had no real bond. 

Green admitted, “Torquay surfers had just started going to Mount Buller (a ski resort four hours away) to ski.”

“But it was only a few weekends a year, so even though we could see there were similarities between surfing and skiing, surfing still absolutely dominated our lives.”

“So when I started drawing this thing, I wanted the mountain really tiny, but it didn’t work, so we ended up with a mountain that was way ahead of its time.”

The logo’s evolution was constant.

“I took the existing cartoony logo and saw an opportunity to streamline it and give it a more engineered look,” designer Ray Smith recalls.

“So I played with the geometry of the two elements and tried to tie them together more. I also came up with a new squashed font to go with it.”

“The symbol was actually secondary to the logo type, but it turned out to have greater longevity than the type.”

When Quiksilver created its women’s line, Roxy, the famous heart-shaped logo came from simply putting two Quiksilver icons together.

Interestingly, according to the surf company’s official book, the “original Roxy logo was highly derivative with Polynesian and Balinese influences.”

“No one was satisfied with it, but it wasn’t until a designer at Quiksilver’s Turkish licensee put two Quiksilver logos together to make a heart that the penny dropped.”

By the 1990s, the logo was reshaped again for bold advertising campaigns, slipped into ovals, and stretched across collections.

For instance, the innovative visual effects employed by Tom Adler and David Carson to give Quiksilver’s advertising a makeover in the late 1990s required a restructuring of the mountain and wave logo.

The simple, understated oval seemed to sit perfectly with the use of bold copy lines and photo blow-ups employed at the time.

Then, designer/skater Natas Kaupas began experimenting with his stylized freehand script while working with David Carson.

With new applications for it being found all the time, the Natas script changes almost as quickly as the work of the taggers that inspired it, with Natas keeping one step ahead of the designers across the board sports industry who have copied it.

From Surf to Snow

What started as a balanced sketch of wave and mountain eventually became prophetic.

By the mid-1980s, Quiksilver Europe realized that surfwear alone couldn’t survive eight months of winter.

The founders visited the French Alps, and after seeing the uninspired ski fashion of the time, they decided to bring surf’s color and fun to the slopes.

“We thought we could take surfwear to the mountains, but we really had no idea about the technical aspects of skiwear, “Harry Hodge remembers.

“We produced the ‘Dead Inventory’ ski jacket in boardshorts fabric that we coated with waterproof spray! Not exactly technical, but people loved it.”

Only 800 of those jackets sold, but their neon punch lit up gray ski slopes.

Soon after, Quiksilver teamed up with French adventurer Jean Afanassieff, who brought real technical knowledge.

The Black Diamonds, Quiksilver’s first snow team, planted the brand across ski magazines in Europe.

Then came Serge Vitelli, a skier-turned-snowboarder, who pushed Quiksilver straight into the rising snowboard culture.

By the early 1990s, snowboarders like Vitelli and Swiss skater Jose Fernandes were the face of Quiksilver in the snow.

The look shifted from wild neon ski suits to long jackets, baggy pants, and urban tones borrowed from skate culture.

The Logo Becomes What It Always Was

When Quiksilver USA launched its first ski line in 1988, shops hesitated. But sales reps leaned on the brand’s story and logo.

“I’d just go in and tell them the Quiksilver story, wouldn’t even open the pack. And they bought it on the brand story,” recalls Rockies rep John Thompson.

By the late 1990s and early 2000s, snow represented more than 20 percent of global sales.

Quiksilver had expanded into technical outerwear, helmets, and even acquired snowboard brands like Gnu and Libtech.

The mountain that was once added “for balance” now defined half the business.

When Rossignol, the legendary ski brand, was acquired in 2005, Quiksilver wasn’t just surf – it was wave, mountain, and everything in between.

And yet, through every shift, every line of shorts, every neon jacket or snowboard helmet, the same logo carried it all.

In 2025, Quiksilver announced the return of the iconic red box logo that was launched in the early 2000s.

A wave curling into a mountain.

A sketch that once seemed mismatched, but turned out to be the perfect story of how a surf brand found itself at home in the snow.

Words by Luís MP | Founder of SurferToday.com