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At Grog's Surf Palace in Seaside Park, Greg Mesanko is selling a 14-year-old boy a wet suit. He's also interviewing an 18-year-old woman who wants to work for him. And, if that weren't confusing enough, he's trying to field a phone call at the same time. The fact that Mesanko has to juggle several duties isn't so remarkable; many businessmen keep up a frenetic pace. But on this early spring day, the rain is being driven by gale-force winds. The ocean nearby is swelling with angry whitecaps. And one would think that surfing would be the last thing on anyone's mind. But at Grog's, the surfer's holy of holies, it's always an endless summer.
Mesanko (a. k. a. Grog), who's 39 years old, runs an establishment that is one of the most successful of its kind in the country, a store that has served as the prototype for other surf shops on both coasts because of its imaginative blend of top-of-the-line surfing equipment with a full line of casual clothing.
Mesanko's achievement was to take the basic surf shop concept (a rundown store front frequented by adolescents in wet suits) and to turn it into the kind of place where suburban moms and weekend tourists would burn holes in their VISA cards buying the latest in casual fashions. And he did it without losing the surfers who walk in trailing salt water.
The original Surf Palace is thriving; a second shop is now part of the Ocean County Mall; a third has just opened on Broadway in Point Pleasant Beach; and plans call for a further expansion into other malls. Mesanko says his businesses gross more than $1 million a year, maybe more than $2 million. He's vague because he'd rather keep the competition guessing.
"He's the king of surfing on the East Coast," says Kelley Woolsey, vice-president for marketing and sales with the O'Neill Wet Suit Co. of Santa Cruz, Calif. "I'd say on the whole East Coast they look at his store to see what he's doing and where he's going."
"The key to Mesanko's success is his vision," says another Californian, Greg Garrett of the Gotcha Sportswear Co. "Most surf shops stayed traditional with surfboards and wet suits. Greg really expanded...