Hamel’s Has Everything for the Beach Crowd

It’s a typical Saturday afternoon in Mission Beach, and the cash register inside Hamel’s Action Sports Center is ringing at the frequency of the crashing surf.

The funky, 1,000-square-foot shop, right on the ocean at the foot of Ventura Place, is as crowded, and as crazed, as any K mart store in the midst of a blue-light sale.

Just past the front door, co-owner Dan Hamel, 41, is helping a pair of tourists wearing cameras and Hawaiian shirts select a batch of post cards to send home to their friends.

His 43-year-old brother and partner, Ray, is watching three young boys rummage through a box of stickers for some suitably “rad” decals to plaster on their newly purchased skateboards.

A few feet away, a slender teen-age girl in a skimpy bikini--and with a tan so even it looks airbrushed--is trying on sunglasses. Her muscle-shirted boyfriend, meanwhile, is testing various brands of suntan oil by rubbing dabs of goo onto her back.

Both Sales and Rentals

Toward the rear of the store, more than a dozen other people of all ages are lollygagging around. Some are pulling T-shirts, swim trunks and other “surf fashions” off the racks. Some are waiting to rent bicycles, roller skates or surfboards. Others are just hanging out.

“What we’re really marketing is the Southern California life style,” said Dan. “And after 20 years in the business, we’ve learned that the right atmosphere is every bit as important as a wide mix of merchandise.”

Atmosphere and merchandise take precedence over order. Most of Hamel’s Mission Beach competitors specialize in one or two areas, like T-shirt sales or bike rentals. But the Hamel brothers handle anything and everything connected with the beach--or, as Dan Hamel says, “the Southern California life style.”

As a result, Hamel’s Action Sports Center is a retail circus. Skateboards dangle from the ceiling above racks of T-shirts, swimwear and beach towels. Boxes of roller skates are stacked around displays of sunglasses, suntan oils and rubber sandals. Crammed onto the shelves across from the cash register are such eclectic items as smashball games, baseball caps covered with plastic sea gull droppings, and calendars of girls in bikinis.

Haphazard Strategy Works

This haphazard marketing strategy appears to work. Last year, Dan said, Hamel’s did more than $500,000 in total sales--70% of which was realized between Memorial Day and Labor Day--despite spending less than $2,000 on advertising.

“In this business, everything is word of mouth,” he said. “We’ve been around so long that even tourists from Arizona and Canada come by the moment they arrive at the beach, because their friends who visited San Diego in the past told them they’ll find everything they need right here.”

Rentals account for about a quarter of Hamel’s business, Dan said. A fleet of 100 bicycles, 300 skateboards and pairs of roller skates, 24 scooters and 50 boogie boards each rent for $3 an hour; the hourly rate for the 24 surfboards and wet suits is a dollar more.

“Most people come in to Hamel’s to buy something,” said Ray. “No matter where they’re from, they like to take a part of the Southern California life style with them.”

The Hamel brothers started out small. They opened shop in July, 1967, “mostly as a way out of doing physical labor,” Dan said.

At the time, Dan was working as a journeyman painter and Ray as a sheet metal maker.

“We had both gotten pretty burned out with our jobs,” Ray said. “We had long hair and beards, and neither one of our unions wanted to work with longhairs. So we started looking for something else to do.”

The year before, Ray had purchased several bicycles from a police auction, repaired them, and resold them at a considerable profit. He began talking about opening a bicycle and surfboard rental-repair business, ideally on the beach where he and his brother had grown up.

Dan had been working out regularly at a beachfront gym at the foot of Ventura Place, and when the gym closed, the brothers seized the opportunity and moved in.

They signed the lease, for $275 a month, on a Saturday. That afternoon, they bought 24 used Stingray bicycles and two dozen surfboards. They borrowed a dozen surf mattresses.

At nightfall, they began assembling the bikes and polishing the surfboards outside, underneath a street lamp, because “we didn’t have any electricity,” Ray recalled. An hour or so later, they officially opened for business.

“By the time we closed for the night, we had taken in exactly $26.50 in rentals,” Ray said. “The next day, we made $126.50. And the following Monday, we each quit our jobs.”

Had to Return to Jobs

Once the summer was over, however, both Hamels reluctantly returned to their blue-collar jobs.

“What we had made during the summer didn’t hold us through the winter,” Dan said. “In fact, we had to keep going back to our regular jobs for nearly 10 years, just to keep the shop, and us, alive.”

Every year, things got a little better. Profits from the summer went toward expansion in the winter, and in 1977 the Hamel brothers were making enough money to not only quit their regular jobs for good, but also to buy the entire two-story, 4,000-square-foot building that houses their shop. The price was nearly $300,000.

Today, that building alone is worth more than $1 million. The Hamel brothers employ a full-time sales force of 20 in the winter and twice as many in the summer.

According to a recent profile in Action Sports Retailer, a leading national trade publication, “Every activity that Mission Beach offers is catered to fully by Hamel’s inventory, services and promotions.”

Those services include a bike repair shop and an unofficial job referral agency for neighborhood youths.

Community Activists

The Hamels’ promotions include various surfing, volleyball and other athletic events, as well as the annual Mr. and Miss Mission Beach beauty contests, which routinely attract upward of 10,000 people to the beach in front of Hamel’s. This year’s event is scheduled for the weekend of July 27 and 28, Ray said.

The brothers are among Mission Beach’s most vocal community activists. Dan has served on both the Mission Beach Town Council and the Mission Beach Precise Plan group and helped establish a merchants’ association.

With his brother, he has lobbied the San Diego City Council to ban alcohol in beach parking lots, clear the brush around the Belmont Park roller coaster to get rid of transients, and supply merchants with sandbags to stave off high tides during winter storms.

Most recently, the Hamel brothers led the fight against commercial development of the Belmont Park site. Although the developers won, the Hamels are still selling “Recall Mike Gotch” T-shirts, which they printed last year to vent their frustrations with the San Diego city councilman “who allowed the developers to take away our park,” Dan said.

To celebrate their 20th year as the unrivaled kings of Mission Beach’s business community, the Hamel brothers are starting a mail-order business and introducing their own line of custom skateboards and surf fashions.

They’re also remodeling their Ventura Place store at a cost “that’s more than what we paid for this building and land in the first place,” Ray said.

When construction is completed by summer’s end, he said, the upstairs portion of the building, which houses a storage room and a boxing ring, will be converted into three one-bedroom apartments and an office.

The entire downstairs, most of which is rented out to other businesses, will be devoted to nothing but retail space, quadrupling the size of Hamel’s Action Sports Center to more than 4,000 square feet.

“We’ll double just about everything, from merchandise and rentals to our sales force,” Ray said. “We’re always crowded and extremely cramped, and it’s about time we did something about it.”