Faherty Founders Find Inspiration on Life’s Highway

IN 2013, MIKE AND ALEX FAHERTY, along with Alex’s wife, Kerry Docherty, hit the road. To launch their clothing brand, they traveled the country in a trailer that looked like a DIY beach house and which,in fact, they built themselves. Twelve years later, Faherty, based in New York City, sells a rangy line of apparel staples informed by surf culture and the West. (Blazers, swimsuits, flannels, tees—the Faherty look adapts from beach to bar, even to office.) And to this day, you’ll often find the three founders out and about.

“Our lives aren’t super compartmentalized in terms of what’s work and what’s not,” says Docherty, the company's chief impact officer. “A couple weeks ago, I went to a friend’s ceremony on the Navajo Nation, and I met those friends through work. So it wasn’t with Faherty, but it wasn’t not with Faherty. There’s a lot of blending that happens.”But life on the road has a way of generating energy rather than draining it. “They print fabric differently in Indonesia than they do in India,” says Mike, the brand’s creative director. “There's a different vibe of the layouts and colors. My travels are all in search of creating great versions of my own thing—they all come together from memory as I'm working on a design.” As he talks, behind him is a wall of photos from Folly Beach in South Carolina and of ’70s surfers in Australia, all meant to help inspire future designs. The brand’s creative process also helps attract collaborators, and identify places to spotlight in Faherty’sseasonal catalogs, which look and read like high-end travel magazines. The catalogues have recently covered Maine and Costa Rica, Morocco and Nashville, featuring local hot spots and folks to know.

“I really like travel that centers around people,” Docherty says. “I want to be in the community with the people who live in these places.”

From an early age, Mike and Alex took surf trips to Hawaii, Malibu and Costa Rica, vacationed in Kenya, and made regular ski trips to Bromley Mountain in southern Vermont, a drive they still aim for annually.“ Growing up, my mom was a little bit more of an off-the-beaten-path kind of traveler,” says Alex, the CEO. “Staying at a Hilton wasn't what we did.” Sometimes, they literally went off the beaten path, as when the brothers, then 17, crashed a rented Honda Civic in Tamarindo, Costa Rica. “The car was smoked. We were frightened to hell and back,” Mike says. “But our boards were fine, and we were fine.” Mike spent much of his 20s traveling alone, journeying to Hong Kong, Tokyo, Vietnam, Taiwan, Sri Lanka and parts of India for work, all while looking for vintage clothing and coveted surf spots. “Back then, there wasn’t great GPS,” he says. “If I wanted to go surfing in India, and it was two hours from where I was staying, I would find a taxi driver and show him a picture, and he’d take me for, like, forty bucks. Adventuring was never scary—meeting new people and trying new food was always something that got me going.”

That explorers’ ethos is still at the heart of the brand, as exemplified by a recent jaunt to Busua, Ghana, to check in on a surf club Faherty is sponsoring. Surfing, obviously, remains a touchstone. Growing up in Spring Lake, New Jersey, the brothers Faherty caught waves early and often—and still do, whenever they can.“You get off the highway and there’s a rotary half a mile down the road,” Mike says.“When you make the turn toward the beach, you put the windows down, and you can smell the salt in the air.” When Alex travels, he prefers to stay near the ocean, so he can open a window and take in a reminder of where he grew up. For this crew, home is where the wave is, and where the road leads.