ENTREPRENEUR Carlina Bjork is a co-owner of the lifestyle brand OCN Culture.

Jan 2, 2024 by Nish Nadaraja

I met Carlina Bjork and her husband, Jeff, after they opened OCN Culture, bringing the spirit of “aloha” to downtown San Anselmo, and a great way to begin this new year!

What do you do?  

I’m the co-owner of OCN Culture. I work alongside my two partners who are my husband, Jeff, and my best friend, Shashona (aka “Sho”). OCN Culture is a beach lifestyle brand. We are especially inspired by our collaborations with artists and creatives who embody aloha.

Where do you live? San Geronimo Valley.

How long have you lived in Marin? Since 1996. 

Where can we find you when you’re not at work? 

At home cooking, with friends or at Fitlab in Fairfax. Or, in Hawaii as much as we can. We especially love the Gold Coast area of Oahu.

If you had to convince someone how awesome Marin is, where would you take them? 

Definitely lunch at Hog Island Oyster Co. in Marshall! 

What’s one thing Marin is missing?  A Korean BBQ restaurant.

What’s one bit of advice you’d share with your fellow Marinites? 

Help where and when we can. There are so many volunteer opportunities here, and the impact often goes beyond what we could imagine.

If you could invite anyone to a special dinner, who would they be? 

Duke Kahanamoku. Or, my husband’s grandfather who he never met, as he was killed in action in Okinawa, Japan during WWII.

What is some advice you wish you knew 20 years ago? 

You can do whatever you want. Start it as a side hustle. Lead with your intuition always. It’s OK if it doesn’t turn out like you thought. Keep learning and go with it. 

What is something that in 20 years from now will seem cringeworthy? 

Hopefully fast food?! At least the way it’s made currently.

Big question. What is one thing you’d do to change the world? 

For all humans to have aloha towards each other. I’ll leave you with a quote by Duke Kahanamoku:

“In Hawai’i we greet friends, loved ones and strangers with Aloha, which means with love. Aloha is the key word to the universal spirit of real hospitality… Try meeting or leaving people with Aloha. You’ll be surprised by their reaction.”

Keep up with Carlina Bjork at @ocnculture on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.

Meet Jeff and Carlina Bjork and Shashona Burke | Partners/Owners of OCN Culture

We had the good fortune of connecting with Jeff and Carlina Bjork and Shashona Burke and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Jeff, Carlina and Shashona, what was your thought process behind starting your own business?
OCN Culture started in 2016 as a “side hustle” between best friends. Honestly our thought process was to start something that that would be fun to do together- a project that would allow us to be creative and make cool things, but to also have fun and connect with community. Yes, we had a pipe dream of “blowing this thing up,” but we also had full time jobs, mortgages, and kids to manage. So we kept it light hearted and created some hats, tshirts, and sweatshirts with just our logo printed on them. We had informal “meetings” over beers and bbq’s to make necessary decisions. We bought a commercial tent and sold our “merch” at street fairs and surf contests in Northern California. People liked what we were doing, so we approached some retail shops and wholesaled our products there too. It wasn’t until 2020 (in the middle of the pandemic) that we opened our first brick and mortar shop in Point Reyes, CA. and realized we’d need to make some decisions to send us on a more serious trajectory. We outgrew the space in Point Reyes and in March of 2023 opened our current shop in downtown San Anselmo (Marin County), CA.
 

Alright, so for those in our community who might not be familiar with your business, can you tell us more?
OCN Culture is a lifestyle brand, headquartered in Marin County, CA. We create simplistic, thoughtful, and socially responsibly made products which are inspired by wave sliding culture and our collaborations with artists and creatives who embody Aloha. The products that we create (so far) are wetsuits, apparel, hats, and beanies. Mostly all of our apparel are 100% organic cotton, some hemp blends, and made here in CA. Our retail shop also carries other brands that we feel fit our ocean-centric vibe.Carlina Bjork

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
Marin County is a very unique place. It offers the most amazing trails, food, and shopping. If we had friends visiting for a week, on day one we’d love to show them our shop in downtown San Anselmo! We’d want to show them our sustainable apparel, hats, beanies, wetsuits, and surfboards shaped by legends in Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay. We also offer curated soaps, candles, and self care products created by Marin and Hawaii locals. Everything that we carry has a unique story behind it. If our friends wanted to take a little of Marin or Hawaii back home with them – then OCN Culture is a must see.

Then we’d take a stroll downtown to visit our friends at Longway for a cup of coffee and pastries, and to Still to snag one of their vintage home goods pieces and/or a Hampui hat. If our visiting friend has dogs, then we must also visit Dogville to grab some gourmet treats and a take a look at the Owner’s latest window display (which is always humorous and crafty).

Next – we’d definitely do a day trip out to Hog Island in Marshall, CA (West Marin). The drive out alone is worth it, where we may see white elk, coyotes, deer, and bob cats against the back drop of redwoods and creeks. And once you get to Hog Island, you feel that you’ve been transported back in time. Hog Island farms the best oysters around, and they serve them chilled with their “Hog Wash,” salads and charcutier boards – all while enjoying your lunch on picnic-like tables steps away from the bay where the oysters are grown.

On the way back, we’d take a turn towards Inverness and go all the way to North Beach. We’d take our 1971 Chevy Balboa van and back it up so we can open the back doors and enjoy a beverage while watching the enormous waves, and the epic sunset.

Really, we don’t think we’d even leave Marin. We love it so! And like we said, there’s so much to explore, so our days would be all about small business shopping (we believe is the best kind), being in nature, and eating our farm to table food offerings.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
What we are most proud of is the relationships we’ve built along the way. It’s not just about what we create to wear. The heart of what we really do is about the people! People who have helped us, who we’ve helped, what we learn from each other, and our community who have been so supportive. We’ve really leaned into that and have used it as our driving force. For instance, we love to host art shows at our shop for friends in our community, to support them and to show case their talents (which is also an opportunity to bring people together to hang, listen to good music, and to be social). Another example is our Team Riders who are all unique and talented humans – we show case them and support them in any ways we can, in and out of the water. That’s what we’re most proud of, is our collective of insanely talented, creative, intelligent and good humans who we call our community. We pinch ourselves every day when we think of how lucky we are to be in their orbit!

Website: www.ocnculture.com

Instagram: @ocnculture

Linkedin: @ocnculture

Facebook: @ocnculture

Yelp: OCN Culture

I have to admit that when we started OCN Culture in 2017, I was not thrilled at all. At the time, I had a job in the mortgage industry (which is often a thankless place to be) but I had finally hit the jack pot when it came to finding rad bosses and a team who really valued me. So I wasn’t exactly thrilled at the thought of a side hustle. “Why are we throwing this into the mix of our already crazy lives?  We have two kids, a mortgage, demanding jobs,” I asked my husband Jeff, and went on with “T-shirts?  This is ludicrous.” Jeff looked at me and said, “I need this.” What he meant was that he needed a creative outlet. He has this creative side that needs tapping into, and surf culture has been a part of his life since before he was born as he was bred from a rich history of Hawaiian Culture. I on the other hand, don’t have a creative bone in my body but I’ve always had a hustle mentality. I begrudgingly agreed to help make things happen operationally – as long as it was fun.

We enlisted our two best friends Dan & Sho as Partners and pitched it as a fun thing to do together. As always, they were down for an adventure. Another good friend who is a Brand Strategist & Creative Consultant helped us come up with a couple variations of our logo. We bought T-shirt samples from multiple vendors, tried them on, and through process of elimination we honed it down to the final two which we thought were best fitting. All of this happened over beers and hanging out –  four best friends, doing what we always did on weekends, but now also laughing at each other while trying on T-shirts.

Then, we bought and printed on way too many T-shirts.  Like…. way too many – a stupid amount of them. Way too many colors of shirts and way too many varying logo placements and colors of print.  We laugh at it now, because we still have some of those shirts lying around and it’s actually embarrassing.  They aren’t a good representation of our standards now, so they literally just sit there.  We don’t even feel comfortable giving them away as freebies. We will figure out something; Jeff recently used one to make a flag to hang outside of our shop.

Going back to those crazy stupid T-shirts – as we were choosing them and trying them on, from my recollection, none of us thought about the fabric or where it was made.  It didn’t even cross my mind. For me at the time, if a T-shirt (or jeans or anything else) made me “look good,” I would buy it at any cost. But I was never that person who was turning things inside out to see what it was made of, or where it was made. I was oblivious and I must admit, it was easier that way. After all, it wasn’t my problem to solve, right?

Well, now we know that it’s a problem which we should help solve. This is why we have committed to going 100% organic (or worst case organic + eco-friendly), sustainable, non-toxic dyes, and only work with partners who fairly treat and pay their employees. For now, that means we have all our apparel (which is now more than just T-shirts) made for us locally in California or other states in the USA. And it will be this way until we can do our full, due diligence to see if we even feel comfortable with out-sourcing to any other country.

We’re still a baby in this game. I feel my head being patted “Just wait. You will learn… You will learn of all of the scaling challenges, and you will learn to compromise.”  But this is the thing: We are already compromising. Organic + sustainable = higher prices that many customers cannot (or do not want to) pay. Our retail prices really should be higher – we know that, in fact the feel of our shirts have been compared to those of James Perse. But we feel like that’s our problem to solve. It’s not our customers’ problem that we’re growing, trying to do the right thing, creating products that are high quality and stylish too (sometimes organic clothing can get a little “crunchy”), and that scaling is a challenge for us. So as I beg the question “Does Anyone Even Care?” I am also answering that it doesn’t really matter if they do or don’t.  We will find a way to make this work. We simply feel that it’s the right thing to do… on so many levels. 

The End

P.S. Please, feel free to leave a comment!  We would love to hear from you. And if you have any resources that you'd like to share, please do! For those who want to go down the organic cotton-sustainable-nontoxic-fair wages rabbit hole of apparel, please reach out for some resources to get you started. 

From left to right: Dan, Sho, Jeff, Carlina (Partners and best friends for life)

From left to right:  Jeff’s Grandfather and his friends in Oahu, Hawaii.

Jeff’s flag made out of one of our “crazy stupid” T-shirts

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