Seventhwave History - Grab a Cuppa!
It Started With a Bet
In 1985, Paul Zarifeh was making backpacks. Not wetsuits — backpacks. He'd built TAZ Backpacks from scratch a decade earlier and knew how to run a small manufacturing operation. When a friend named Geoff White told him there was a gap in the New Zealand wetsuit market, Paul didn't spend months deliberating. He sold the backpack business and took the bet.
The Canterbury Wetsuit Company opened in June 1987. Months later, the global share market crashed.
Most people would have folded. Paul got on with it.
Geoff White and Paul Zarifeh, 1988 — the Canterbury Wetsuit Company's first year
Learning From Scratch
There was no instruction manual for making wetsuits in Christchurch in the late 1980s. Paul and Geoff had to figure out every part of the process themselves — neoprene sourcing, pattern making, machinery, construction methods, quality control. All of it.
They'd heard that Yamamoto limestone neoprene from Japan was the best in the world, so they ordered a shipment direct into Lyttelton. That decision — to use the best material available rather than the cheapest — defined everything that followed. Seventhwave still uses Yamamoto neoprene today.
Their first order: 300 kids' spring suits for R&R Sports. They delivered. Then came adult models, a dive range, and a growing pile of repair work from shops and customers across the country as they built a reputation for quality and durability.
Finding Their Niche
The early competitors were formidable — Rip Curl and O'Neill had loyal followings and established distribution. But they had a weakness: their wetsuits weren't warm enough for South Island winters.
New Zealand surfers are a particular breed. They paddle out in water temperatures that would clear a beach anywhere else in the world. They wanted wetsuits that could actually keep up. Paul developed the glued and blindstitched (G&S) construction method — seams sealed against water entry — and combined it with Yamamoto limestone neoprene, which holds heat more effectively than petroleum-based neoprene used by most competitors.
The result was a winter wetsuit with a reputation that spread by word of mouth: exceptionally warm, hard-wearing, and made to last. By the mid-90s, Seventhwave was producing suits for other brands too — Apollo dive suits for Australia, Bodyglove from 1992. Some of those early suits still come back decades later for repairs. In excellent condition.
Going Direct
Success brought a new problem. Selling wholesale to 30–40 retailers across New Zealand meant custom-fit wetsuits went through people who weren't trained in measuring — and the results showed. Racks of slightly-off custom suits, frustrated customers, wasted materials.
The solution was radical for the time: cut wholesale, own the customer relationship, go direct. The business changed its name to Seventhwave Wetsuits and in July 1996 opened its own shop in Ferrymead, Christchurch. Real staff, real wetsuits, real conversations about fit.
The custom-fit service that Seventhwave is known for today was born here — refined through thousands of customer interactions, many suggestions scrawled on scraps of paper (one on a banking slip famously led to the development of a detachable hood system).
Paul later expanded north, opening Auckland stores in Takapuna and Montego, while launching an early website in 2000. The Auckland chapter eventually closed, but the direct-to-customer model and the online capability it built proved prescient — particularly after the Christchurch earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 made clear that a business dependent on local foot traffic was a fragile thing.
After the Earthquakes
Seventhwave survived both earthquakes without major damage. But the 2011 earthquake — which killed 185 people and left the city in ruins — closed the local ocean to surfers for close to a year. For a wetsuit company whose founder surfed every chance he got, that stung.
The response was to build harder online. Better website, better e-commerce, a custom-fit service that worked seamlessly for customers anywhere in the world. The digital infrastructure built through those difficult years became the foundation for Seventhwave's international growth.
A Legacy Worth Protecting
Paul Zarifeh was diagnosed with cancer in 2015 and passed away in 2017. He was a builder, a tinkerer, a man who could have made cheaper wetsuits and chose not to. Every decision he made pointed toward quality, longevity, and looking after the people who trusted his product.
Before he died, Paul sold Seventhwave to the one person he trusted to carry it forward: Sarah — known to everyone in the water as Puff. A Christchurch surfer who'd worn Seventhwave wetsuits for years and understood instinctively what the brand stood for.
Sarah "Puff" Armstrong-Park, owner — Kaikōura at golden hour
Seventhwave Today
Under Puff's ownership, Seventhwave has grown in directions Paul could only have imagined. The team is diverse, female-led, and deeply skilled — wetsuit makers with decades of combined experience who treat each suit as something worth being proud of.
The Zirconium range — neoprene togs, sox, and women's separates built from Yamamoto's premium zirconium-lined neoprene — has become one of the brand's fastest-growing product lines. Designed for real water women who don't stop surfing when the temperature drops, these pieces have found customers well beyond New Zealand: Australia, the USA, Canada, Europe, and further afield.
The team has also taken on some of the most technically demanding work in the country — developing custom cut-resistant wetsuits for Sailing New Zealand's foiling race teams, where carbon fibre hydrofoils travelling at speed demand protection that goes well beyond a standard surf suit. They've worked closely with Sumner Coastguard to design and build a purpose-specific rescue suit for their crew — a project that required understanding exactly how a wetsuit performs under real emergency conditions, not just in the surf. And they've worked with costume crews on major film productions where the technical demands of neoprene on screen required a manufacturer who actually knew what they were doing. It's the kind of work that only comes to a team with the skills, materials, and willingness to solve problems that don't have off-the-shelf answers.
International orders now arrive from surfers, open water swimmers, coastguard crews, foiling sailors, and cold water enthusiasts worldwide — all of whom have discovered that there is a difference between a wetsuit made to a budget and a wetsuit made to last.
Seventhwave also makes custom wetsuits for amputees and people with disabilities — adapting patterns, closures, and construction to suit bodies that standard sizing was never designed for. It's not a side project; it's a direct expression of what custom manufacturing is actually for. Everyone deserves a wetsuit that fits, and everyone deserves to get in the water.
The philosophy hasn't changed since 1987: use the best materials available, build them properly, and make something that keeps people in the water longer.
Seventhwave is still in Ferrymead — where it belongs.
"While owning a small niche wetsuit company has its challenges, particularly being a small country at the bottom of the world, there is nothing I would rather do or could imagine doing. My heart bursts with happiness and gratitude every time I paddle out anywhere in NZ and see all the support our company has. I love sending a wetsuit from NZ to the other side of the world. I love being able to make wetsuits for people with disabilities or non-standard body shapes so they can get in the water too. I love my amazing team — they are my family.
So a big thank you to whoever is reading this for taking the time to learn about us and support us. We do it with love, gratitude and pride."
— Puff (Sarah Armstrong-Park, Owner)