Where joy meets the line-up
Allison Roberts has spent her life moving between worlds — born in New York, raised in California and shaped by the grit of '80s Venice, then drawn north to the slow pull of the central coast and the warm water and warmer rhythms of a life spent surfing. With a background in cultural anthropology, fashion design, and over twenty-five years creative directing for some of the most-loved names in surf and skate, her work has always been guided by the same compass: the ocean, the handmade, and the stories that travel through both.
These days, you'll find her at home in Huntington Beach at The Village Surf House — a forever-evolving canvas she shares with her husband and two surfing daughters — or in the studio shaping her ceramic wave sculptures under the name Ways of Water. Each piece is a small offering to the sea: a reminder of the joy waves bring into our lives, made slowly, made by hand, made to honor the things that move us.
Her creative practice runs on intuition and instinct. She's drawn to imperfection — weathered feet, dirt under fingernails, the visible trace of the human hand. She collects vintage textiles and found artifacts from her travels, pulls color from places most people overlook, and trusts her gut over the loudest voice in the room. It's the kind of creative confidence that only comes from a quarter-century of doing the work, and the kind of softness that only comes from a lifetime by the water.
At the heart of this collaboration is a return to the things Allison loves most: retro florals pulled from the spirit of the '60s and '70s, vintage wallpaper blooms reimagined in three colorways, and the yin yang — woven quietly through the collection as a meditation on balance. For surfers, that duality is everyday currency: land and sea, heart and mind, conscious and subconscious, the physical and the spiritual. The Mid Fin x Allison Roberts collection is built around that in-between space — the one we know best.
Applied to surfboard fins, the artwork becomes something you ride — Allison's retro florals and the yin yang carried from the wall into the water.
For Allison, this collaboration is an extension of everything her practice has always been about: creating beautiful things by hand, honoring the ocean, and leaving room for joy. For Mid Fin Co., it's a chance to bring a deeply experienced creative voice into the shop — and to keep showing that art and surf are best when they meet without trying too hard.
This collection is more than surf hardware. It's a reminder that surfing, at its best, is a celebration. Of beauty, of balance, of a life lived close to the water.
Limited edition. Available now.
