From Surfing Royalty to Creative Force, Mele Saili Does It All
The third-generation Pacific Beach native honors her family's Gordon & Smith legacy while pursuing her own passions as an artist, designer, and professional surfer
For Mele Saili, surfing is a birthright. A third-generation San Diegan—a third-generation Pacific Beachian, to be exact—Saili has a stacked pedigree of surfers in her family. She’s the granddaughter of Larry Gordon, who seven decades ago co-founded Gordon & Smith, once the world’s largest surfboard manufacturer. (Today, Larry’s daughter—Saili’s mother, Debbie Gordon—runs the company.) Saili’s father, Masi Saili, has also built his own career as a shaper, and he even made her first board.
Competitive surfing brought Saili around the globe for over two decades—she held a long stint as a team rider for Bing Surfboards and once placed third at the prestigious Deus 9 Foot & Single competition in Bali, surfing alongside names like Kassia Meador and Leah Dawson. Still a professional free surfer, she’s now drawn to contests less for the trophy and more for the experience. Now, it’s more about the location, the waves, and the people she gets to share them with.
“She’s flown the nest and gone a different route than I would’ve ever imagined for her,” says her mom, a 2025 San Diego Surfing Hall of Fame inductee. “But she’s taken the networking she learned from me to another level. I couldn’t be more proud of the business she’s built for herself.”
Her career honors all of her identities—an artist, a teacher, a clothing designer, a professional free surfer. San Diego is where she finds her artistic inspiration, where she first learned to surf, and where she clocks the most on-board hours surfing today. If you ever find yourself on the shores of Swami’s Beach around dawn patrol, you might catch her dancing on the tip of her Gordon & Smith board.
“What’s so special about San Diego is the variety of surf we have is different from anywhere,” Saili says. “If one spot isn’t breaking right, you can just drive five or 10 minutes down the coast and find something that is.”
This variety of surf lets her improvise on the board during free surfing competitions. Unlike traditional competitive surfing, where surfers are judged in heats against a scorecard of maneuvers, free surfing events invite surfers to interpret the waves however they like, prioritizing style and flow over a checklist of scored tricks. Today, Saili prefers to compete in independent invitationals put on for free surfers over World Surf League events.
“Free surfing caters more to style, more creative surfing, as opposed to competitive surfing, which is a little more choreographed,” Saili says. “I don’t know if [competitive surfing is] as beautiful to watch.”
In September, she went to Portugal to compete in the Gliding Barnacles Festival, which combines surfing, art, and music, the perfect blend of what she loves most. In and out of the water, Saili holds creativity as a core tenet of her being. Art, not surfing, was in fact her first love.
“I just love to work with charcoal and ink; that’s where I started out,” Saili says of the evolution of her art. “I just reached this really happy era in my life, so I’ve [also] gotten into cyanotype printing.”
Cyanotype printing, Saili explains, involves applying a watercolor-like solution to cloth, wood, or paper, then exposing it to the sun until it turns a deep blue. (The colorful reaction process was discovered in the 1840s and was used as an early version of blueprints, hence the name.) She shows her work in independent exhibitions around San Diego, most recently in an all-women’s group show in San Clemente.
Artwork by Mele Saili
Another one of Saili’s many jobs—a lifestyle she jokes is essential to afford living in Southern California these days—is teaching art to kids at a local preschool. Leading younger kids in art exploration, sensory art, and the overall artistic process as her day job lets her share her passion with others while preserving her own relationship with art.
“It’s tricky to do what you love for a career because you can lose the joy,” Saili says. “What’s so special about my job is I’m actually not really creating the art; I’m creating experiences for kids to do art. It keeps my art separate, and I still can find a lot of joy in it.”
While her careers overlap creatively, part of the key to that balance is keeping them separate, too.
“Art is more of a visual journal, so none of my pieces really have to do with surfing,” Saili says. “Surfing is a beautiful expression, a physical expression. Art for me is more mental. I like having those two ways to express myself.
“Balance is great. I think success, for me, is having a lot of creative freedom in all of my jobs and all the things I love to do.”
