The story of Cavalier Surf Shop in Nags Head does not start with surfing.
It starts with laundry.
Back in the 1950s, before the beach road filled in the way it has today, the small brick building that is now Cavalier Surf Shop was a full-service launderette. Six industrial dryers lined one wall and washing machines lined the other. If you were staying on this stretch of Nags Head, this is where you came to get your laundry done.
“This was one of the original buildings out here,” says Jerry Slayton, whose parents bought the shop in 1986. “There weren’t washers and dryers in the houses. Everybody came here.”
Then came Hurricane Donna in 1960, tearing the roof clean off.
The owner repaired his building and kept the laundry service going. By 1962, the owner, who also owned Cavalier Sporting Goods in Virginia Beach, added a small retail operation, and the Cavalier became part launderette, part surf shop. A little bit of this, a little bit of that, as is the Outer Banks way.
That pattern of adjusting and shifting would continue for the Cavalier, and by the mid-1980s, it was once again in transition.
Photo: Jerry, Marty and Ken Slayton, owners of Cavalier Surf Shop. Photo courtesy of Cavalier Surf Shop Facebook
Ken Slayton of Virginia Beach had been coming to the Outer Banks for years, working as a salesman supplying surf gear to shops up and down the coast.
“I’d stop in every surf shop on the way down,” he says.
One spring in the mid-1980s, he walked into Cavalier and met the current owners, at the time two sisters.
“I told the sisters, ‘It’s springtime. You hardly have anything in here. Boogie boards are really popular right now, you might want to put some in,’” Ken says. “They said, ‘We’re not sure we’re staying. We’re not happy here.’”
Ken walked out, found a phone and called his wife, Marty.
“There’s a surf shop in Nags Head for sale," he told her.
“Okay,” Marty replied, with more than a hint of yes in her voice. She loved vacationing on the Outer Banks, so why not make a home there?
“I made the contract,” Marty says. “We hadn’t even talked about moving. I hadn’t even seen it. We just did it.”
Within a month, on July 21, 1986, the Slaytons had moved to Nags Head with their two young children, Karla and Jerry.
What they bought wasn’t really a surf shop. The launderette was still the heart of the business.
“It was very different then,” Marty says. “Barn doors. Screens. No air conditioning. Just big fans. It was hot. Like a sweatshop.”
Fishermen, campers, locals, anyone who needed clean clothes, sheets and towels came in with piles of laundry.
“Oh yeah, we did a lot of laundry,” Marty says. “People would just drop it off. We’d clean it, fold it, weigh it and charge them 80 cents a pound.”
Up front, they sold what they could.
“It wasn’t really a surf shop yet,” Jerry says. “Trust me, my friends let me know that.”
Ken had kept his job in sales, and Marty just figured out the business as she went. Though she did have some retail lineage in her blood. Her grandfather had owned a country store, and three generations had worked there.
A turnaround for the shop came when Marty went to a surf expo in Florida with her sister.
“We just looked around, we didn’t need a whole lot because our place was so small," she says. "We just picked out a few things and said, ‘Let’s try this.’”
One of those things? Birdwell boardshorts.
“I couldn’t keep them in stock,” Marty says. “Nobody else had them down here.”
The rentals were also trial and error. They rented beach chairs and umbrellas and glass surfboards because that was what was available at the time.
“We’d clean boards, repair fins and fix dings every single night – it was a whole process,” Ken says. “You learned as you went along.”
The family had moved into a small house behind the shop, downsizing from a much larger home in Virginia Beach.
“My bedroom back there was as big as this house,” Jerry says.
It was a big change, but it came with some positive changes, like more family time, a quieter life and a lot more freedom for the children in the safety of the Outer Banks.
“And you didn’t have to get in your car to go to work,” Marty says. “You just walked right over.”
Summers were long, hot and busy. Winters were quiet.
“Back then, the season was basically Easter to September,” Marty says. “After that, there was nothing.”
So when the crowds left, the family worked on the shop, salvaging material around town when they could.
“We’d go to buildings being torn down and ask, ‘What are you going to do with this wood?’” Marty says. “They’d say, ‘You want it? Take it.’”
They hauled it back to the Cavalier and pulled nails, scraped tar paper and sanded for weeks.
“We spent a whole winter just sanding wood,” Marty says.
Piece by piece, they reshaped the shop.
For a while, the laundromat and surf shop worked side by side. Until a particularly rainy summer in the early 1990s, when campers and vacationers overloaded them with loads of laundry, and the septic system couldn’t keep up.
“We had to pump it twice,” Marty says. “The town came and said, ‘You can’t do that. You can only pump once a year.’”
They had a choice: Invest heavily in the septic system and keep the launderette or let it go.
“So … the laundry was done,” Marty says.
With the laundry gone, the surf shop finally had room to grow. They expanded rentals to bikes and rental-friendly soft-top boards. They added lessons, with Jerry and other local kids teaching visitors to surf. They built inventory. They hired local kids with good handwriting, which was essential in the days of paper receipts, Marty says with a laugh. They kept figuring it out.
Along the way, the Slaytons realized something important. The business wasn’t just what they were selling or renting. It was how they were treating people.
“Anybody who comes through that door, you greet them,” Marty says. “Always.”
That’s rule number one. From there, it’s conversation. They ask a few questions and they listen to the answers. That’s it.
“Put a nickel in, you get a quarter back,” Ken says, laughing. “Sometimes you get five dollars.”
And people remember that feeling.
“We’re seeing third generations now,” Ken says. “Families that started coming here in the ’80s … now their kids and their kids’ kids come in.”
Customers remember more than the fun little shop and the cool stuff they bought there. They remember the friendly family – Jerry, Marty, Ken and their son-in-law, David Sawyer, who now works in the shop.
This year marks 40 years since that phone call Ken made to Marty about a surf shop in Nags Head. Forty years since they said yes to something they hadn’t really planned for, in a building that had already lived a few lives before them. In the last 40 years, the Outer Banks has changed. The building has changed. The business has changed. But the way Cavalier feels hasn’t changed much at all.
The Slaytons have done things their own way. And it has worked.
“We do something for people,” Marty says. “I don’t know what it is exactly. But they come back here.”
Visit a Legend
Cavalier Surf Shop
Customers can find Cavalier Surf Shop at milepost 13 on the beach road, in a bright yellow building that’s hard to miss. The shop offers surfboards, bodyboards and skimboard rentals and sales, beach rentals and name-brand apparel and accessories for men, women and children. Its well-loved Cavalier logo gear and stickers, with new designs every year, are the ultimate Nags Head souvenir.
4324 S. Virginia Dare Trail, Nags Head
(252) 441-7349
Visit the website
About the Author Molly Harrison
Molly Harrison is managing editor at OneBoat, publisher of OuterBanksThisWeek.com. She moved to Nags Head in 1994 and since then has made her living writing articles and creating publications about the people, places and culture of the Outer Banks.
