Cooking wax and cutting buses – the surprising story of Shred & Butta

Jim Stewart feels like someone who always knew where he was meant to be. You assume that a life which combines a phenomenally successful surf and board wax brand with a yard full of bizarre vehicles in various states of transformation cannot have come around by chance. But it’s funny how appearances can be deceiving. None of this was planned, none of it built with any kind of long-term vision. It’s a testament to the power of giving things a shot, saying yes, doing what you love and seeing where it takes you, even if that’s into a situation where Jonny Vegas is putting you on a painfully tight deadline.

When I speak to Jim, he’s taking refuge from the noise of the yard by hiding in the cab of a truck. It’s not clear if the truck is a project or a functional vehicle. Perhaps there’s not a clear division between the two. He flags down a passing member of the team and pleads for coffee and chocolate, then sighs with the force of someone who very rarely gets a moment to sit still. I ask him how much time he’s got to talk and get an unexpected reply. “A bit,” he says, “but I’ve got to go and see a sheep in a minute”.  I decide we’ll come back round to that later and start at the start.

Jim's story begins in a workshop somewhere near London, in which he was working, “13, 14, 15-hour shifts, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, with a waxing machine going the whole time.” It was impossible to wear the standard issue masks for the entire length of such a long day. The workers were constantly light-headed and lethargic, but there were no regulations as to how many hours a person could spend breathing the harsh chemicals of the wax. Jim read that legislation was being introduced in California to limit exposure to an hour or two a day, but it instantly seemed an unworkable solution. The key was surely to make less poisonous waxes.

Over the course of months, he tried a huge variety of recipes, sending tests to skater friends, fellow workshop employees and anyone who would give the wax a try. “It kind of started just as a personal project,” Jim explains, “It was never meant to go to market. It was never meant to be a product. But obviously, once we were starting to use it in workshops, people were like, oh, can we get some of that?”

Jim was surprised to find that nobody else in the UK was manufacturing wax. “We became that grassroots company that everyone gets behind. Word got around, magazines wrote about us and it just boomed into a business I’d had no intention of starting.” Suddenly, he was hanging out at major events in the snowboarding and skating calendar, an intense lifestyle but one that threw up the next move. It was, in one way, something of a backward step.

“We’d been at this huge event where we brought real snow from the dome at Milton Keynes to Shoreditch and set up this big, kick ass rail. At the after party, I was talking to Jan from O’Neill, who doesn’t normally drink but we were both on it that night. And we started talking about getting our teams on a massive tour and Jan said, “let’s get a bus!” and I said, “yes! Let’s get a bus.” I’d actually started my working life as a mechanic and I’d always sworn I’d never go back to the motor trade, but we were getting a bus.

The plan rapidly took shape, with the idea being to do up the bus like Jack O’Neill’s original shop from the 50s, in a heavy driftwood theme. Then Jim made an interesting decision. “I found a company who was selling off stock and they offered me a deal, so because I’m an idiot I got two buses instead of one. Then before we’d even done the bus for the O’Neill Butta tour, we agreed to work with another brand who bought a double decker. The yard was already filling up and my accountant was like, “what the hell are you doing with all these vehicles?” So, I told her, and she said this was basically a new business. And that’s where Shred & Butta came from.”

There followed a growing team, a string of commissions and a broad range clients, from desperate people asking if their rusted vans could be salvaged, to companies who flew him out to the biggest events in extreme sports and projects for more than a few movie producers. “I’ve got stuff here that’s been blown up for films and now the back’s hanging off, or the roof has got a huge hole in it, but I keep them around. I’ll work on them again one day.”

Which gets us onto the topic of TV, at which point Jim groans and laughs at the same time as he remembers working on the Jonny Vegas show Carry on Glamping. “They asked if they could bring Jonny down to the yard to have a look round and choose some vehicles for the show. We had plenty that were in decent order, but he goes right to the back and picks out two complete wrecks. We put in a serious few week's work, but we got it done.” He’s keen to stress that such a timeframe is far from standard practice in their build work.

He talks about how a space should feel personal to the owner and, in the case of things that won’t be moving once they’re finished, related to the place around them. For the work on Little Firs, the collaboration with Passenger, the most important thing was keeping the feel open and light, to fit with the intended Lake District locations, but every piece is different.

“Our first step is normally to strip everything back,” Jim says, “then we go in with the client and some pens and some tape and just start drawing out what it could look like.” He explains how design is a delicate balance between functionality and style, but it’s clearly a challenge that excites him anew with every project, whether it’s a simple van refurb or the conjoined double decker buses that were part of another TV show.

Pressed for a favourite project, it says a lot that he looks to the future, not the past, launching enthusiastically into a plan to attach the fuselage of a light aircraft to the top of a bus, as a bedrooom space. Even as he explains how it might be done though, I get a sense that it’s competing with a multitude of other ideas and pressures, which Jim soon confirms. He has a host of vehicles undergoing work, he still cooks the wax for Butta and he has a young family and a growing menagerie of animals. This feels like the right time to clarify the sheep comment.

“It’s the same with animals as it is with cars and trucks. People know we’ve got some already, so they ask if we can take theirs on. A guy across the way had a flock of sheep and now there’s only one, so he phoned me and asked if I can take it in. I just said “I’ll bring the truck”, because what’s one more?”

The sheep appointment is closing in, so I ask the question that I’ve really wanted to ask the whole time we’ve been talking. In essence, it’s “what’s the plan here?” even though I already know it doesn’t really make sense. Jim pauses for a second, then talks about a site he once found that was selling islands in Panama. “I’d have to just run, I think. If we have to leave here, I don’t think we could ever clear the yard, so I’d just disappear and live on my island.” He knows it’s never going to happen, but the simpler life does appeal.

“I told a friend that maybe I’d stop Shred & Butta and give up the commissions, slow down a bit. I said I’d maybe work on one project, one vehicle, for fun. And they said, “what, so you’d just start all over again?”

Even after our brief conversation, I can only agree, but it feels like a nice problem to have. Jim’s passion and his willingness to leap before looking have taken him this far. The capacity of the yard and the sheep fields aside, why stop now?

Words by Christopher-Wilson Elmes

Featuring Jim Stewart