The Wall Street Journal recently wrote the Shibumi Shade story that everybody writes every summer: “The $255 Beach Shade Dividing America’s Coastal Towns.” It plays the hits:
Many people like them because they work better than any other beach shade.
Some people think they are very loud, although new ones aren’t as loud as the old ones.
They’re really popular on the east coast! Not on the west coast.
The company has a patent (which I wrote about) and spends a lot of time trying to stop imitators.
Some towns hate them and have banned them. Lookin’ at you, Myrtle Beach!
Every year, some national publication “discovers” the Shibumi Shade. How? Maybe the same way that most people who spend time at the beach discover them: By looking around and seeing them everywhere.
However! If you read things closely, there’s a tiny bit of actual Shibumi news in there:
The three friends who created the shade and the company, Dane Barnes, Scott Barnes and Alex Slater, are no longer the majority owners. Stories in the past have noted that Stripes, a private equity firm, made a significant investment in 2021. The Journal now says that Stripes is the majority owner, although the founders “remain board members, brand ambassadors and strategic advisers.”
They’re still selling a lot of them. In 2024, the company told The Assembly that it sold 300,000 in the first eight years. The Journal now says, as of 2026, the number is 500,000. That’s 200,000 in two years! Boy that’s a lot of Shibumis, which are now sold in many different colors. The company stuck with the original blue version for a long time because it initially helped with marketing and identification.
Shibumis were originally made in North Carolina (originals state it on a fabric tag), but production moved out of the United States to Asia in 2024. (The Assembly story back then noted that some production had moved overseas).
Also, given that Shibumi is constantly trying to tamp down copycats, it’s probably not surprising that the woman who’s been its CEO for the last three years once worked for Tory Burch as its “Director of Intellectual Property and Global Brand Enforcement.” In an interview last year, she said that the company’s goal is to expand to the West Coast (where, the Journal article noted, nobody seems to know what they are). And while this seems to be the season of the IPO (SpaceX! Anthropic!), Shibumi will not be following suit to celebrate its tenth birthday. “At this time, Shibumi is not seeking additional investors as we focus on expanding and scaling with the current support,” Tiffany Walden said last year. Sorry to dash your Shibumi memestock dreams!
So maybe the Shibumi Shade is less North Carolina-y than it used to be. Which, you know, is just business. However! It’s interesting to compare that company to another one founded by UNC grads. In 2014, David Baron, Ryan Cocca, and Hannah Fussell started making play couches inspired partly by their hatred for dorm room futons. Hence, The Nugget was born, which is basically two triangles and two rectangles covered in microsuede. It’s catnip for kids (I know this—we own one), and demand exploded during the pandemic. At one point, more than 200,000 people were on a waitlist. Years later, the company still makes each and every one in Butner, North Carolina, and the internal foam comes from a plant in Mt. Airy. "It was really important early on (for Nugget Comfort) to be in North Carolina," Baron, the CEO, told WTVD last year. "It was important to me to stay connected to the state because we had gone to and benefited from a public university."
Look, I’m not telling you how to live. But if you drag your Nugget down to the beach and set it up underneath your Shibumi Shade this summer? Respect.