ON A COOL, foggy late-spring day, I drive to Meyerhoffer's house and design studio in Montara, a California beach town 20 miles south of San Francisco. The 2,900-square-foot space, a two-story modernist slab of glass and white concrete that he purchased in 1996, occupies a hillside lot one block above Highway 1. In the driveway rests a gutted Air­stream trailer Meyer­hoffer has been refurbishing for trips to his vacation home in Baja's Scorpion Bay. The open garage shelters an immaculate silver 1965 Ford Cobra, two Scott mountain bikes, and a couple dozen surfboards.

"Obviously, California as a context changes things," Meyerhoffer says when I ask how moving to the state altered the trajectory of his career. "But I was always outdoorsy. I had a lot of different interests. I wasn't a specialist."

With a shaved head and a short, neatly trimmed beard, he could model for the companies he works for, and he dresses with a rehearsed casualness that's typical of those West Coast alphas who divide their days between playing at the beach and earning a lot of money. Born in Stockholm, Meyerhoffer attended art and design schools in London and Vevey, Switzerland. After a brief internship with Porsche in 1991–92, he turned down their job offer to accept a position with IDEO, an international design behemoth based in the Bay Area. One of his first assignments there was the V3.

In 1996, he was plucked from IDEO by Jonathan Ive, Apple's now-legendary design chief. There, Meyerhoffer led the team that created the eMate, a translucent laptop that many consider the precursor to the iMac. "For me, the most essential thing was that we broke the rules," Meyerhoffer explains between sips of hot tea. "It was kind of a maverick move. Every single computer at that time was a beige box, and we made a very organic, translucent machine."

By his own admission, Meyerhoffer works best in smaller, less structured settings, where he's free to sketch ideas at midnight and go surfing at noon. So in 1998, he left Apple to branch out on his own. He didn't intend to focus on the sports industry—he still designs for a lot of technology firms—but Smith called, in hopes of replicating the success of the V3. At the time, helmets were becoming more common in snow sports, but no one had figured out a good way to integrate them with goggles. Meyerhoffer's answer was the Warp, which had outrigger attachments that allowed the strap to fit around a helmet without pulling the goggles off the user's face. The design became an industry standard, and outdoor firms have been calling ever since.

When Meyerhoffer takes on a new client, he establishes early on that he needs to be an integral part of their complete process. "I design the product, but I'm a component of their whole company,"?he explains. Rather than billing by the hour, as design firms commonly do, Meyerhoffer asks for fixed fees, company stock, or, better yet, royalties, which he believes keep both sides more involved.

He begins by working ideas out in pen or pencil. But his approach is more back-of-the-napkin than organized sketchbook. "All my sketches end up on one piece of paper," he explains. "As a designer, you get trained to make nice sketches: ‘Here's one idea. Here's another.' Obviously, I have to present like that to the client later on. But the way I design, the more scribbles, the better."

And the more surfing, the better. Meyerhoffer and his two on-site employees (two others telecommute) take their daily breaks in the waves off Montara State Beach, just below his living-room window. He claims the sessions help him recognize and tune in to his creative impulses.

"Surfing is a great exercise that way," he says. "If the wave's not there, it's not there. It's made thousands of miles away. You have to sit in the water and wait for this little energy pulse to arrive. Then you have to be in the perfect position and paddle like crazy to get into the wave. And it's a moment that will never come back. It just goes, and then it's gone."