Longtime Uptown business keeps divers warm and dry in chilly waters
By Bonnie Nicholls | SDUN Reporter
When local Coast Guard rescue swimmers plunge into the frigid ocean to save people in distress, they’re wearing drysuits manufactured by a family-run business in Golden Hill.
Diving Unlimited International (DUI) has been making drysuits for the past 50 years from an unassuming building near the east end of C Street, where Interstate 15 meets Highway 94. And it has done so despite a tough business climate and invitations to move operations out of California.
What does it take to survive? “Having a good group of people,” said CEO Susan Long, “[and] people who believe in the same thing that you do.”
Unlike wetsuits, which keep you warm through neoprene insulation, drysuits are watertight and allow you to wear fluffy, full-body undergarments that trap air against your body, like the insulation in your house. They are ideal for extremely cold water, and required by the Coast Guard rescue swimmers for water temperatures below 55 degrees Fahrenheit.
DUI’s military customers include not only Coast Guard rescue swimmers, for which DUI is the exclusive provider, but also Navy SEALs and Army combat divers. It also makes suits for commercial, public safety and scientific divers.
“The bulk of the market is serious recreational divers,” Long said. “North America is our biggest market.”
DUI employs 75 people, most of them assembling the product one suit at a time. A tour of the facilities reveals a small room with a few sales people and two large warehouses for manufacturing. DUI makes about 5,000 drysuits a year, plus military waterproof bags for weapons, radios and other equipment.
Over the years, the company has improved on the product, reconfiguring zippers, offering heated undergarments and creating patented seals that work like Ziplock mechanisms on plastic bags. All suits go through rigorous testing and have a seven-year warranty.
“The people here know that the customers who buy our equipment are putting their lives in our hands,” Long said.
The company was founded by Long’s father, Dick, who at 76, still works for DUI, managing the demo tours to dive shops across the country to market their suits.
“My dad always smelled of neoprene,” Long said, who grew up around the business. “He always had a ‘farmer John’ tan.”
Long, however, didn’t immediately take to the business. She didn’t even like diving. Instead, she made her own career as director of catering for various Marriott Hotels. Then, a vacation break on Roatán, an island off the Caribbean coast of Honduras, turned into a 14-month stay where she ran a resort and fell in love with diving.
In 1995, she moved back to San Diego to temporarily help with the business, she said. Eventually, she and her dad made a plan to transition running the business to her, and she’s been heading DUI for the past 10 years.
“I knew I could never fill his fins,” Long said, so she found her own way of doing things, including streamlining operations.
“We have to get better and better if we want to be here five years from now,” she said.
Long implemented a new scheduling process with the existing manufacturing staff and cut down the time it takes to make a drysuit from six weeks to three. She brought in a cutting machine programmed with DUI-specific software that uses a customer’s measurements to select a pattern, make changes to that pattern and lay out the fabric. She added new overlay materials that customers can choose from to personalize their black suits.
And just this year, after three years of development, DUI rolled out BlueHeat, battery-powered heated undergarments.
Still, DUI has had its share of choppy waters. “Diving is stagnant, it’s not growing,” Long said. And San Diego has stringent rules and regulations for manufacturing. “They really don’t want you here,” she said, adding that the majority of successful businesses are in biotech and restaurants. “Running a factory in San Diego is challenging.”
Companies outside of San Diego – as well as the U.S. – have come calling. “We’ve had countless companies from China come here to ask us how to make the dry suits and they’ll make them for us,” Long said.
But DUI is not going anywhere.
“One of the things I find so rewarding is making something,” Long said. As she walked through the warehouse at 1148 Delevan Drive, she addressed every employee by name. She beamed as she showed the innovations her employees have come up with in testing, research and development.
In the larger scheme of things, she said, DUI is “very small: a niche within a niche business. In the diving world, we have a great name.”
For more information on DUI, visit dui-online.com or call 619-236-1203.
