Photo Contributed by Hope Gonzalez

Second-year student Hope Gonzalez poses with $1,000 check for the nonprofit, Surfrider Foundation.

With a passion for ocean conservation and entrepreneurship, second-year California Lutheran University student Hope Gonzalez found a way to combine the two.

Gonzalez, a business administration major, is the founder and CEO of clothing company SPF805. According to the SPF805 website, the brand is dedicated to educating people on the importance of coral reefs, while providing affordable and trendy clothing to its customers.

Gonzalez, who was born and raised in Ventura County, otherwise known as the 805, said she has spent a portion of every summer of her life in Maui, Hawaii. There, she witnessed firsthand the negative impacts mankind has had on the ocean environment.

“Every day, I’d go snorkel the same reef. You’d see similar turtles, fish, everything, and every year we’d go back, it would be, like, less fish, less turtles. I got to see in person, like, what was going on in the ocean, that a lot of people in Ventura County aren’t talking about because we aren’t snorkeling,” Gonzalez said.

Gonzalez said she came to the realization that humans were causing this destruction after watching a Netflix documentary called “Chasing Coral” when she was in sixth grade.

“Ever since that, it was in the back of my mind,…‘I want to do something about this one day’, but I never knew where to start,” Gonzalez said.

Years later, during Gonzalez’s junior year of high school, SPF805 was born. Gonzalez said she didn’t have any business experience before starting SPF805, but that she knew she wanted to do something where she could be creative.

“I really liked this one clothing line called ‘FINATICS,’” Gonzalez said. “She [the founder of FINATICS] makes clothing that educates about sharks and shark finning. And so I was very inspired by her and I was like, ‘I wanna start a clothing brand.’”

Since launching SPF805, Gonzalez said she donates a percentage of profit from each purchase to Maui Nui Marine Resource Council and Surfrider Foundation.

Last year, at the Pacific Coast Business Times Spirit of Small Business Awards, Gonzalez became the first college student to ever win an award at the event when she took home the Green Business Award for SPF805.

“To see Hope get up there in front of a hundred people and give a great speech about what she’s working on and why, when the rest of the awardees were grown adults, made me, it made me proud,” Executive Director of the Steven Dorfman Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship Mike Panesis said.

Panesis and Dean of the School of Management Gerhard Apfelthaler were both in attendance when Gonzalez received her award. Also present were Gonzalez’s family and Cal Lutheran Interim President John Nunes.

Cal Lutheran sophomore and fellow small business owner Sophie Cleofas said she has known Gonzalez since they were neighbors in Pederson Hall during their freshman year. Cleofas said since then, the two have had many classes together and bond over their shared passion for small businesses.

“You can tell, just talking to her, that the way she talks about, just, the ocean, her love for the ocean is a lot deeper than just like, ‘Oh, I live in California, I go to the beach, I love the ocean,’” Cleofas said. “It’s something that she’s grown up on.”

Gonzalez and Cleofas have not only bonded over their small businesses, but also their passion for family.

“I think you can see how, like, deeply rooted a passion is within her. And that goes for a lot of things,” Cleofas said. “You can see how passionate she is about how she loves people, too, like, how she expresses her gratitude for you, or her passion for you just being in her life.”

Panesis said he first met Gonzalez when he interviewed her for the Steven Dorfman Scholarship, in which, “it was obvious…that she had an entrepreneurial spirit that was a perfect fit for the program.”

According to Panesis, it is quite rare for college students to launch a startup when they graduate, let alone in their junior year of high school like Gonzalez. Panesis said Gonzalez’s grit, in addition to her creativity, allowed her to accomplish this feat.

“You can tell there’s a lot of thought that goes into…the message that she wants to deliver. So she thinks very carefully about those kinds of things,” Panesis said.

Gonzalez said she wears all the hats in running her business, excluding the manufacturing of goods. These roles include designing graphics for the clothing, organizing photo shoots, as well as packing and shipping orders.

“I definitely want to continue growing [SPF805] and eventually have a team of people that will be able to help me and keep the mission going,” Gonzalez said. “I never want to hand it over to people who don’t have that same mission. So for SPF805, it’s just continuing to grow and educate not only my community, but the world.”

Apfelthaler said what sets Gonzalez apart is how she shows up for others even when her plate is full with marketing internships and SPF805 duties.

“Hope is the person who shows up,” Apfelthaler said. “She probably has a million other things to do, but she understands, you know, the value of community, being there for others.”

Gonzalez said as a small business owner, every order she receives is important to her.

“Every single order from a small business, you are remembered. Every order is packaged with so much passion for each order,” Gonzalez said. “Every single one means so much to me.”