Francis Leonard “Duke” Boyd, who co-founded the pioneering surfwear company Hang Ten in 1960, designing and launching a new wave of cool, aspirational surf style that became a worldwide industry, died peacefully at sunrise Sept. 21 at his Makaha home.

Born Nov. 13, 1934, in Kansas City, Kan., Boyd was 85 years old. The cause of death was complications from melanoma, said his wife, Elizabeth Boyd.

Long lauded as an industry catalyst and leader, Boyd was inducted into the International Surfing Hall of Fame in 1992, the Men’s Apparel Guild in California Hall of Fame at its debut in 1993, and the East Coast Surf Legends Hall of Fame in 2000. In 2009, Boyd was honored with the Oceanside Surf Museum Surf Legend Award and Huntington Beach Surfing Walk of Fame Surf Culture Award.

“Duke Boyd is to the surf industry what Duke Kahanamoku was to the surfing culture,” said Hawaii surfer and Chart House restaurant founder Joey Cabell.

Although the two never met, the legendary Hawaiian surfer was a primary inspiration for Boyd, who lived on Oahu for a time as a child and caught his first wave in Waikiki, Elizabeth Boyd said.

“(Boyd) was a visionary,” said Jeff Hakman, a Hawaii champion surfer who, along with Cabell, Fred Hemmings, Paul Strauch and Butch Van Artsdalen, accompanied Kahanamoku to appearances and events as his surf team.

Hakman said Boyd steered him into the surf apparel business in the 1970s, hiring him as a Hang Ten rep and then pushing him to become the first licensee for the U.S. division of Quiksilver, then a small Australian company that Boyd correctly predicted would take off internationally along with the sport.

Boyd “was the first one” to see surfing’s broad marketability, said Dale Hope, Hawaii surfer, paddler, apparel designer and author of “The Aloha Shirt” who, like Hakman and Cabell, treasured Boyd as a mentor and warm, loyal friend “who came to every one of my book events.”

In the 1960s, “Hang Ten was part of the youth movement that embraced creativity, nonconvention, blue jeans, T-shirts and the Beatles,” said Hope, praising Boyd’s grassroots “guerrilla marketing,” giving away trunks to top surfers on the beach and featuring them “in his aspirational ads on the back covers of Surfer Magazine, which was the only thing I read as a teenager.”

Hope remembered the impact of Hang Ten’s horizontal-striped T-shirts, jackets and most of all board shorts, all “bearing the embroidered symbolic logo of two bare feet, which represented the coveted act of hanging your 10 toes over the front of a long board while surfing on a wave.”

Boyd’s genius was in marketing the image and coolness of that experience to nonsurfers, Hope said.

AS A CHILD, Boyd moved with his mother and stepfather, a civil servant, to California and then Hawaii, where he attended school at Pearl Harbor. He started surfing at age 12 in Waikiki and enjoyed camping, swimming and hiking as a Boy Scout in Makaha, a place he loved and frequently returned to, settling there for the last 17 years of his life.

He graduated from Balboa High School in the former Panama Canal Zone and joined the U.S. Army, serving briefly in the Korean War. After leaving the military, Boyd went to college on the G.I. Bill, graduating from Long Beach State College, Calif., with a bachelor of arts degree in education. He planned to teach art and history, Elizabeth Boyd said, perhaps inspired by his experiences in Paris, where he was stationed for a time with the Army.

As a surfer, Boyd found he “needed a different kind of trunk” with freedom to move, rather than the fitted, “uncool” shorts Californian companies offered, his wife said.

He showed Doris Moore, a garment manufacturer in Long Beach, his design for surf trunks inspired by the classic, custom-tailored board shorts that Hawaii surfers ordered from shops such as M. Nii in Waianae and Take’s in Waikiki, and proposed they produce and sell a line of surfwear.

Moore’s shop sewed samples, which Boyd would give to some of the most admired surfers of the time, including Phil Edwards, Dewey Weber, Corky Carroll, Donald Takayama and Hakman, to test and endorse.

But Boyd also understood the evolving underground, anti-hero culture of surfing, said Steve Pezman, co-founder of The Surfer’s Journal, who met Boyd when he was manager for surfer Mickey Munoz at Ole’s Surf Shop in Seal Beach, Calif.

First, however, he met Boyd’s advance guard.

“Duke would pay local top, up-and-coming surfer kids to go into stores and ask for Hang Ten clothes, seeding the sense of demand, and then a week or so later, he’d walk into the store with his merchandise and they’d say they’d been hearing about it,” Pezman said. “At the time, real surf shops didn’t carry clothes.”

In 1969, during the height of the hippie and anti-­Vietnam War movements, as young surfers embraced noncommercial, counterculture values, Boyd started a new brand within Hang Ten called Golden Breed. Together with Hakman, he organized two annual, two-day surf events called Expression Sessions, in which participants were each paid $100 a day just to surf together at Pipeline and Sunset Beach, with no winners declared and no prizes given.

Boyd suggested that Lightning Bolt Surfboards co-founders Jack Shipley and Gerry Lopez, who delivered a mythmaking performance at a Pipeline Expression Session, start a clothing line, and the three became partners for a brand that, like Hang Ten, became internationally licensed.

AFTER SELLING Hang Ten in 1970, Boyd moved for a time to Aspen, Colo., where he became an avid skier and close friends with Cabell, who had established a Chart House restaurant there.

But as a lifelong “idea man,” his wife said, he never stopped promoting and marketing, coming up with names for now-established brands such as Body Glove.

Boyd was a mentor who pushed people to achieve the potential he saw in them, influencing all aspects of the sport of surfing and the free-flowing lifestyle he helped define, Hakman and Pezman said.

“Duke launched me on the path of magazine journalism,” Pezman said. “He was a stimulant in the lives of all sorts of people who ended up benefiting from his tendency to chase things and make them happen.”

Boyd was always thinking ahead, said Hakman, who remembered a 1969 visit to Boyd’s house in Huntington Beach “where he drew on his napkin little stick figures on tiny boards, grabbing the rail, spinning in the air above the lip of the wave, and told us, ‘Hey, here’s what surfing’s going to look like in the future, with really small boards, it’s going to be in the air,’ and we were going, ‘No way, Duke, that’s really out there.’”

Besides a true visionary, Boyd was “a really, really lovely, generous person,” Hakman said. “Too bad he’s left us.”

“We miss him so much,” said Cabell, who, with his wife, Yana, saw the Boyds regularly and were buoyed by Duke Boyd’s positivity and cheer, despite his terminal diagnosis and the new coronavirus pandemic.

“He was brilliant and sharp as a tack. He’d pull his wheelchair up to our big table and we would just tell stories, have a great time, go back in history,” Cabell said. “Duke was fun to be around — just the merry sunshine and a world-class person.”

Elizabeth Boyd shared a brief essay titled “Odds and Ends” by her husband, who also authored the “Legends of Surfing: The Greatest Surfriders from Duke Kaha­namoku to Kelly Slater,” with a foreword by Pezman.

“I lived my designs. They were real because I was,” Boyd wrote, adding that if asked to describe himself, he would say: “Duke was a good designer, not a great one. His heart was more into what influenced the fashion that dresses the players for the future.”

While following his heart, Boyd “brought the surfing tribe together with his two feet,” Hope said.

In addition to his wife, Boyd is survived by daughters Shawnn Boyd of Iowa and Shannon Knox of Honolulu, and a granddaughter, Maia Blue Knox.