You’re standing at the edge of the pool for a test swim, motivated and ready for the “perfect” suit. But have you ever thought about what really happens there? Behind the scenes, it’s often less about your performance and more about stock levels and psychology.
The salesman’s trick: the “dry” trap
A specialist retailer usually has 1-2 brands that he pushes, 2-3 brands he takes on consignment for test swims so that the selection looks large. But his goal is clear: he wants to sell the suits that he has already paid for and that are taking up space in the warehouse.
Before you go for a test swim, he finds out your “budget” through a conversation and then gives you the suit that you are most likely to buy. As you are still dry, you slide effortlessly into the first neoprene. It fits perfectly. You jump into the water, are fresh and fly the first 100 meters. However, your feeling is very deceptive: as you usually swim without a wetsuit, every suit feels like a miracle at first. The second time you put it on, you are wet, putting it on becomes torture and your strength diminishes. As a normal athlete, you can’t even reproduce 100 meters to within 0.5 seconds. An objective comparison? Impossible.
The bare figures: All Yamamoto?
Did you know that there are around 30 to 50 brands worldwide, but 80% of them use the identical Yamamoto neoprene? By law, the material can be between 2 mm and 5 mm thick. If the material is the same almost everywhere, how big are the differences really?
The answer is sobering: they are marginal. We measured this in the swimming channel under laboratory conditions. As the current is a constant variable, human measurement errors are eliminated. The result: the difference between the top suits over an Ironman distance (3.8 km) is just between 10 and 30 seconds – depending on the swimming style. That’s almost nothing compared to the cost of poor technique.
Marketing instead of research
At the time, we carried out a test with 20 brands and two models each. How interested were the manufacturers? Zero. Why? Because the turnover is too low in relation to the effort involved to carry out real research. The industry works through marketing and sponsorship. If your idol wears brand XY, you want it too – that’s the psychology that drives sales, not hydrodynamics.
The bio-logic in the swimming channel
At the Horgen swimming channel, we put an end to this confusion of brands. We’re not in the mood for sales pitches about the nuances of neoprene. That’s why we only stock one brand and only the top model.
Our focus is not on rubber, but on people:
- Perfect fit: we immediately find the size that fits.
- Technique correction: Instead of having you test 10 different suits, I correct your 3 main mistakes during the session.
A clean water position and an optimized arm stroke will save you much more time than trying out ten wetsuits in an indoor pool, where you won’t be able to reproduce your 50m times anyway.
Your Roy