Rip Curl head of men's apparel Adam Leslie shares insights into Rip Curl's latest collaboration with Australian surfer Mick Fanning, where the team produced an innovative boardshort.
What are the key details in the boardshorts?
The Mirage Activate Ultimate Compression Liner Board short represents the best in core innovation. It is a high-performance compression liner board short with body-mapping silicon grip that stimulates body position awareness and activates underused core surfing muscle groups, balancing mobility, power, posture, and joint alignment.
The Mirage Activate features an ultra-lightweight Aerotech outer shell and a firm, yet flexible, rash-resistant fit. The compression liner decreases lactic acid build-up, reducing fatigue and aiding faster recovery.
As well, these epic trunks are fitted with a DWR coating for quick-drying post-surf comfort. Plus, high hip zip pocket. Finally, four-way stretch for uninhibited shredding.
What key steps were involved in the collaboration?
The project started within our men’s apparel team along with a few other key stakeholders - talking concepts, building briefs and prototypes, which were taken from our Torquay Global head office up to the Gold Coast to review with 3-time WSL champion Mick Fanning.
Casey Egan, our head of design, and Joel Steven, our senior board short designer, ran Mick through the different projects and prototypes. When they spoke with him about the final project, he almost fell out of his chair. It turned out he had been wearing compression liners under his wetsuit and board shorts for most of his career. This made the choice of what project to chase a very easy decision.
Mick put us in contact with Dr Tim Brown, who is based in California. Mick has a long-standing relationship with Tim from his years of injury whilst competing on the world tour. We formed a project team to guide it on a pathway to market. There were multiple prototypes fine-tuning different Lycra fabrications, panelling, silicon print qualities and placement before finally nailing the version that has now launched to market.
With the amount of innovation we were undertaking, it can be challenging to have a firm go to market date. There needs to be fluidity in how you work with your marketing team gathering content and building assets. We were doing this as the project progressed, so that when we were ready to push the go-to-market date, we were as prepared as possible.
In saying this, we started this project just prior to the pandemic, which threw plenty of challenges our way.
Were there any challenges?
There were numerous challenges, namely through fabrication and fit. Given we were essentially building a board short with two layers and our long-time focus with board shorts has been around developing lighter board shorts, we wanted to develop a new fabric for the shell.
The result was the development of an engineered perforated Mirage Pro fabric. It is lighter than any other Mirage fabric previously developed and stretchier than the existing non-perforated Mirage Pro fabric, so that when combined with the liner together the total board short, it doesn’t feel too heavy.
The next challenge was the silicon liner fabric, experimenting with multiple different types and trying to get the balance correct between the right amount of silicon to activate the nerve endings and hold the muscles, but was also comfortable.
The most challenging part of the process was getting the liner fit correct. We are talking over 60 samples and again fitted enough to hold muscles, be comfortable and sit nicely with the board short outer shell.
How have sales of the shorts gone so far?
Like most projects, when you are trying to establish new technology and recommended retail prices, there can be some trepidation. We have seen this over the years through numerous other Rip Curl innovations like the Flashbomb wetsuit, GPS watch, Anti Series Soft Tech fleece and the Mirage 321 Board short.
We are in week two of the release and early sell through has been very pleasing. Our available to promise inventory sold out last week, so what we have left on the shelves is all we will have until September next year, and we know this momentum will only grow.
Are there any further developments from this collaboration?
We don't want to let too much out of the bag yet, but yes, we are working with Tim on some further projects, however we don't have any planned release dates yet.