faster
through science.
water is ~800× denser than air — so the fastest way to swim faster isn't more power, it's less drag. everything we build starts from that physics, gets woven into fabric, and proves itself in our flume in Tenerife before it ships.
we test everything. this is what that looks like.
Flume · Lab · Pool — deboer film
One minute on why we're faster through science — and how heavily we test before anything ships.
drag is the enemy. and it's squared.
every speed gain in the water fights one equation: hydrodynamic drag. water's density means small changes in how cleanly you move through it pay enormous dividends — far more than the same effort spent on raw power.
the detail that matters most: velocity is squared. swim twice as fast and you create four times the drag. the faster you get, the more every point of drag costs you — and the more reducing drag becomes the fastest way to improve. that's DCR: drag coefficient reduction. It's the founding principle of every suit we make.
body position and shape — the line you hold, and the surface you hold it in. this is the term a suit can attack.
water: ~800× denser than air. fixed by physics — and the reason tiny improvements matter so much.
the punishing term. drag grows with the square of your speed, so the fast pay the highest price for it.
how much of you the water has to move around. buoyancy and body line keep it small.
a swimmer has many ways to chase speed — technique, power, pacing. the equation says the same thing every time: decreasing drag is the fastest way to swim faster.
speed isn't linear. drag is squared.
drag the dot along the curve. because drag scales with velocity squared, the line isn't straight, it steepens. the faster you go, the more each extra fraction of speed costs you.
this is why a fast swimmer has more to gain from a low-drag suit than a slow one: they're living on the steep part of the curve, where every point of drag is most expensive.
the water is the whole problem.
ρ is the density of what you're moving through. drag the slider from air to water and watch the medium thicken. the resistance arrow grows because there's simply more mass to shove aside with every stroke.
here's the catch: you can't change ρ. the water is fixed at ~800× the density of air. so every fraction of speed has to be bought from the terms you can change - your shape, and your surface.
why a rough ball flies farther.
logic says smooth is fast. physics disagrees. a smooth sphere carries a thin, fragile layer of water that peels away early, leaving a wide, churning wake behind it and that wake is drag.
a dimpled golf ball trips that layer into controlled turbulence, which clings to the surface longer. the flow separates later, the wake shrinks, and the ball flies nearly twice as far. the same law applies in water: a carefully textured surface delays separation, relieving the partial vacuum that drags at the rear of a moving body, including a swimmer's.
sinking legs are slow legs.
the equation's S term is frontal area, how much of you the water has to shove aside. drag the slider from no wetsuit to full buoyancy and watch the legs rise: the body flattens, the frontal area collapses, the drag falls.
this is the single biggest thing a wetsuit does for an open-water swimmer. Not propulsion, but posture. lift the hips and you stop swimming uphill.
fish solved this first.
aquatic animals have spent millions of years optimizing against the same equation. their answer isn't a smooth body, it's scales: rows of overlapping, seashell-shaped bumps whose peaks and valleys channel water into parallel streams instead of letting it swirl.
researchers placing biomimetic fish-scale arrays in a laminar water channel found the arrays generated streamwise streaks that stabilized the boundary layer — delaying the transition to turbulent flow far downstream of the smooth-plate baseline. there are many papers on hydrodynamics. We're among the few applying their cause-and-effect rules to speed skin development.
arrays of overlapping biomimetic fish scales were tested on a flat plate in a low-turbulence laminar water channel, with transition to turbulence triggered by a controlled Tollmien–Schlichting wave. the scale arrays attenuated the wave and pushed the laminar-to-turbulent transition substantially downstream — the authors hypothesize that fish scales can stabilize the laminar boundary layer and prevent it from early transition, reducing friction drag.
from the paper to the fabric: 3Dium™
with our textile weavers in Italy, we translated the scale-array research into a woven surface: a biomimetic array simplified to a hexagonal structure: the geometry of shark scales. the 3D texture trips the boundary layer into the same controlled turbulence, keeping flow laminar across the critical millimeters of water against the swimmer's skin.
against smooth fabric in our flume, the array measurably reduces drag. this leads to less energy per stroke on a long swim and more speed at race pace. every new weave goes back in the water before it goes anywhere near a suit.
laminar flow, held to the skin.
the hex array trips a thin, fast turbulent layer that grips the surface, so the flow above it stays smooth and parallel instead of tumbling into drag. this is that, looping: water streaming over the weave, staying attached.
our process: faster through science
research
start from peer-reviewed hydrodynamics, not marketing instinct.
weave
translate the physics into fabric with our Italian textile weavers.
flume
test against baseline in Tenerife. real swimmers, real drag data.
race
athletes race it, critique it, redesign it. only faster ships.
feel the science in the water.
every suit we sell is the output of this process. the equation, the weave, the flume, the athletes. find the one mapped to how you swim.