The Best Swim Briefs You Can Actually Buy
Six swim briefs worth buying, from club chlorine proof kit to the Mediterranean beach pair, with the honest weakness of each and when cheap is correct.
The Club Print: Custom Swim Briefs and the Best Kit in Sport
Rowing clubs, rugby tours and charity swims agree: custom swim briefs are the best team kit in sport. How the club print works and how to order a set.
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There is a photograph that exists in some form in nearly every club in the sporting world. Fifteen or twenty men on a beach, a pool deck or a slipway, arms round each other, grinning, all wearing precisely the same pair of swim briefs in the club's colours with the club's crest on the hip. Nobody in that photograph looks self-conscious. Several of them would not have gone near a swim brief alone on a Tuesday.
The club print is one of the great accidental inventions of modern sport, and it deserves more credit than it gets.
How it happened
Budgy Smuggler is the brand that turned this into an industry. What began as a joke in 2003 became a real business when Adam Linforth bought it in 2008 selling around a thousand pairs a year, and it now sells north of a hundred thousand, with a large share of that coming from custom orders. The minimum order is around ten units, which is not a coincidence. Ten is a rowing crew, a five a side team with subs, a stag party, a swim club committee, a group of lads who did a charity dip in January and enjoyed it more than they expected. Break Out the Budgy Smugglers: The Aussie BBQ Guide to Swim Briefs
The company has leaned into this properly, with club shops, university crews, surf lifesaving clubs and a genuinely unimprovable marketing line about outfitting Australia's most ordinary rig. Other brands have followed, and any decent sublimation printer can now put a crest, a sponsor and a nickname on a swim brief for less than the cost of a training top. The blanks they print on vary far more than the printing does, and it is worth knowing which ones hold their shape after a season. The Best Swim Briefs You Can Actually Buy
Why it works so well as kit
Consider what a club normally buys. Polo shirts nobody wears twice, hoodies that shrink, a tour t-shirt that lives in a drawer. Then consider the club swim brief. It is cheap, it is one size band rather than a fitting exercise, it packs into a wash bag, it photographs brilliantly, and it is worn at exactly the moments a club is most itself: the pre-season swim, the tour, the sea dip, the end of season trip where somebody inevitably swims in a harbour they should not.
Nobody dilutes it, either. There is no polite corporate version of a club swim brief. The moment you order them, you have committed the group to a shared bit of nerve, and shared nerve is the entire point of a club. The Speedo Comeback Is Real (and We Have the Numbers)
The confidence trick hiding inside it
This is the part worth taking seriously, because it is a real psychological mechanism dressed up as a laugh.
Most reluctance around swim briefs is not about the garment. It is the fear of being the only one, of being looked at, of standing out on a pool deck. The club print removes the variable entirely. When twenty men wear the same thing, nobody is the exception, and after about four minutes nobody is thinking about it at all. Men who have spent a decade swimming in shorts discover in a single afternoon that the thing they were dreading is fine, that the swim is better, and that the walk to the water takes eleven seconds and then it is over. The Locker Room Question: Getting Over the Fear of Being Seen in Briefs
A surprising number of committed swim brief wearers can name the exact tour or charity swim that converted them. The club print is the world's most effective free trial.
Ordering a set without regret
Pick a cut the whole group can wear. The square leg or standard brief is the safe order for a mixed group of body types and confidence levels; save the racing cut for people who asked for it. Your First Speedo: The Complete Buying Guide
Design for the hip, not the front. Crests, initials and stripes sit best on the side. Resist any design that puts a slogan across the front, no matter how funny it is in the group chat at eleven at night.
Order sizes honestly. Get everyone's waist measurement rather than everyone's opinion of their waist measurement. A too-small order is the only genuine way to make this go wrong.
Buy one spare in each common size. Someone will lose theirs on the first night. custom club swim briefs ยท team swim brief multipack
The photograph
The reason the club print endures is that it produces the single best photograph any club takes all year, and everyone in it looks happy. Kit that people actually wear, in the moments they will actually remember, at about fifteen euro a head. Every sports club in the country buys a hoodie nobody puts on. Buy the briefs instead. The Sea Swimmer's Case for the Swim Brief