FIELD NOTES: THE COLD WATER STUDY

There is a moment, about forty minutes into a cold water session when a long lull suddenly leads your next decision. You're getting cold. Your legs feel heavier. Your paddle is a half-beat slower. Waiting for the next set feels further away than it did an hour ago. Most surfers learn to read that moment intuitively. You either push through it or you're catching one more in.

What almost no surfer has ever been able to ask is a simple question: "How is my wetsuit actually performing, right now, at minute forty?"

For as long as wetsuits have existed, the industry's answer has been some version of "trust us." Thicker is warmer. Limestone is better than petroleum. This fleece is a game-changer. The marketing language has always run well ahead of the measurement. That gap between what the industry traditionally claims about wetsuits and what can actually be proven about them in the ocean is where the Standard Issue Fullsuit was designed.

Our Research Lab

We exist to make equipment for a life spent in the ocean. That framing matters, because equipment is something you test. Equipment has tolerances and failure points and honest performance curves. Equipment isn't styled. It's engineered, used, broken, and refined.

"With our wetsuit program, what we're trying to do is base our decisions off of data and science versus marketing and sales," says Bruce Moore, our Director of Innovation and Sustainability.

It's a sentence that sounds almost defensive until you understand what preceded it. Bruce has been in the wetsuit industry long enough to watch a lot of categories get born during a marketing meeting instead of the lineup. Bigger claims. Bolder graphics. Thinner proof.

So when we began designing our next generation of fullsuits, we made a different kind of commitment: we would partner with researchers who had no reason to care about our marketing calendar and we would let their data tell us what to build.

Research & Development

The partner we found was about an hour down the coast from our Newport Beach headquarters, inside the Kinesiology department at California State University San Marcos.

Surfing has historically been a terrible research subject. It's variable. It's wet. It's unpredictable. Participants don't stay still. The environment refuses to replicate. As a result, despite surfing being practiced by an estimated 37 million people worldwide — with well over two million in the United States alone — the sport has generated remarkably little peer-reviewed science. As Dr. Sean Newcomer and his co-authors noted in their 2018 paper in Ergonomics, the first to characterize regional skin temperatures in recreational surfers wearing a wetsuit: "despite the increase in popularity, there is a paucity of research on the physiological aspects of recreational surfing."

Almost nobody had bothered to study what wetsuits actually do.

CSUSM changed that. A group of professors there had spent years standing up one of the only academic programs in the country focused on the biomechanics, physiology, and health benefits of surfing. They had the instruments. They had the methodology. They had the patience to chase data into cold water at 6 a.m. What they did not have was an equipment company willing to let the findings drive the design.

"We built this relationship quite a few years ago," Bruce says, "and we've been learning more and more about how the body functions in a surfing environment. And now, more specifically, how wetsuits function in a surfing environment."

That is where the Standard Issue Fullsuit began.

The principal investigator on the skin-temperature work, Dr. Sean Newcomer — Professor in the Department of Kinesiology at CSUSM, and a co-author on the 2018 Ergonomics paper that first put surfing thermoregulation into the peer-reviewed literature — frames the scope of the project plainly:

"Over the past six months we have had the opportunity to work with FLORENCE on a research project investigating the insulation capacity of a variety of wetsuit materials in a field setting. These studies were performed by a group of graduate and undergraduate students from California State University San Marcos at local Southern California beaches on over 80 surfers ranging in age from 18 to 50 years old. The results of these studies allowed FLORENCE to optimize material location and type to increase warmth during surfing with their new innovative wetsuit design."
Dr. Sean C. Newcomer, PhD, Professor, Department of Kinesiology, California State University San Marcos

Eighty surfers. Six months. Actual ocean. That is the dataset behind the suit.

Every wetsuit on the market is a set of assumptions about heat. Assumptions about which parts of your body lose it fastest. Assumptions about which materials hold it best. Assumptions about what a surfer will trade — flexibility, weight, cost — to keep it.

We wanted to replace the assumptions with measurements. Specifically, we wanted answers to two questions that would shape the entire architecture of the new suit:

1. Does bio-based foam actually keep a surfer as warm as traditional chloroprene neoprene? If the answer was yes, there was no longer a performance argument for building suits out of petroleum.
2. Where on the body does a high-loft fleece lining actually make a thermal difference? If we could map that, we could stop lining entire suits on faith and start placing fleece only where it mattered.

Both questions had been asked before in catalogs. Neither had been answered in water.

The protocol, refined across multiple sessions with CSUSM graduate researchers, is meticulous. Each participant is instrumented with an array of iButton wireless thermal sensors — small, waterproof thermistors, applied at precise anatomical landmarks that had been validated in earlier CSUSM work.

As one of the graduate researchers walked us through on a recent morning at 54th Street in Newport Beach, "the sensors are placed ten centimeters lateral to the umbilicus, two centimeters inferior to the clavicle, on the upper arm between the acromion process and the glenohumeral head, and on the thigh along the vastus lateralis between the femur and the patella." Those sites aren't arbitrary. They represent regions of the body that thermoregulate differently, and losing data from any one of them would blur the picture.

Once instrumented, participants surf. Not simulate surfing. Not paddle in a pool. Surf. For at least an hour, in the Pacific, participating in the acts of paddling, sitting, and wave-riding that makes up a real session. The sensors log skin temperature every sixty seconds. Water temperature and air temperature are captured at the site. At the end of the session, the data is downloaded and the surfer is debriefed on what felt warmer, more comfortable, and more flexible. Because perception matters too.

To isolate the variable of interest, material not suit, each suit was built as a split prototype: one side of the body in one material, the other side in another. The surfer becomes their own control. As our CSUSM collaborator put it, "In a lab-based study, it wouldn't be as applicable for surfers that surf every day in varying water temperatures and varying air temperatures. It's important that we take measures of those."

What the data said about foam

The first preliminary study we want to share compared our new plant-based bio foam against traditional chloroprene neoprene, held constant across a full hour of surfing in split-side prototype suits.

The headline finding is almost anticlimactic, and that is exactly what makes it important.

Averaged across every sensor site on the body, there was no meaningful thermal difference between the two foams (p = 0.654). Over sixty minutes of real surfing, skin temperatures under the bio foam tracked the chloroprene curve so closely that the two lines are nearly indistinguishable on the chart.