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Find the good problems
They took the dinghy market by storm and now the Australian clothing specialists are (successfully) moving on to the offshore racing scene
Zhik hasn’t been around all that long in the sailing world, yet it quickly became the clothing of choice for many of the world’s best sailors. Olympic medallists like Nathan Outteridge and Pete Burling aren’t going to compromise performance by wearing inferior kit, at least not by choice.
‘We were pushing to be able to wear Zhik a long time before it was finally adopted as the official clothing for the Australian Sailing Team,’ says Outteridge, who won 49er gold at the 2012 Olympics and steers the Swedish entry for the America’s Cup, Artemis Racing. Outteridge has been wearing Zhik as his first-choice kit for a decade now, from not long after the Australian company was launched in 2004 following the Athens Olympics. It has made great strides since then due to a never-ending search for the answer to difficult problems, as founder Brian Conolly explains: ‘We try to find the problems worth solving in order to differentiate ourselves from the other products out there,’ he says.
‘That’s the approach we adopted from the very start, to try to make kit that sailors want to use and that they’ll find benefits and improvements from. Which, actually, is not as easy as it sounds. Sometimes finding the good problems is the hardest part, and once you find those good problems it can take a while to find a solution.’ Zhik made its early reputation by developing high-performance apparel designed specifically for the needs of dinghy sailors. ‘There
4 SEAHORSE
was a lot of stuff in the sailing market that was basically just a copy of what had been developed for surfing or scuba diving,’ says Conolly. ‘A lot of stuff was very derivative, without really looking at what the different requirements were.
‘I mean, for a start, in sailing you’re mostly on top of the water – not in the water like you are with surfing or diving. And the flex requirements of the clothing – the way you use your body – are very different too. So there were some clear developments we could make early on that the dinghy sailors responded to very quickly and enthusiastically.’
Avlare
One of the next big developments on Zhik’s never-ending programme of innovation was the launch of Avlare, with similar stretch properties to Spandex or Lycra but which is also waterproof. Hmm, a rash vest that’s waterproof... Conolly admits it sounds almost too good to be true, and concedes that you have to try it to believe it. ‘It sounds obvious to say it, but one of the problems is that when you wear Spandex or Lycra, it gets wet, and you get wet in it. Not many people really question that. ‘You get wet, and you’re in the water!’ Trouble is, windchill is a big consideration for competitive sailors.’
So Conolly and his research team set about looking for ways of
THIERRY MARTINEZ
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