How to develop a swim product – the Otion® story

From brainwave to making waves – how SwimForTri and Drag2Zero created an innovative technical swim paddle from scratch

Do you have a brilliant idea for a new swim product? One that could perhaps transform people’s swimming journeys and help them master a fundamental technique point.

How do you take that idea from a rough sketch on a scrap of paper to a physical, saleable product?

This was the problem facing Swim4Tri (SFT) founder and head coach Dan Bulluck back in 2012, when he first mapped out his vision for what became the Otion technical swim paddle.

Dan is a world-leading swimming coach and expert, but at that point he had no knowledge of product development.

Chance encounter

By chance, Dan met Simon Smart, the founder of Drag2Zero, who did know about product development, but had little swimming experience. Simon was a keen cyclist and wanted to give triathlon a go. Here’s how he tells the story.

“I could run and ride a bike but had never swum competitively. [Triathlon coach] Joe Beer invited me along to one of his triathlon camps at Club a La Santa in Lanzarote – and that’s where I met Dan and the SFT team. I instantly bought into Dan’s philosophy of focusing on technique first, and my swimming came on incredibly quickly. Until that swim camp, it had never occurred to me that the concept was identical to cycling: you can produce all the power you want, but without a good position, you are wasting your time.”

Partnership opportunity

Despite their different professional backgrounds, Dan and Simon discovered they had a lot in common. Dan was trying to find the best coaching methods to teach swimmers to get the right compromise between technique and fitness. Drag2zero was doing exactly the same on the bike, finding a position that gave the best compromise for power, drag, speed and sustainability.

Simon picks up the story again here:

“During the swim camps, Dan and I talked about the challenges of business in the multi-sport world and how to develop products to achieve our goals. The Drag2zero business has evolved from 2007, when it was about teaching people to hold an optimum position on a bike using a wind tunnel, to today, where an athlete can buy a cockpit that instantly optimises the bike and body aerodynamics, providing efficiency, speed and sustainability. We developed those cockpit products to enable that.

“In parallel to the journey Drag2Zero has been on in the cycling world, we have been working with Dan to try and develop equipment to achieve the same goal in the swim world.”

The Otion Swim paddle vision

Dan needed a product to instigate a relaxed hand and to control finger spacing – ideally your fingers should be around 4mm apart rather than either clamped together or spread wide. By 2015, he had produced the first prototype of the Otion paddle but was unable to find anyone with the expertise to develop the product and take it to market. After several chats, the Drag2zero/SFT collaboration was born.

“Everything we have ever designed and developed at Drag2Zero is derived through necessity, as opposed to merely being a design exercise. With everything manufactured in the UK, it has been possible to repeat the design-manufacture-test-develop cycle many times. That’s how we end up with products that work.

“The Otion paddle development has followed this methodology. Since 2015, we have made endless prototypes and gradually improved every detail. Designed at Silverstone, printed by rapid prototype specialists Project 76 in Peterborough and tested in London by Dan (initially in secret and then after we had patent protection in place, with a wider audience at Dan’s swim classes).

“You couldn’t ask for a better scenario for developing a product before taking it to market. It’s taken a long time, but we needed to be sure it was right before committing to manufacturing.”

Multiple iterations

During the development process, the team worked through around 30 variations until prototype 10d gave them what they were looking for: a paddle that behaves like a personal swim coach, gives you instant feedback and gets you swimming efficiently. At this point, they knew they had something special and needed to get patent protection on the invention before they could get it into the public domain.

But the paddle didn’t just have to be perfect for swimmers – it needed to be designed for manufacture. It became clear that the only option was to injection mould the complicated 3D shapes that are essential to achieve a relaxed hand and the ‘transparent experience’ you get when using the paddle correctly (meaning that you almost shouldn’t know it’s there).

Dimples

When you pick up a pair of Otion paddles, you’ll notice that the top size has dimples while the bottom is smooth. This isn’t an accident. During design, they found dimples on top were important for grip, but dimpling on the lower surface affected the feel when gliding the paddle through the water. They even tested different dimple heights!

It took around five years to arrive at the final design and to be in a position to commit to manufacture. Having designed and developed the product in the UK, and with the current economic challenges post-covid, it made sense to also manufacture in the UK.

“This is something the team are proud of,” says Simon, before adding that the pandemic certainly drew out the process.

“Mould making is a declining art in the UK, but they finally had the product in their hands. The moulds were made locally in Northamptonshire, and the injection moulding is done in Shropshire.”

So, if you do have a brilliant idea for a revolutionary swim product, it looks like you need two things: the right partner(s) and the determination and patience to keep working on your product until it’s ready for market.

You can read our Otion Paddles review here.

Otion Paddles are available online here.

About SwimForTri

Founded in 2003 by Dan Bullock with his sister Keeley, SFT was looking to help adults of all abilities to swim faster at a time when this was not really a big thing. Dan has coached with the GB Tri Coach Steve Trew Tri Camp and the Joe Beer Tri camp. He is a former British Masters Record holder and medallist at Euro and World Masters Championships.

About Drag2Zero

Drag2Zero was founded in 2007 by Simon Smart who at that time was an aerodynamicist at Red Bull F1. He saw that aerodynamics was not at that time really being used in cycling to their full potential and was looking to bring aero to more people. At that time, aerodynamics were only really considered important in track and time trial events (and even then, it was hard to convince many that it made much of a difference). Drag2Zero set up the first wind tunnel testing service available commercially in Europe, allowing cyclists to optimise their rider position and Simon very soon was designing products for the likes of Giant Bikes, Scott Sports, ENVE Composites and Endura clothing, working on optimising products aerodynamically. Their product development and rider position optimisation work quickly proved to be effective and knowledge was transferred over to the world of triathlon.