Can Making Mountain Bike Gear Give This New Wetsuit Brand A Competitive Advantage?

To risk a pun, the wetsuit market is saturated.

There are many, many brands vying for market share with the same goal and method in mind: Keep people warm with rubber. And in a surf industry that is facing the hardest financial reckoning in its 70+ year existence, it’s not rude to ask how Ion plans on attacking things.

So, how does Ion Wetsuits claim to have a point of difference? Through not surfing.

Well, not only surfing. Ion started back in 2004 by carving out a niche through windsurfing, wakeboarding, and yes… mountain biking. There, the exigences are different: less time sitting and waiting means the wearer is going to be warmer naturally. Meaning, the emphasis needs to lean more on flex than warmth.

Ion then became known, for us U.S. surfers at least, as that mysterious Euro brand that made stretchy suits for kiteboarders.

Now that Ion has invested cash, years, and “exhaustive” R&D into their surfing wetsuits, maybe it’s time to re-examine our narrative on Ion Wetsuits altogether.

A few months ago, the team brought on Jack Freestone as their marquee surf team rider. It’s a smart move from those shrewd Europeans: Jack’s surfing is respected by a core audience, he and Alana Blanchard are Instagram superstars with a pre-packaged audience (2 Million combined followers) for Ion, and Jack is quite the workhorse, starring in an Album Surfboards short film nearly every 3 months.

The challenge, of course, is to reincorporate the “warmth” side of the equation back into things now that they’re dealing with an audience that spends a measly 3% of their session actually surfing and the rest trying to stay warm in cold-water spots.

Which, they’ve claimed they’ve done, thanks to two patented technologies known as “Plasma Plush” and “Hot Stuff 2.0” that do a lot of techy-sounding things but mostly do one big thing: trap air close to the body and create the warmest inside layer possible for the surfer while sacrificing the least amount of flex possible.

The fun thing here is that we’ll soon see if the wetsuits’ claims stack up: Ion will be competing in our next iteration of Stab’s Best Wetsuits which will be dropping in a few months’ time. And, don’t worry, we’ll be testing these suits some very cold water this time around.

Let’s see if Ion’s investment paid off.