Why most board shorts feel cheaper than they used to

Pick up a pair of board shorts from almost any big brand and compare them to a pair from fifteen years ago, and you can feel the difference before you've read a single label. Lighter fabric, flimsier waistband, hardware that feels like it came out of a party bag. And you're not imagining it, and it's not nostalgia. The category got cheaper to make, and the making is where you feel it.

So here's what changed, where the corners got cut, and what doing it properly actually looks like from the inside.

What happened to board shorts?

Fast fashion happened, mostly. Once shorts became a seasonal volume item rather than a piece of equipment, the maths flipped, design cycles compressed, price points became the brief, and every single component got value engineered. Each individual cut is small, a lighter fabric here, a generic zip there, but stack five of them on top of each other and you get shorts that feel disposable, because they are. And if you sell them cheap enough nobody complains, they just buy again next summer, which is sort of the whole business model.

The five corners that got cut

The first is fabric weight. Thin fabric is cheaper per metre and photographs exactly the same as good fabric, and it's also why new shorts go shapeless by February. You can feel this one instantly, scrunch the fabric, and if it feels like a plastic bag it'll wear like one.

The second is elastic waistbands on everything. A proper fixed waistband has to actually fit, which means the brand has to get the sizing right across every size, whereas elastic covers sizing sins and costs less to make. That's why it took over, and it's also why shorts stopped looking like shorts, which we've written about in can you wear board shorts to the pub?.

The third is generic hardware. Zips, clasps and buckles are where a few cents per unit adds up across a hundred thousand units, so no-name components became the standard. And the zip is the one that kills the whole garment when it goes, and it goes, we broke an entire production run learning why board shorts zips break.

The fourth is stitching and reinforcement. Bar tacks at the stress points, proper seam allowances, double stitching where the load lives, all of it takes seconds of machine time, and seconds of machine time is exactly what volume production optimises away. This is the invisible one, you find out at the worst possible moment, usually mid squat.

And the fifth is the mesh liner as a shortcut. A liner lets a brand use fabric that's too thin or too scratchy to sit against skin, so it's a patch over a materials decision, sold to you as a feature.

What does doing it properly look like?

Boring, mostly, which is why nobody markets it. Our tech pack, the document that tells the factory exactly how to build the shorts, runs to 17 pages for one design, stitch widths, button proportions, exactly how many mm the logo sits above the hem, pocket geometry we genuinely used Pythagoras on. And then samples, and more samples, rounds of them, each one measured against a 12 point spec and sent back for the details that are wrong.

It took us the better part of 2 years and a change of factory to get a pair we'd put our name on. And the second production run still taught us the zip lesson the hard way.

None of that shows up in a product photo. All of it shows up in month six of owning the shorts.

How do you spot quality board shorts on the rack?

Five checks, thirty seconds. Fabric with some body that recovers when you scrunch it, a fixed waistband with a real closure rather than elastic and a shoelace, a zip with a name on it, tight bar tacked stitching at the pocket corners and the fly, and no mesh liner covering for the fabric. Any pair that passes all five was made by people who cared.

And if it happens to be The Collective, well, we did warn you this section was coming.

Frequently asked questions

Are expensive board shorts worth it?

Price and quality correlate loosely at best, plenty of expensive pairs fail the rack checks above and the occasional cheap pair passes. Pay for construction, not logo size, the checks are a better guide than the price tag.

How long should good board shorts last?

3 to 5 years of regular wear, more with decent care, and we've covered the routine in how to make board shorts last. If shorts consistently die in one summer, the construction was the problem.

Which brands still make quality board shorts?

We're obviously biased, so we'll give you the method instead of a list. Run the five rack checks, look at whether the brand publishes real measurements and component details, and see if they talk about construction anywhere, because brands that do the work generally can't shut up about it. Case in point.

More in this series: why board shorts zips break, what actually matters in board shorts fabric and how to make board shorts last.