TURN swimming goggles

Among intermediate swimmers, i.e. those who have mastered several strokes and train regularly, two main groups were identified. On the one hand are those who have never been coached by a third party (such as a club coach). These swimmers use goggles that they think are comfortable, which are quite large and have a soft one-piece nose bridge and adjustment straps on the sides.

How do you know if you are in this category? Your swimming goggles are at the bottom of your bag and you adjust them each session by adjusting the straps.

On the other hand are the more experienced swimmers, who may have had previous club experience. They tend to go for more compact, more stable goggles, which have an adjustable nose bridge and a strap that adjusts at the back.

How do you know if this is you? When training, you adjust your goggles once and that's it.

By observing swimmers, it becomes quickly apparent that the first type of swimmer takes time to adjust their goggles. Yet, in the end, you don't always get optimal results. Water coming in, strap slipping, pain and marks around the eyes... Your performance suffers as a result of this imprecise adjustment.

How can we give this category of swimmers a reliable and permanent adjustment for their swimming goggles? We set out with one goal in mind: to allow you to enjoy swimming while focusing only on your swimming, not on your goggles!

The challenge: find a system that will allow you to achieve perfect adjustment every time. Even if you have to adjust your glasses every session.

What's the answer? The adjustment wheel!

The idea of the wheel had already been part of the discussion since 2005. But the project was not yet mature enough to see the light of day. "We had the bare bones, we just didn't know how to put meat on them," explains Yann, the Product Manager of TURN goggles.

In 2017, we bought a patent from one of our suppliers. The idea: associate the adjustment wheel with swimming goggles. No one had ever done it before. You see this kind of adjustment on cycling or ski helmets, but no one had ever seen one on swimming goggles. We thought it could work, and that it could be THE solution!

It took a long time to find the perfect formula to ensure reliability, usability and comfort. We first tried putting the wheel on the adjustment elastics, but it was never tight enough because the wheel drains the dynamics from the elastic. Currently, 100% of existing goggles have elastic straps. But for this project, the solution was perhaps elsewhere... So we moved towards rigid temples.

The challenges to overcome were: using non-elastic and permanent temples, and defining the adjustment range. On top of that, you have to deal with the need to extend the frames to get them on and off.

For the laboratory tests, we had to invent machines because there were none that could test this kind of product! This famous adjustment wheel has undergone dozens and dozens of hours of testing to ensure that it does not break and that it continues to perform its function even after many uses.

No way are we going to release a product that's "pretty good but not great". Product excellence is what we strive for. So when a test doesn't meet our expectations, we start over. This is what happened after a testing process: we had to throw away the moulds the prototypes were made from and start another 8 months of research and development.

Then we tested the goggles in real conditions, in the pool, with swimmers. The challenge, through these many tests, was to put the product to the test! We want to make sure that they meet all our requirements, that they are intuitive to use and comfortable to wear.