Former Swimmer Bringing Fun into SwimGirl Brand of Caps
As a young competitive swimmer, the Mission Viejo Nadadores provided about as good an environment as Amber Theders could’ve wanted. Aesthetically, though, not so much – unless you liked blue and gold, the colors of the powerhouse club that was legendarily fastidious about staying on-brand before that was even a thing.
Theders found the avalanche of blue and gold oddly inspiring, wondering what the taboo process of adding a novel splash of color might look like.
“When I was growing up, I was super competitive into swimming but also really girly, and for whatever reason in the swimming world, everything seemed team-related,” Theders said. “It was always team colors, and it never really felt like something more personal or something that could show off your personality at practice.”
That curiosity has turned into a business, the SwimGirl brand, where Theders designs and sells caps that are quite different from the staid, stock team models. As she lays out in her company’s social profiles, the aim is to, “Show off your style, have fun, and train like a beast.”
Theders knows the swim culture well. She started at age four at Mission Viejo, then jumped to Irvine Novaquatics at 12. The Laguna Beach native swam at Orange Coast College then briefly at Whittier College.
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After halting her business studies at Whittier to tend to a family matter, the 24-year-old has transformed her spark of creativity into a venture. She caters to other swimmers looking for caps that help them escape the humdrum tableau of training and express a little dash of personality. While she has done hoodies and other on-deck gear in the past, her current focus is solely on swim caps (both latex and silicone) in eye-popping colors with holiday or pop culture themes. The buzzy designs and vibrant colors have an unmistakably Instagram-able appeal.
SwimGirl merges several threads in Theders’ life. She comes from a family of small-business owners, including her uncle, who indulged her desire to print cap designs for her and her friends as a teen. Her college business studies were always aimed at starting an endeavor of her own someday. She’s always had a certain artistic sensibility, but she’s cultivated that by teaching herself design, which shines through in SwimGirl’s playful pink script logo. Some of that she traces to her mom, a professional photographer.
Theders had a direct line to the teen swim market when she started SwimGirl. It started with caps she made for kids she babysat or at summer clubs she coached, which provided a built-in word-of-mouth network and focus-group testing. She merged her ideas with feedback and headed back to her design program to test new versions.
“I want to design caps that are cool, and it was just like drinking through a firehose,” she said. “I was learning how to use Adobe Illustrator and doing simple designs and kind of building up my ideas, and it all kind of built from there.”
Her sales eventually expanded to sales booths at major meets in Southern California, and she added an e-commerce platform during the pandemic. The local aspect remains central, since all the caps are produced and printed in Orange County. Despite many companies facing supply shortages and price increases for latex and silicone, Theders has mainly avoided that, since the effects are most pronounced for the plain, stock colors (black, navy, etc.) that Theders purposefully eschews.
She hopes expand in 2022 to include more retail availability; since most of her sales occur in-person at tables set up at meets, the easing of pandemic restrictions could help with that. She’s interested in returning to non-cap apparel at some point.
For now, though, the mission is all about fostering fun and for swimmers.
“The ultimate goal,” she said, “is just to provide apparel that makes going to practice more fun while still being good quality and practical.”
Good Job Amber, I Love the work your doing, Good luck in the future!