Thanks to Lake Illawarra High School English teacher Shannon McLoughlin, gone are the days of chasing your towel as it cartwheels away in the breeze.
A couple of year ago, Shannon – who regularly takes her pups, Archie and Alfie, to dog-friendly Wollongong City Beach – grew frustrated with towels that went rogue in the wind.
Shannon and her partner, fellow Lake Illawarra High School teacher Tom, scoured the internet one afternoon for a towel that could solve her problem, only to come up empty-handed. So, with Tom’s encouragement, she put her single semester of design knowledge to the test and created the Weighted Beach Towel herself.
“I think I spent, like, an hour Googling, ‘Is there a weighted beach towel?’ or something so that I can easily fan the sand off, place it down on the beach and then just enjoy my day and relax, but I couldn't find anything online at all,” Shannon said.
“We do a lot of travel as well, and a towel is so important when you travel sometimes – it's like your swimming towel, but it's also your bathroom towel – so you need it for a lot of things, and I [thought] it'd be so convenient if something like that existed so that you can use it for multiple different situations.
“I spent probably about six months, I think, nutting out the design and figuring out exactly how we could make it the most useful beach towel, but also travel towel.”
In July last year, Shannon and Tom launched their company, Tidebreak Towels, and began selling the Weighted Beach Towel online, but ensuring that Shannon’s unique design was faultless was an eight-month-long process.
“The reason it took a little while is I was figuring out the weights. Originally, I [thought] wouldn't it be good if there were weights already in the towel? But then I thought about the practicality of if you're at the beach [and] you've just gone for a swim, that's not very nice to dry yourself with,” Shannon said.
“I thought, alright, what if we had little sandbags that we ship with the towels – I tried that too – and, you know, if they get wet, they become really heavy and… that's also not super convenient.
“So finally… I was like, weight bags, that would be perfect; you can just fill them up when you need them, you can take it out, you can add something extra if you want it to be a certain degree of heaviness.
“If you've got jewellery, or something like that, you can put that in the weight bags because we made sure they're this stretchy, waterproof material… so it actually has multiple uses too and that was our goal.”
Made in Melbourne, the Weighted Beach Towel is a double-layered, quick-drying polyester and polyamide waffle-print blend that is wind-proof, sand-proof and provides warmth, with four corner pockets on the reverse side of the towel. The snap buttons that lock each weight bag in position can also be used to clip towels together, which Shannon says is popular with beach picnickers.
Though designed with various uses in mind, there is one popular use of the towel that has surprised Shannon and inspired her to work on a kid-friendly adaption.
“[There’s] one thing we didn't realise, but a few families have bought the towels and told us early on that you could actually clip the two corners together around your neck, and the kids love it because they look like a superhero,” Shannon said.
“One of the big things I've had so far with feedback is whether I can [create] a child-size version… so I'm looking into that as well and I'm hoping to add more colours too.”
With buyers across the country – particularly travellers – providing positive feedback, Shannon and Tom will take leave during term four to spend six months living in the Burleigh Heads region, focusing solely on expanding Tidebreak Towels. If they’re not simply relaxing in the warmth of the Sunshine State, Shannon says you’ll catch them – and their towels – at beachfront markets along the Gold Coast.
For more information on Tidebreak Towels' Weighted Beach Towel, visit their website.