Don’t be caught short this summer

A Californian website, www.shortomatic.com, allows consumers to customise their own board shorts.

Users can submit any kind of image, photo or artwork and it will be superimposed onto the board shorts. You can also include a personalised message, with the shorts also carrying an edition number.

Shortomatic has been created by the founders of another US site called Yogamatic, which makes bespoke yoga mats for people to contort themselves upon.

The company uses a community of local artists to create the board shorts and claims that they can make shorts suitable for eight to 80-year-olds.

Unless Tony Abbott comes to power and creates a new law in which budgie smugglers are compulsory on Australian beaches, there will be plenty of board shorts on display this summer, offering plenty of scope for a similar venture here.

Quiksilver has dipped its toe into this area, offering customised board shorts via its Japanese operation before finally offering Australian consumers the opportunity to choose their own colour scheme earlier this year.

However, Quiksilver only offers users the chance to choose from a range of block colours, rather than the elaborate designs on show at Shortomatic. Australian surfing website MeSurf has branded the Quicksilver effort “a bit of a let down.”