Foreign Trade Black Athletic Shorts Review: Nine Days Folded in a Parcel, Then the Crease Check

Most reviews of a seven-dollar short stop at the price. We stopped at the parcel. The Foreign Trade black athletic shorts (SKU 7720570468) are listed at $7.46 against a struck-through $8.51, in polyester with slight stretch, a straight leg, a drawstring waist and a five-point — mid-thigh — cut. Sizes run M to 3XL, and the listing offers white, black, orange and green. We ordered the black pair shown in the photographs, in size L, and treated it the way a first-time buyer would: measured it on the bench, packed it into a consolidated carton with our reference load, and then left it folded in that carton for nine days before opening it.

What arrived, and what the listing does not say

The short that arrived matches the listing description in the ways that are checkable without wearing it: polyester main fabric, a straight leg, a mid-thigh length, a drawstring at the waist, script lettering across the front and small patch details low on the legs. The seller's own feature sheet also names a second brand, Chensida, alongside the Foreign Trade title, and dates the style to summer 2025 while a separate line says 2024. Those inconsistencies are worth knowing about but did not change what we measured.

What the listing never publishes is a single body measurement. No waist, no hip, no inseam, no leg opening. Everything in the table below came off our own sample with calipers and a tape, so treat it as one data point, not a size chart.

The bench sheet

The 17.5 cm inseam is what "five-point" means in practice on this pair: the hem sits above the knee, not at it. The 29.6 cm half-opening gives a straight leg with room to move without reading as baggy. The slight stretch in the fabric is real but modest — we could pull the waistband roughly 3 cm wider than its relaxed flat figure by hand, and it returned to 38.0 cm when released.

Packing it into the reference load

Our standard fill check uses a padded box, a folded garment and a boxed figure, and the product under test has to be the only thing doing the wrapping. The shorts went into the folded-garment slot. At 163 g and 9.4 mm folded, they added almost nothing to the carton's bulk: the lid closed with no bulge along the seam and the tape line stayed flat, which is the outcome you want if you are consolidating a cheap pair of shorts with heavier items instead of paying a separate shipping line for them.

The trade-off is the fold itself. Thin polyester with a print on the front is exactly the material that takes a set. So we closed the carton, left it on the shelf, and opened it nine days later — roughly the sitting time of a slow consolidation.

Nine days folded: the crease check

Out of the carton, the pair showed two visible fold lines: one across the thigh, one down the centre of the right leg that crossed part of the script lettering. Neither was a sharp break, and neither damaged the print — the lettering was continuous across the fold when we looked at it under a raking light, with no lifting or flaking at the crease.

Hanging the shorts on a hanger for twenty minutes at room temperature removed the leg line almost completely. The cross-thigh line softened but stayed faintly visible until we steamed it. If you are buying these to wear straight out of the parcel on arrival day, expect to hang or steam them first; if you are buying them in June for a July trip, this is a non-issue.

The drop routine

We ran the three-step drop — corner, edge, face — from waist height onto flat concrete, with the shorts packed in the same reference load, three cycles. Damage is logged in millimetres by location. There was nothing to log on the garment: no seam separation at the crotch, no pulled stitching at the drawstring exit, no scuffing of the leg patches. The carton's corner crushed by about 4 mm across the first cycle, which is a carton result, not a shorts result. What this tells you is limited: polyester shorts are not fragile, and a drop test cannot tell you how a waistband feels after ten wears.

The price, the names and what we cannot sign off

At $7.46 the arithmetic is simple, and the struck-through $8.51 is a listing device rather than a discount we could verify. Two things stay unresolved. First, there are no independent buyer claims on this listing to check fit, feel or wear against — our numbers are one sample on one bench. Second, the colourways share a single set of photographs, so the black pair's script lettering and leg patches are documented, while the white, orange and green versions are not. If you are ordering anything other than black, ask the agent for a photograph of the actual colourway before the parcel closes.

Practical order of operations: request flat waist, hip and inseam figures for your size, confirm your colourway with a photograph, then fold the pair into an existing parcel rather than shipping it alone.