ACG FEATURE - PART TWO
How does Considered thinking apply to the way this shoe is made?
Good point. The lining is polyester which is pretty standard but it has a high degree of recycled content. We’re also using different foams that have achieved EPM (Environmentally Preferred Materials) status. What we’re doing right now is trying to sandwich our highest performance climbing rubber on the outsole, but use Green Rubber as well, which gets rid of a lot of the nasty extra chemicals and by-products that come with rubber. Then there are the unsexy details like pattern efficiencies, or engineering the pieces so that they fit together more than once when you’re cutting them all out.
Has that stuff had a big impact on the final price?
Not really. With a lot of the vendors, the price of the regular and the EPM version of materials doesn’t change a whole lot. So it’s just making the extra effort to search out what options are out there and make sure we use those. Ideally, we don’t want to make people compromise. We’re giving them an option to have everything – it’s Considered, but it’s also high performance. But it’s also the standard way we do things, it’s just what we do now. Considered permeates everything, so much so that it’s like we almost sort of forget about it.
It does seem even more apt given it’s used in the outdoors. Have you been out giving it a pounding?
Oh, yeah. Right behind you you’ll see there’s a big pile of our first-round Ashiko samples. The footwear development cycle can take anywhere from 12 to 18 months, which seems like a lot but when you actually work in the amount of time that it takes for a factory to build all the moulds and do all the work needed to make a shoe, you actually only have a couple of shots at getting it right. We found a couple of potential spots in the original sample that we needed to revise. More support, better abrasion resistance in some areas and then they’re off to our product testing group, where hundreds of real hardcore wear-testers go out and put a beating on shoes. In four to six, maybe eight weeks of wear, we get a real good idea of how these are going to hold up long-term.
Check out our next feature: NIKE ACG FEATURE - PART ONE
