Shoemaking Technology: New Shoemaking Technology With Shoes As Light As Socks.

A pair of good shoes The highest state of a child should be to forget its existence.

Martin Lotti has a deep understanding of this. He is Nike's global Olympic creative director and also an footwear. Designer 。 In the past, when he asked questions to athletes, he wanted to have a pair of shoes, and the answers were almost the same -- lighter. They emphasized the meaning of "light": socks, like feet, and even "skin."

There will always be ways to think about it. On February 21, 2012, at the Nike Olympic Games Innovation Conference of 299 basketball street sports center in New York, Mark Parker, the global president and CEO of the company, displayed the new running shoes called "Flyknit Racer". Its appearance is somewhat different: the whole shoe is completely woven by a thread, and all the structures and braces are knitted. On this 9 (43 yards) marathon running shoes, the weight of the upper and tongue is only 34 grams, plus the total weight of the bottom is only 160 grams. You can take a look at the 2008 Olympic men's marathon champion Nike shoes Nike Zoom Streak 3, the weight of a pair of Flyknit Racer has just reduced by 35%.

Nike has used Flyknit in these shoes, a technology that makes running shoes lighter, and may bring changes to the company's production mode.

Mark Parker will be the witness of Nike's transformation. In the fierce competition between Nike and Reebok in 1980s, it was Parker who invented the famous "visible air cushion", which made Nike a great success. But neither the air cushion technology nor any other new technology has been separated from the industry for centuries. Tradition is to cut and stitch all kinds of materials together.

Even in 1990s. Natural fabric mesh fabric (Mesh) is a popular shoe material at that time, usually woven from nylon or polyester fibers, which makes the product lighter and breathable. But on the whole, this mesh cloth is still too soft. It not only has poor supporting ability, but also is too slow to react to water and sweat and is easily scratched or broken. Manufacturers must add some auxiliary processes and materials, such as the use of special fibers and high-strength wire netting. Similarly, they can not get rid of the traditional technology of "splicing", so that they can be integrated into one another.

When the Beijing Olympics ended in 2008, Nike's footwear designers began planning a subversion of the shoe structure. "Nike's product innovation is always centered on improving athletes' performance," Martin Lotti told the first financial weekly (micro-blog). They considered abandoning the process of tailoring, stitching and pasting in traditional shoemaking. Because only in this way can we create lighter shoes.

The socks with simple sculpt become the rudiments of design. Tony Bignell, director of Nike footwear research and development, explains that this is also a result of athletes' suggestions. But designers soon discovered that this is actually a big problem, because there is no technology in the world that can create knitted shoes. They must start from scratch.

First, they must find a magic material. The technicians in the shoe factory also participated in it. They not only play the role of production according to the drawings, but also give advice on the choice of materials. Finally, they suggested that Nike adopt a polyester spinning line with both elasticity and durability, and the thickness and strength can be changed. This spinning line can be added to Lycra material without affecting its use. Before we put on our new shoes, we can only describe this: it is lighter and softer than any socks in your drawer. It is called "feather material" - light and soft like feathers.

What machine can be used to make uppers is also a difficult problem. Innovation Kitchen is usually the place where Nike products are born. It encourages free and creative ideas to provide the necessary tools, materials, machines, toys, software, games and inspirational pictures at any time. But at that time, there was no single machine that could meet the needs of woven upper.

But new materials may not need new machines. In knitting, sweaters, socks or shoes, the machine works the same way. The solution of Nike's computer programmers and engineers is to find a machine that used to knit sweaters and socks, and rewrite the software to make it competent for the weaving of new materials. An interview with Nike designer also revealed that the replacement of the "brain" sewing machine is the core of the production of new shoes. Although other manufacturers are trying to make vamp by way of "weaving", they cannot be integrated as a result of material, equipment and software procedures.

Now work is entering a crucial step. The material of spinning is usually lacking in solid structure and durability when moving, which is far from the first requirement of solid modeling. The whole shoe body is finished by a spinning line, and the difficulty is much larger than that of Nike's previous generation. In the product of Nike's last generation of Flywire (fly line technology), the spun fabric attached to fabric needs to be bonded to TPU (thermoplastic polyurethane elastomer plastic, sole material). In order to maintain the tightness of the vamp, the TPU and the spinning line must cooperate with each other. The supporting role is actually TPU, and it is not perfect enough. With the technology of Hyperfuse and Hyperdunk series, the phenomenon of parallel nylon thread cracking happens from time to time.

Despite the structural failures of Flyknit Racer, designers finally succeeded in designing a weaving scheme to make the high strength spinning mixed with Lycra material on the left side of the shoe, forming a skeleton and supporting bracket to maintain the stability of the shoe. These spinning lines support the shoes like the sling of the sling bridge, and they can also respond to the movements of the athletes in real time, relax while resting, and tighten when they move.

To achieve this step, besides the mysterious machine, accurate data is also crucial. To this end, Nike has also applied the foot imaging database to the development. These data come from 40 years of cooperation with track events. Many of them are famous world champions. For example, Carmelita Jeter, the 100 meter dash champion in the 2011 World Championships, the fastest woman on earth today. The designers tested her mobile speed and plantar pressure, which corresponded to sports shoes. Nike always has the tradition of designing products with athletes, and even the founder of Philip Knight is a famous track and field athlete. In the innovative kitchen, you can see from time to time the tester who carries the sensor is shuttling in the professional test field of basketball, track and field, each project has different personnel combinations.

All preparations will produce a "chemical reaction" in a machine about 4.6 meters long, and a brand new product will emerge. The software sends out different instructions in different processes according to the data in advance. When the shoe toe part needs more stretches of material, the machine will reduce the number of layers of spinning and increase the injection of Lycra material. When the heel part needs more stable shape and strength, the machine will use different thickness of multi-layer spinning.

Flyknit vamp is not only lighter in weight, but also more flexible and more breathable, compared with the vamp made of mesh fabric and other materials. Parker told the first financial weekly that thousands of athletes will wear Nike's new products to participate in the Olympic Games at the 2012 London Olympic Games. Liu Xiang will be the first Chinese to wear Nike Flyknit running shoes.

In this summer's contest, it is not just athletes who compete for top names. Adidas has released a plan to make full use of its "official sporting goods partner of London Olympic Games", which has invested about 1 billion yuan. This expenditure includes obtaining official partnership status, athletes, volunteers and retailers. clothing The cost of production, and the marketing cost of products and companies themselves.

Compared with Adidas, the launch of Flyknit shows Nike is trying to win the product. If you can't get what you want, you may be grabbed by the competition. According to the British Daily Telegraph, in May 2011, Nike's share in the UK market was about 18%, while Adidas ranked second in 15%. In the global market, Adidas also bites behind Nike. Rating agency Canaccord Genuity even predicted that if Nike missed the opportunity brought by the four year Olympic Games, it would probably give Adidas the first place in the market share in 2015.

In addition to the Olympic Games, Parker has a long-term plan. He hopes Nike can gradually achieve full automatic production and end the outsourcing of manual production, so that the speed of product change is ahead of its competitors. Traditional shoe making technology can not do this. There are more than twenty-five parts of a pair of shoes that need to be stitched together. Most of them need to be manually completed. So Nike put the factory in Vietnam, China and other countries with lower labor costs. This leads to the longest part of the cycle of shoes in the United States, which is actually on board.

Flyknit streamlining the cutting, sewing and pasting steps in traditional technology can reduce the rising labor cost and raw material cost. For Nike, the ideal situation is that it can no longer rely on cheap labor factories, and the biggest part of labor will disappear from the shoe production line. Sam Poser, an analyst at Sterne Agee & Leach Inc, a US investment bank, believes that the technology can bring Nike at least $23 billion in annual sales and significantly raise gross margins.

According to the tradition of this company, technological innovation is usually gradually applied from one type of product to other products. Flywire was launched into the market in 2008. It has been used in 60% of Nike's footwear products. If all goes well, the future of Flyknit will be the same, and this will fundamentally change the whole Nike's production mode.

Charlie Denson, President of Nike brand, said that in the future Nike company might have such a scenario: a customer walked into Nike store, scanned his feet, and the computer could apply the information to make personalized shoes, and only one spinning line could complete it.

Of course, in order to achieve all this, Flyknit must come to fame and help athletes fly on the field.