#140420: FILA China/Just Another Performance Tennis Style
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December 2014 -November 2015
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Anta Sports/FILA
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Full-time senior designer
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To design a series of 4 silhouettes under the performance category, tennis, running, cross-training and a lifestyle for locate China market.
Here is a little background of the project and FILA international, specifically great China market. During that time not before I started to work with FILA great China, FILA hasn’t established the market it wants to be in terms of footwear. There is an internal conflicts which one side believe FILA needs to focus on performance driven market.
Yet there is another side believe that fashion trend driven should be the focus of the brand. Because of this situation, company created 2 teams which one is focused on performance footwear; another is designing fashion driven footwear, which in large are ladies’ footwear.
Due to company limited design resources I was hired to design performance footwear for the brand. Originally the position was a full time in-house designer. However, I was not interested in relocating to the city of Xiamen. I started a project based contract with the company which I work in-house during the product and development period of each project.
Once I was on board the performance design team, the initial meetings were to discuss what specific performance footwear category should be focused. After several internal meetings, I propose the direction of approach few performance footwear at the same time to test the market and the development potential of the team. One of the category is performance tennis since the brand does have tennis footwear in its archive. It makes sense to revisit the tennis category in a new market.
One of the main design feature is the use of KPU application, which has a very distinctive look and interest design to it. Simply put is putting a design via moulding onto a piece of material. The idea is to create a cage system that provides both breathability and support by designing an intricate pattern applying to needed areas, such as toe vamp and mid-foot quarter areas.
The pattern I chose is a hexagon shape kind of like the section of a honey cone with maximal air ventilation holes, and the pattern is attached onto a air mesh. With this design feature in place player is able to have maximal breathability but still have enough support during intense tennis session.
The entire silhouette is quite decent once the sample came back. However, there are one big problem I knew I had to focus on fixing, which is the weight of the shoe is just too heavy to be performance friendly.
Four areas I provided feedback to development team. The midsole execution much be changed from compressed EVA to blow EVA to reduce weight. Outsole use TPU instead of rubber. The toe cap use microfiber based PU instead of real suede. Also I might need to increase the scale of hexagon in order to give more open space leading to less weight.
