#210320: Cultsport V-Man Era Running Shoe
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March 2021 -November 2021
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Cult.Fit/CultSport is an India local startup fitness brand
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Product and design consulting
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To design a collection of 6 running silhouettes and 2 new toolings for local India market.
Knitting footwear, especially in sneaker world is certainly a trend and a general direction going forward. I have worked on a full knitting upper footwear before. Please see project here. In terms of sophistication of design, this upper design is much more complicated. At least what I set to accomplish is a much complicated knitting upper.
Designing a full knitted sneaker upper is very different than designing traditional sneaker upper. In fact a full knitted upper is not designed but more likely to be engineered and produced. The idea of this knit upper is ventilation. Ventilation is key feature of this upper and other design interest is secondary, such as branding, fine details.
The idea was to create a heavily ventilated upper for extreme breathability with large air ventilation system. Based on personal experiences most knitting threads is not very breathable material. My goal is to put designed ventilations at critical areas, such as vamp and medial arch area.
However, once the prototype came back, I have realized that my design is way to conservative and safe. The air ventilation is way too small to be functional and the area of ventilations are not generous enough to be useful.
Something good did come out of this first prototype. The flow of the cable knitting works well through the entire upper and the brand logo sit well with the upper design. Even though the top two lace loops were supposed to be integrated into the logo. The reality is the lace loop is too big to fit into as part of the logo.
There was this idea that I wanted to use several different shade of grey threads constructing this upper. Later I learnt couple technical information of footwear knitting technology. The more color needed the better knitting required. The more detail needed the much sophisticated required. The bottomline is that footwear upper knitting technology is certainly not one for all kind of situation.
Since the small scale of the knitting factory the client can afford. In the end the manufacture is agreed to try a two tone knitting design. Based on the sample came back, I am sure if and when this design moving forward I will have to reduce the knitting to one color.
Even with one tone knitting there is still the concern of the quality of threads used, which is made of different type of materials, such as TPU, cotton, other synthetics like kevlar. There is also the thickness of the thread itself. All in all in order to have a quality knitting footwear, design appearance wise is not top priority.
I will provide full detailed break down blog article on knitting technology of footwear soon.
