A site visitor just sent me an article from the NY Times on the shoes Obiri wore in Boston this year:
Highlights from the NY times
"The shoes had no laces. They had no heel cap — a hard plate at the back kept the foot in place. They were made of a weird, stretchy, plastic-y material..
"The shoe was created from a single semi-translucent synthetic monofilament almost a mile long that was extruded by a robot arm, engineered to fit to Ms. Obiri’s feet to help her run in the most effective way and then heat-fused to a foam rubber and carbon-fiber sole. It is called the Cloudboom Strike LS — LS stands for LightSpray, the trademarked name of the technology — and it weighs a mere 170 grams, or about six ounces. It has 75 percent less impact on the environment than a traditional sneaker, according to On. And when it comes to style, it has more in common with an alien bedroom slipper than any running shoe.
"Think of it as the Tesla of the sneaker world. On is hoping the Cloudboom Strike LS will have the same disruptive effect on the sneaker market that Elon Musk’s innovation had on the car world. If so, On will upend not just design conventions, but the whole sneaker business model."
While the shoe may be great for Obiri and the environment, in addition to the shoe being potentially bad for her competitors, it may also cost a lot of people their jobs.
Rather than the usual 150 to 200 components of a running shoe, the Cloudboom Strike LS has only seven. Rather than being touched by about 100 people on an assembly line, it is touched, on average, by one. Rather than being put together by patternmakers, it is created using parametric design principles, and computational engineering.
Rather than the fabric being dyed, color is added via inkjet. Rather than the production being outsourced to factories in Asia — in On’s case, in Indonesia and Vietnam — and then shipped around the world, the Cloudboom Strike LS will be made by new “production cells” in Zurich and in On’s other markets.
That means that the time between production and delivery is much shorter. (The Cloudboom Strike LS goes from midsole to finished product in three minutes.) It also means that there is no waste on the cutting-room floor — no leftover materials or toxic glue to be thrown away — and significantly fewer carbon emissions. There should also be less stock left at the end of every season because the shoe is made closer to demand. And because the filament is a thermoplastic, the upper can be melted down and reused at the end of a shoe’s life cycle.
“It’s really jumping into the future when it comes to manufacturing,” Marc Maurer, the co-chief executive of On, said. When asked about the implications for the supply chain and the people who will no longer be necessary, he said, essentially, that automation and repurposing are the story of industry.
Shoe experts of LRC, what do you think? Would a shoe like this actually be better than the Vaporfly or other traditional super shoes? Or is this simply a great PR person getting some nice press for the company in the NY Times? I totally get why it would be better environmentally but I'm talking about performance.