Making real carbon-plate marathon shoes for a Korean brand — after the plates on offer elsewhere did not hold up

The challenge

A Korean buyer supplies professional marathon teams and serious runners — people who race in the shoe and notice immediately if it does not perform. Their problem was the plate. What factories offered was often not genuinely carbon, or a generic plate that behaved nothing like a racing plate under a real runner. For a marathon shoe that is not a cosmetic issue: the plate is the product. They needed a manufacturer who could prove the plate was real, and get it into runners' hands in time for races.

What we did

• Supplied a genuine carbon plate — tooled to the customer's requirement where the project needs it, or sourced to specification where a suitable plate exists
• Built to the plate geometry the project called for — full-length, half-length or spoon (shovel) plates are all within our scope
• Matched the plate to the right midsole for the shoe's positioning — supercritical foam, PEBA or standard EVA, which is where much of a racing shoe's value is decided
• Tested the two things that separate a real racing plate from a lookalike: bending stiffness, and the peel strength of the bond between plate and foam

Results

• The buyer ran their own testing on our shoe and chose us on the result — not on price or promises
• Bending stiffness and plate-to-foam peel strength met the relevant Korean and Chinese national standards for professional running shoes
• Delivered in the shortest possible time, so the buyer's runners were racing marathons in genuine carbon-plate shoes

Project at a glance