![]() TL: Usually in basketball, you start with a fairly stiff cushioning system-some combination of foam and rubber pancake mix-with the goal to make it more flexible by introducing flex grooves or mixing in softer foams. It’s a holistic system, a 360-degree approach.Ĭan you talk more about that approach? How’s it different from the way other basketball sneakers are made? It’s specific to cutting motions and hard stopping motions that optimizes what is underfoot. It may seem super simple to look at, but it’s really engineered from the inside out in terms of how it holds the foot on the UA Flow platform. Not only that, but we also put a lot of emphasis on how we built the upper. TL: It has huge potential for a word of mouth “You gotta try these out” type of cushioning. All the components from the upper to the plate and the materials to the shape of the traction is really key. It’s not just about the material, it’s about building a system. Without the weight of an outsole and just the midsole, we have the opportunity to create a lightweight high-performance basketball shoe. The traction is so good that you don’t have to have an outsole on it, which usually adds two or three ounces worth of weight. The big thing for the Curry Flow 8 is that we’re building a shoe with a rubberless unisole. This is the most excited I’ve been about the opportunity and potential of new technology in a long time. What makes UA Flow unique from everything else the company has done in basketball?įD: We know it’s our best foam from the low-compression set standpoint. A basketball player saying he can do moves that he wasn’t able to do before is kind of the equivalent to a runner saying I’m running faster because of these shoes. TL: Stephen said he’s been working on some new moves that the shoe enables him to do and I think that’s the most exciting: when players can do new things due to the product that they wear. A lighter shoe allows a player to have more energy and be fresher throughout the game. It’s one of the lightest basketball sneakers we’ve ever done. We wanted to build a lighter weight high performance shoe. Watching how Stephen moves, he’s very quick on his feet and this could give him the extra separation to do even more amazing moves. How does this technology help Stephen and players like him?įD: When we saw how sticky this material was on hardwood, we knew this was going to be pretty groundbreaking. Over 90 athletes put in more than 1,500 hours on-court in the shoe altogether. UA Flow and the Curry Flow 8 went through 13 rounds of weartesting and 10 rounds of biomechanical testing. He can feel the court, but still feel protected underfoot. He was getting cushioning, but not sacrificing court feel. TL: He ran around the practice facility down in Walnut Creek, came back with feedback and one of the first things he said was, “Man, I feel like a ninja.” Ninja referring to how quiet the shoe is because UA Flow doesn’t squeak, but also how smooth the transitions were. Do you remember his reaction when he first tried UA Flow? Stephen must have really thought it was awesome for him to want it ASAP. It was a huge collaborative team effort to pull this off and bring it to market in 2020." He quickly grasped the material’s traction on the hardwood, "So from there, we had the opportunity to develop UA Flow for basketball also." On the development experience, he added, "I’ve worked on some challenging projects, but I’ve never had to develop and scale something in the middle of a pandemic. While testing UA Flow in a running shoe at the company’s Portland office, Fred Dojan, Under Armour Innovation’s VP of Footwear Development, decided to try it out on the court. It was in the spirit of curiosity and experimentation that helped bring UA Flow to basketball in the first place. ![]() So, he did what any two-time NBA MVP, three-time NBA champion, and the (soon-to-be) namesake of Curry Brand would do: he challenged the team to make UA Flow a signature feature in his next signature shoe. After some quick weartesting, Stephen realized what it could mean for basketball. In early 2019, the Under Armour design team introduced Stephen Curry to an early version of a new cushioning technology, UA Flow.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |