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Techknow Tuesday - True Fit

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While some people really like them, for the most part feet are pretty gross, especially feet fresh out of snowboard boots.

 

 

So imagine if you had to spend more than a year traveling around finding and measuring size 7 feet- better than digging a ditch or something, but pretty gross. Fortunately for all the women out there though, our engineers were ok with doing that and on top of taking foot and calf measurements on more than 40 ladies feet they spent more than 2,500 hours testing the results and creating our True Fit™ design.

 

If you don’t know much about True Fit™ already, it’s basically a totally unique boot design that we have to that makes our women’s boots the best-fitting, and most comfortable boots in the world (in our opinion anyway). We recently caught up with a few of our boot designers and engineers to figure out what makes them so awesome.

 

What is True Fit?

True fit is a truly women’s specific fit and functional design based on extensive research done on the female form and how we ride. We started from scratch with this project looking first at women’s foot and lower leg dimensions.  Most of my time went into collecting dimensional data from women with size 7 feet that would actually agree to allow me to measure their feet. (Sometimes this was a challenge) Once we had this data we were able to apply it to building prototype lasts (Lasts are forms or molds that the boots and liners are made from).  Several rounds were made and fit tested before we were satisfied.  At this same time we also had to look at components such as the shell tongue and internal heel counter – as these are also molded components.  The advantage here was we were able to create Rapid Prototype Models directly from our 3d geometry (cad file).  This process allowed us to look at a wide variety of designs.  With the help of the Engineering Dept we were able to look at the relationship between Liner and shell in 3d.  This ensured that all the pieces fit together correctly.  The shear amount of testing that went into the confirmation of this Last was truly insane.

 

 

 

 

How is that different from normal boots and bindings?

I see it as being different in two ways – first it’s different because every detail of our boots and bindings are based around this true fit of a women’s foot and how we ride.  Most people claim they do this but the amount of research that went into this project can’t be matched.  It’s probably one of the biggest R&D projects ever undertaken in snowboarding.  The 2nd reason it’s different is because it is applied to the boots and bindings in how they work together. These products are develop, tested and approved together to make the best fitting, most comfortable and best performing women’s product on the planet.

 

 

 

 

What made you (Burton) want to make something like that?

Necessity.  You can take a men’s product, size it down, tweak it, adjust some lines but to truly make it for a women you have start from the beginning and move forward, not try and retrofit something that works for a dude.

 

How long has it been used in Boots and Bindings?

We first started utilizing all our research in 2007

 

How has it been received?

Really good, our riders love it, our testers love it, our customers love it.

 

 

 

Anything else we should know about it?

Not sure that you should know about it but over the course of tracking down and measuring women’s feet we had a few misadventures. There was one time where we went to a college campus hoping to find  a bunch of size 7’s, but all the girls just thought we were some weirdo’s who wanted to touch their feet, so we didn’t make any progress. We went back a few days later with a bunch of t-shirts, and started offering free tee’s to any girl that would let us measure their feet- that worked a lot better.

 

Another time we were at Hood and a dude was convinced that I was putting the moves on his girl by trying to measure her feet, wasn’t buying any out story at all and was seriously trying to fight me. All ended ok, but was pretty funny.

 

Want to know anything else about True FIt, Boots, or anything related to snowboarding? Just ask it here in the comments and we'll let you know whats up.

 

Also, while we have you here, do yourself a favor and check us out on Twitter here, cause like obviously you want to know what we are doing like allll the time.

 

Misty Nug: Apparently your feet swell while walking during the day, so the best time to try on shoes or boots is in the afternoon, or after you have been most active, cause your feet are bigger than normal (or maybe at their normal size... uh... hard to say).

 

 

Part  of a well balanced week of Burton blog posts officially known as "Now Read This,"

Techknow Tuesday teaches you what you need to know about everything important

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