onze-expertise-design

SHOE DESIGN

OUR EXPERTISE

Designed from the sole up, hand crafted with care. We make the shoes that your kids will love. Here is how we do it.

OUR PHILOSOPHY

Just like with our own adult shoes, children’s shoes need to be comfortable and protect their feet. Our design philosophy starts with a deep understanding of what comfort means. Each one of our shoes is designed to the shape of children’s feet, with materials that are flexible to allow them to move and grow.

After almost 30 years of making the world’s best kid’s shoes, we’ve found there are five key elements that make a shoe comfortable: Flexibility, Adjustability, Breathability, Weight and Fit. That’s why our shoes are shaped like children’s feet, why they use flexible, breathable leathers and knits that are lightweight, and why they use fastening that makes them easy to wear and easy to adjust. Shoes also need to be durable to stand up to the crazy things our kids put them through and continue to protect their feet.

Stage, not age, is a mantra in our business and what it means is that we design for the stages of development a child goes through, to guide them on their journey.

DESIGN PROCESS

Making the world’s best shoes for growing feet takes care and attention at every stage of the design. We work closely with podiatrists and researchers throughout our design process to better understand children’s feet, how they move, run, jump and play.

DISCOVERY

Our design process starts with a simple question: What could we do better? Children need to grow freely and explore a lot of new environments, so it’s important that they have the right footwear to guide and protect them wherever they go. We try to understand what needs are not being met and how we can best design a shoe to carry our little adventurers on their journey.

RESEARCH

Once we know what problem we’re trying to solve, our design team works with podiatrists, researchers and other industry experts to find materials and design features that might help us. It might be that we’re designing a wet weather shoe that needs to be made with flexible materials, or a warm shoe that still needs to be breathable. Researching the problem helps guide our design direction.

PROTOTYPES

From our research we’ll develop sometimes dozens of prototypes, using different solutions to understand how effective each idea is. We continue to test these prototypes against our philosophies of flexibility, adjustability, breathability, durability and great fit. Our prototypes might use different materials, different shapes, different means of fastening or different assembly techniques.

WEAR TESTING

Once we find some prototypes that work, we invite a select group of parents to bring their children in and try on the shoes. Seeing how children react to the new shoe and how it feels on their feet, lets us know if we’re headed in the right direction. Once we’ve settled on a prototype, we’ll let children take the shoes away for a period of time and wear them to get feedback on which shoes they love the most.

AESTHETIC DESIGN

Designing shoes that children love means meeting a bunch of different criteria. At Bobux, we treat the child as our customer and we design our shoes so they will love them. That means making a shoe that’s comfortable for them to wear, guides their movement well and also, looks pretty cool. But it’s more than just looking cool, the shoes need to look like they do what they do, to inform their use. If a child doesn’t absolutely love their shoe, then it’s not a Bobux shoe.