Go Behind The Process Of Designing Sneakers For Feel

The feel of footwear. That’s the premise behind Lululemon’s entry into the space, building a new last from scratch—for women, mind you—and offering female-specific engineering, such as a heel cup that diminishes soft-tissue impact across the body. Lululemon aims to turn research gained from 20-plus years as an apparel maker into a new footwear perspective.

This new Lululemon-makes-footwear effort wasn’t something born out of a desire to add more SKUs to the repertoire, but took years of research and testing to craft, culminating with a March 8 debut—on National Women’s Day, of course—of four women’s-specific footwear styles the brand will release throughout 2022, the first hitting retail March 22.

The shoes

Footwear creation started with a focus on the entire body. Mark Oleson, Lululemon vice president of product creation, formerly in research and development, says the brand has long focused on feel and sensation. An internal project investigating bras and discomfort led Lululemon to see that much of the negative impact on a women’s body was happening at the heel strike.

“When you look at soft tissue vibration and feel happening from the ground up, it starts affecting everything we do,” Oleson says. “We had been addressing a symptom and at some point, where is the cause coming from?”

Lululemon’s entry into footwear began as a research project to see if creating their own footwear could translate to a better whole-body experience. They believe it can.

That led to the creation of four different silhouettes for 2022. Lululemon starts with the Blissfeel run shoe March 22 in 10 different colorways. It will then release the Chargefeel hybrid run and train shoe and a Restfeel slide, both in July, and a Strongfeel shoe, designed for fitness training, in September.

With the “science of feel principle” leading the way, Sun Choe, Lululemon chief product officer, says they focused on materials and engineering to meet a women’s need of wanting a balance of cushioning and support. That led to building from scratch, with a brand-new last specific to a women’s foot—generally wider in the forefoot and narrower in the heel—based on over one million scans and proprietary foams and upper fabrics.

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Oleson says the major key to building a new footwear perspective was placing a focus not on the ankle down, but on the knee up. Using the heel strike insight as a building block, the Lululemon shoes have a different heel cradle, designed to “soften the impact and that softens the impact of your body tissue,” Choe says. “That was a really huge unlock for us and in a lot of the wear testing, that is definitely one of the things you really noticed.”

The Blissfeel offers an extra-thick foam to ensure energy return for a run while the Chargefeel uses two different foams stacked, one with the purpose of minimizing impact and the other helping with energy return. The Strongfeel took insights from the brand’s Mirror training product and designed an outsole meant to have the best traction no matter the surface and a midsole welcoming lateral support. The Restfeel was designed to support the customer coming to and from a yoga studio or gym.

Known as an apparel brand, Lululemon took its fabric knowledge and turned that into footwear uppers, changing the levels of tension and stretch based on the movements required in the shoes. Every spot in the shoe’s upper gets tweaked to fit the need, some with more compression and less stretch to support lateral movement and others with added stretch for heel-to-toe movement.

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And in typical Lululemon fashion, the aesthetic of the shoes come distinct. “Part of feeling your best is not only comfort, but how you look,” Choe says. “We have had a good track record for creating a lot of demand for how to put a kit together head-to-toe. We took a lot of that color theory and things we know from guests and put it into footwear.” The footwear team offered tweaks and adjustments and Choe believes they have a fresh product for the market.

Lululemon plans to display footwear differently in retail stores, designing their own display cases meant to sit in the middle of the floor to better highlight their features and design, positioning the shoes at an angle, instead of just a profile view against the wall.

The initial four shoes offer a starting point for the new busines unit. “Based on the activities she participates in, we constructed how we wanted to launch this year,” Choe says. Men’s shoes will launch in 2023 and Lululemon will “continue to innovate on the upper materials,” incorporate additional feedback and play with colors and trims.

The origin story

When the heel strike became a central theme roughly four years ago, Lululemon decided to explore what that meant in terms of footwear creation. Oleson and a small team opened an office in downtown Portland, home to worldwide footwear makers and support businesses, in what he calls a hub and spoke model, basically with a startup mentality with Lululemon as the venture capitalist supporting his small group.

“We were able to pull in some of the best in the industry who had been looking at footwear forever,” he says. “It slowly turned from a startup to a center of excellence where we have something here and we are starting to prototype and bring in more resources. Now we are a business category, but it grew organically.” And it continues to grow, with the Portland office now at 30 employees.

The four-year process started with a concept and grew with research and eventually with engineering of a new midsole and fresh prototyping. Then came wear testing aplenty. “There were a lot of iterations along the way,” Oleson says. “We wanted to make the right piece of footwear that merits a place next to the pant wall and creates a unique sensation and feel.”

Basing in Portland helped get the team the experience it needed immediately. “We are a super desirable brand for some of the best of the best to come to and look at the category differently, to look at from a feel perspective,” Oleson says. “It might not sound like a lot, but it means everything to say we want to look at feel, then function with an aesthetic wrapper. It was an easy way to get some of the best talent in the industry.”

“We believe we do have quite a unique point of view by starting with women’s first and building this last from scratch and all the iterating we have done,” Choe says. “We are really changing the conversation in this space, so it is about the feeling.”