The red-hot item on this year’s winter runner’s Christmas list may well be Kahtoola’s NANOspikes.
The Flagstaff company had already established MICROspikes as a winter option for trail runners to slip over their shoes when founder Danny Giovale and his team went to work on developing a traction option for road runners back in 2011. The reasons to doing this were obvious from a business perspective. There are far more road runners than trail runners, and they inhabit a much more diverse territory.
Plus, the MICROspikes were so popular that runners were taking them to the roads anyway, wearing down the three-eighth-inch stainless steel spikes on concrete and asphalt, which they were never intended to tackle.
The challenge is in the fact that there were already good road-traction options from other companies. So Kahtoola needed to buy into the challenge of doing what the company does best: innovate.
“The thing Kahtoola prides itself on is we don’t want to put something on the market that anybody else has,” said Hilary Childs, Kahtoola marketing director.
“The NANO is truly distinguished from the MICROspike,” Giovale said. “We haven’t made incremental change. We’ve created a whole new product.”
Childs jokes that the NANOspikes are the “baby” of Chris Bunch, the head of the Kahtoola industrial design team. If pressed, Bunch admits this is his most satisfying professional achievement to date. But he deflects credit to the company and the long-range commitment to the NANOspikes concept. He speaks of company-wide meetings early on to identify the five goals that the fledgling idea must accomplish. Without consensus at that stage, they would not have moved forward, Bunch says.
He talks of subsequent brainstorming sessions with “lots of post-it notes” to determine how those goals might be achieved.
“This was not just my idea. It was everybody,” Bunch said. “I took these ideas to make prototypes and to see what ideas work.”
The Kahtoola team tested every low- and high-end product it could find, and embarked on a constant loop of feedback and testing of its own designs. Giovale says he paid for tooling that he knew they would likely never use on a market-ready product even though the quality still would have been very good. The eventual tooling, Giovale said, contained “the refinements that make the difference.”
The result is an 8.3-ounce low-profile product with serious innovation that belies its simple design.
Among the features that make NANOspikes unique are:
- A patent-pending evolved spike design, in which the 0.21-inch tungsten carbide studs are inserted into an aluminum anchor in a tapered platform that ensures the studs stay in place. Its gripping ability is not in question. One media representative successfully tried them out at the Jay Lively Activity Center when he visited Flagstaff. At trade shows, Kahtoola brings its 5-x-8-foot ice block, as other companies do, but unlike others, Kahtoola does not provide a support bar for testers.
- Textured, dual-compound plates that helps keep snow from sticking and provides flexibility under the shoe. It also disperses weight so the tips of the 10 studs can grip the ice and the pressure does not transfer upward into the users’ feet.
- Upward-facing traction, in which small nubs on the upper platform help prevent movement between the NANOspike plate and the shoe.
- A refined elastomer harness that is thin and light, with an arced profile that creates a more uniform stretch over the entire foot.
- Perhaps the most significant feature is another patent-pending design innovation, the reinforced eyelets. The six eyelets that connect the harness above the shoe to the two studded plates that fit below the shoe are no mere metal grommets. They are a powerful blend that ensures durability and a proper fit while allowing the product to maintain a light weight.
The staff hung dead weight off the eyelets in the back of Kahtoola’s South River Run Road headquarters to see how much they could withstand, Childs says. Inevitably, the harness would tear before the eyelets gave way.
“We’re not the first people to try to reinforce an eyelet,” Giovale said. “We were the first people that got it to stay.”
“The overmolded eyelets weren’t just a design challenge,” Bunch said. “It was also a materials and an engineering challenge.”
The branding challenge was to leverage the equity afforded by the success of MICROspikes without sabotaging the flagship product or confusing customers into purchasing a product that does not meet their specific needs – either road or trail use.
For quite a while, Giovale says, he expected they would tack a word on, such as MICROspikes Light or MICROspikes Nano. Ultimately though, the desire to distinguish the product led to the shorter, but still familiar, construction of NANOspikes.
“That gives it more identity and puts the brand back on Kahtoola,” Giovale said, noting how Apple takes the same approach with its ubiquitous iPhones, iPads and many other products.
The founder also remembers the same uncertainty with MICROspikes when they were launched before the name became common and the seemingly obvious choice.
“It’s like a baby’s name,” he said. “Once it’s done and you like the kid, you like the name.”
The $49.95 price tag reflects Kahtoola’s commitment to its running audience. Kahtoola balanced the quality-price equation with runners in mind, Giovale notes. Some people may want to use the NANOspikes for shoveling snow and walking the dog, and they can find cheaper options. But they also might enjoy the increased durability that comes with paying a little more.
“We consider runners to be our most demanding market,” he said. “Fifty dollars for runners, that will blow out the other competitors’ products, and we needed to nail that.”
Always looking ahead, Giovale says the process of creating the NANOspikes led to a wealth of information that could result in refinement of existing products or new products in future seasons. But that is a topic for another day. As winter descends across the country, the real testing is about to begin. FBN
By Myles Schrag
Flagstaff Business News
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