Case Studies

See how some of the world’s leading brands are benefiting from Bestol’s experience and expertise across advanced materials and manufacturing processes.

Heel Liner

Overview:

Innovation and a focus on continued customer satisfaction breathe new life into a product coming to the end of its life-cycle.

The Challenge:

A major European brand was looking to refresh a dated product that was suffering from reliability and dissatisfaction issues, and leap ahead with new innovation in the fast-growing ladies high heel footcare market. Bestol was engaged to engineer and improve on the product’s functionality, with a particular focus on adhesion, reliability and comfort to delivery better customer satisfaction. 

The Solution:

Bestol worked closely with the client’s marketing team to identify areas of improvement for the current product line that was contributing to the declining customer satisfaction. A key challenge that we faced with the legacy product was delamination, which manifested with the heel liner gradually releasing from the leather shoe and falling in the shoe or sticking to the sock or stocking, resulting in a range of messy and dissatisfying outcomes.  The fundamental issue was that the legacy product relied on the tackiness of the urethane substrate to deliver the bonding function. This material and bonding function was inherently unstable with variable conditions in the shoe.

Faced with this challenge, Bestol’s engineers worked with a range of adhesive vendors and designed and tested various technologies that could bond successfully with urethane elastomers, and also with the diverse shoe materials.  Because no stock adhesives could provide this complex functionality, Bestol’s development team worked with several leading adhesive brands and tested dozens of new formulations, closely collaborating with our client’s R&D teams as well as the adhesive vendors technicians to finally develop exceptional material. 

This new material would need to be robust, and provide a permanent bond to the urethane gel, while providing sufficient tack to adhere to various leather shoes without while not destroying the leather finish.

The Success:

The results were exceptional, and the brand was able to make compelling, differentiating claims to the trade. This all led to a significant improvement of sales, as annual volume of increased more than 100%, surpassing 2,000,000 units within its first year on the market.
Today, almost a decade later, the brand enjoys the continued success of a product that was engineered to perform with durability.