My name is Sami Hureaux, I am a field test engineer at Decathlon for the football brand Kipsta. My role within the design team is to have the products tested and to analyse the results in order to validate them in use. This allows us to improve products before to bring them to market and to claim certain benefits.
The sustainability project was started because Kipsta wanted to improve its products in terms of lifespan in order to improve customer satisfaction and be more sustainable. The main objective of this project was to understand the factors impacting the resistance of our football shoes and to succeed in controlling them. The idea is to objectively and scientifically quantify the lifespan of our shoes, in order to improve them to better satisfy users.
The main contribution of CTC in this project is ensure the availability of human and mechanical testing resources. Indeed, at Decathlon, we do not necessarily have all the machines available internally, nor human time to devote to each test. It is in this way that CTC has saved us a lot of time.
CTC contributed enormously to the Kipsta sustainability project through its expertise in footwear, but also through the accessibility of the teams. We were in collaboration on the choice of tests and the relevance of the results, the data provided are reliable and understandable. The international leader in quality control supported Decathlon on the technical and scientific side of the project from launch to completion.
By correlating the data collected in the field by Decathlon with the mechanical data collected by CTC, we came up with a high-performance solution. The study allowed us to quantify the defects of our products in use and to scientifically validate a mechanical representation of these same degradations.
Today, thanks to this collaboration between Kipsta and CTC in the sustainability project, we are able to assess the resistance of a product, characterize potential defects and optimize the performance of our shoes. We are able to reliably claim a theoretical lifespan.
Currently, the study is finalized on the football shoe. The objective is to duplicate this same methodology for any type of product and to continue to evaluate the new ranges and innovations developed by Kipsta.
