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Designing Football Boots

At Adidas, it鈥檚 Senior Design Director, Dave Surace and Senior Product Director, Rob Ashcroft鈥檚 job to create the next pair of football boots for the year ahead.

These boots - if a success - will go on to sit on shop shelves across the world and grace the feet of the biggest footballing stars.

In this episode of In the Studio, football journalist Raphael Honigstein guides us through this creative duo's process, as they balance new, exciting ideas with tried and tested formulas that have brought the company success before.

We鈥檒l join Dave as he sketches out the new design, discussing the delicate balance between emerging technologies and the dream boots he has in his mind. He鈥檚 also keen to reflect the history of the sport too, taking us inside the Archive Room to search for design inspiration from the past.

For Rob, his domain lies in what鈥檚 worked before. Armed with the stats about which designs sell well and why, he guides Dave and his team towards a boot that not only looks good, but performs well on the pitch and the shop floor too.
But what is success for them both? A slick design? An impressed athlete? Or a sales boom? And which one of these takes precedence when designing a new football boot?
We follow the next steps in the process - from the rigorous testing to the storytelling around the launch - and hear the final moment when Dave and Rob get to unbox their creation for the very first time.

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30 minutes

Podcast