Choo choo. All aboard.

Normally when I’m doing product design, I’m 6-9 months out from the planned launch date. The concept, market potential, the product development and where it fits into the portfolio comes first, and then only the patternmaking begins.

And in the last few weeks I had just finalized what I thought was a Chelsea boot pattern, ready for a release into the Frontier line.

But first, a bit of background that led up to the decision of making a Chelsea, the eventual patternmaking and subsequent train wreck.

Broadly generalizing, the Malaysian market is a ‘lazy’ market. People love slip on shoes, due to many homes, mosques, temples and businesses having a shoes off policy.

Culturally, most also people grow up wearing slippers (flip flops or thongs for those in other parts of the world) and if wearing closed toed footwear, a loose fit is also generally preferred.

My suspicion for this is due to a) if it rains, it pours. So just embrace that your feet are going to get soaked, and b) easy on, easy off.

With daily average humidity around 80% and temperature at 33 degrees (or 92 degrees in Freedom Units) you can also understand why people may not want to lace up tight, or at all.

So that’s the customer side.

From a market perspective, there is nothing locally made at a certain quality point in the Chelsea boot segment. I’d received many enquiries about when I’d be releasing one, so it was simply a matter of understanding what, when and how it would fit into the product lineup.

That being said, just by receiving enquiries and deciding to build is a decision based on 1 dimension. If the price isn’t right, it simply doesn’t matter how many enquires there are.

I’d experienced this already. A story for another day.

Some patterns are harder to execute.

But first, let’s address the rear pull loop. With the pattern already designed, and a single test boot made from the master, I thought sure, should be fine.

Wrong.

When building a few more pairs of fitting boots, I’d noticed that there was the possibility of having a noticeable off-centre positioning for the rear pull loop.

This was part due to the width of the loop being relatively narrow, which would make it more visually noticeable if it was slightly off center, and partly due to the seam that ran up the rear of the boot, where both quarters were sewn together.

This seam, if not knocked completely flat, could upset the centering of the pull tab which was overlaid and sewn onto it. Or the sewing machine itself could accidently run along the seam and be shifted off its positioning when sewing the pull loop.

Now a little amount of offcenteredness is fine in my philosophy. After all, that’s the charm of buying a product in this segment. Everything is made with human hands.

So in the end, I decided that it just needed more care in assembly and pushed the thought out of my mind. Problem solved.

Wrong again.

Pattern positioning influences durability.

Onto the front pull tab. My pattern was a Chelsea with a vamp that you might commonly see on more rugged Chelsea work boot styles. i.e. Intersecting the quarters before the elastic goring, rather than directly underneath the goring, or not at all, as with a wholecut.

Designing the pattern in this way eliminated the need for blocking out the vamp before lasting, where if it’s to be done by hand, takes at least a day of blocking and drying time.

Plus, my pattern choice had the added benefit of never being seen in the Malaysian market.

So despite boot nerds looking down on non-wholecut Chelsea patterns, initial focus groups in the local market thought that a non-wholecut Chelsea was quite revolutionary.

Perspective is amazing right.

Back to the story.

Now the Chelsea vamp ended in a pull tab poking above the topline, that can be pulled when putting the boots on. The pull tab wasn’t a separate piece of leather or a nylon loop sewn to the vamp, but rather it was incorporated into the vamp piece itself.

That is, the vamp just extended past the topline of the quarters, leaving some excess leather to pull on. That was the pull tab.

This was my second concern that I’d initially brushed off, ‘was it durable enough?’

Safe is better than sorry.

I’d realized after building the first test boot, that the stitching on the vamp attaching it to the quarters at the pull tab base may not be strong enough to withstand pulling.

The root cause was that the stitching allowance wasn’t wide enough. Ideally, at least at the topline, the lateral and medial side quarters stitching allowance should overlap, to reinforce where the pull tab base would be stitched onto it.

I’d also forgotten to take into account the curvature of the last at the top of the instep where the quarters stitching allowance was overlaid by the vamp piece. What a mouthful.

The sentence above could be expanded into a 2,000 word essay on the topology of lasts and how what you think is a straight line in a 2d pattern actually isn’t when put on a 3d last. But for simplicity, let’s just keep it as is. You’ll have to trust me.

Long story short. I was concerned that when the pull tab was pulled, over time it may rip the vamp piece away from the quarters, starting at the topline stitching.

Again, because it wasn’t reinforced enough by the stitching allowance due to my error in the pattern making.

Trainwreck.exe

By the time my brain was at ease, I’d tweaked the pattern so much that it had become a completely new pattern. Which had confirmed that unfortunately, the rat was correct, and I was wrong.

I reversed the pull loop, sewing the end under the heel cap, instead of on top of it. I’d also redesigned the heel cap shape, making it less noticeable if the pull loop above it was slightly off center.

As a by-note, using curves in a pattern rather than harder, squared edges make symmetry less noticeable. Curved lines give more room for off centered-ness, compared to if patterns have hard, square edges, where a human eye can easily catch if something isn’t squared.

Secondly, the vamp pull tab. This wasn’t as straightforward to redesign. I liked the idea of the incorporated pull tab in the vamp, but it just needed more structural integrity. Unfortunately this meant I had to redesign the quarters and associated stitching allowance that allowed the vamp to be stitched more securely to it.

So I lengthened the quarters stitching allowance to overlap at the topline, effectively reinforcing themselves.

The redesign kept going until I was really satisfied.

I also experimented with my lining pattern.

Normally, Outstation boots are unlined in the shaft, leaving only the vamp fully lined. However, in the case of this Chelsea pattern, I had lined only the front half of the vamp, leaving the instep of the vamp unlined.

I was worried that lasting both an upper and a lining of considerable thickness without any blocking (despite the pattern being designed to mitigate this) wasn’t going to be feasible at the instep.

But I never tested my theory. And as you guessed it, I was wrong.

I decided to extend the vamp lining to go all the way up the instep, essentially mirroring the vamp upper, where it was also stitched underneath the quarters stitching allowance. This gave another level of structure behind where the pull tab was.