We caught up with lead designer Mahsa Aryan, and the players who helped bring the F50 SparkFusion to life, Trinity Rodman of Washington Spirit and Mia Fishel of Chelsea F.C. Women, to hear about the inspiration, process, and what this moment means for women’s soccer.
Teen Vogue: How did this come to be, what were the initial steps in bringing this to life from ideation to creation?
Mahsa Aryan: This has been in the works for many many years, we have always been mulling over the idea, “Do we create a women’s only cleat?”
When we pulled a group of our internal experts together, we had this conversation about three and a half years ago. And we said, well, we have enough data and insights to say that there is a need for it. Anatomically, her foot shape is different and bio-mechanically, we believe that she moves differently on pitch and therefore needs boots that are catered towards her. So that was kind of the starting point of kicking everything off, but really throughout the entire process, the basis of everything was really just making sure that no matter what decisions we were making, they’re found on female insights and what we believe is best for the the women players.
Courtesy of brand.
TV: So during this process did you work closely with female athletes? Were they part of the conversation? How did that work?
MA: Absolutely, we work with our female and male players throughout all of our creations and in this one we wanted to heavily skew and only speak with female players. And one of the first female players I was very involved with from the beginning was Trinity Rodman.
And she told us right off the bat, first of all, how important it is to have a mid-cut silhouette. So the one that actually has a sock on it is her preferred style, and she said that, you know, when you come to North America and you see women play, that’s the vast majority of the type of boots that we play in.
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