Sports brand OEM: improving footwear upper peel strength

Customer Background

The customer is a sports shoe OEM in Fujian supplying upper processing services to several brands, with clear acceptance standards for peel strength and flex resistance after lamination.

The Problem

• Peel strength after upper lamination fluctuated and some batches missed the internal standard
• Large differences between fabric batches meant process parameters had to be adjusted repeatedly
• Localised micro-delamination appeared after the flex test

What We Did

Together with the customer we mapped the relationship between pressing temperature, pressure and dwell time, and supplied film with a matched surface treatment state for each fabric type, reducing process variation caused by substrate differences. We also proposed a formulation direction with better resilience to improve flex performance.

Results

• Peel strength became more consistent and batch-to-batch variation narrowed
• Flex test pass rate improved
• Line set-up frequency fell and production efficiency improved