Prize winners
Safety footwear styles made an impression on the jury at the German Design Awards 2021.
The winners of the 2021 German Design Awards were named in March at a ceremony that, this year, had to be digital only. The German Design Council, which presents these awards every year, describes the competition as one of its core duties as it attempts to “observe, analyse and evaluate international developments in design”. It’s an international competition and, in 2021, there were 4,200 entries from 60 countries.
In the end, the council this year chose 76 winners in three award disciplines: Excellent Product Design, Excellent Communications Design and Excellent Architecture. The product design category breaks down further into more than 30 sub-categories. Shoe companies are at liberty to submit entries for a number of these, including luxury goods, sports, outdoor activities and leisure, as well as lifestyle and fashion.
However, it is the industry sub-category that is of greatest interest to makers of safety and work shoes and boots. Among the winners in Excellent Product Design this year, there were several work and safety shoe styles, with the winners being reviewed here.
Sporty look
Lippstadt-based footwear group ISM Heinrich Krämer celebrated the success of two of its safety shoes in the awards. The Aer55 Impulse Blue Orange Low, which it makes under its Albatros brand, and the Frontside Low shoe, which it makes under the Puma Safety brand, were both named as winners.
The Aer55 Impulse Blue Orange Low uses proprietary technology called Impulse foam in the midsole, which the manufacturer says returns up to 55% of energy to the wearer. It has loops on the tongue and at the heel for the specific purpose of making the shoe easy for workers to put on and take off, but ISM Heinrich Krämer claims that it has managed to make these loops into “an additional design element”. Comments from the jury at the German Design Awards included compliments for a sporty look that helps makes this a modern work shoe.
High-level comfort
ISM Heinrich Krämer’s other winning entry, the Puma Safety Frontside Low, also has a modern sneaker look, the manufacturer states. But it has safety-enhancing footwear technology throughout. There is a fibreglass toe-cap and FAPlite proprietary protection against penetration. The shoe also has a non-slip rubber outsole with thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) reinforcements.
This style also has foam technology to provide energy return that ISM Heinrich Krämer calculates to be 60%. This technology is called Effect Foam, which the company uses throughout a safety footwear line called Urban Effect. It further calculates that the foam can lower the impact on the wearer’s bones and joints by 47%, offering what it calls “a permanently high level of comfort for fatigue-free working, all day long”. In its statement about the product, the jury said it combines a fashionable, sporty look with technology to provide safety aspects and “the promise of great comfort”.
For women
Another winning entry, the Nora safety shoe from Louis Steitz Secura, is designed specifically for women to wear at work. It is light in weight, and is especially adapted to fit women’s feet well.
Fit is at the forefront of the design, with four widths for each shoe length. It avoids seams and uses a leather insole for a healthy foot climate for wearers, with safety features that include an abrasion-resistant toe-guard, a heel trim in TPU for stability and an anti-slip sole. The jury at the Awards said the shoe combined safety aspects with “outstanding accuracy of fit and maximum wearing comfort”.
Long-term health benefits
Lightness in weight and special attention to shoe width and comfort are qualities that also characterise the Garant safety shoe from Hoffmann, which completes the safety footwear line-up at the 2021 awards.
The Garant shoe also has an aluminium protective toe-cap and a weight-dependent range of damping. The manufacturer insists that this can reduce stress on the wearer’s knees and back, offering health benefits over the long term.
The German Design Awards first ran in 1969 as ‘The Federal Awards for Good Design’. The competition adopted its current name in 1992 and it was in 2012 that the German Design Council began to host the competition. The Frankfurt-based body has an interesting history. In the late 1940s, German-designed products came in for criticism at international exhibitions and the government responded by setting up an organisation that would promote good design as a means of bringing economic and cultural benefits to German companies and to encourage them to use design to build “a bridge to the world”. It began its work in 1953 and is still going strong today.
The Garant work shoe from Hoffmann offers a weight-dependent range of damping to help reduce stress on the wearer’s knees and back.
Credit: Hoffmann
