Interview Lake Cycling

Lake Cycling is renowned for the fit and performance of its cycling shoes. Leather Naturally caught up with them to learn more about two new models just launched and the part that leather plays in helping them fulfil a mission to create the most innovative performance cycling shoes.

LN: tell us about Lake Cycling

Lake cycling’s core business since 1982 Is in design, development and manufacturing of Cycling Specific foot wear. We wholly own our manufacturing facility that makes all of our top-level racing shoes. All of our products are developed in-house by our design/development engineer who brings over 20 years of experience designing cycling shoe for Lake along with a core manufacturing team that has multiple decades of experience in cycling footwear manufacturing.

Lake’s mission has always been to create the most comfortable, best fitting, innovative and highest functioning cycling shoes by utilizing our decades of experience in conjunction with the best and most advance materials.

LN: there’s a lot of buzz around your new launches, how do you use leather to enhance the performance?

The Lake MX238 brings together several high-quality materials in order to build performance oriented Mountain Bike racing shoe that not only excels in comfort and function but also having enhanced upper durability. The main body / vamp of the shoes uses leather sourced from Ecco Tannery that is light weight, supple, breathable and highly Water Resistant. The Toe and heel use leather from Helcor Ledertec that is extremely durable while maintaining the positive properties of leather.

CX332 offers many of the features and functionality that are expected in a top-pro-level racing shoe but with the comfort that is only gained from Leather. The upper is Kangaroo Leather source from Packer Leather Tannery. We have over 30 years working relationship with Packer and have found that their Leather provides not only the light weight performance needed at the pro-level but also the benefit of breathability and form fitting that you can only get from leather.

LN: what inspires your use of leather and what are the benefits for cycling shoes?

We use leather purely for the functionality and comfort level that is impossible to gain from synthetics or textiles. The flexibility, form fitting, breathability, durability and esthetic possibilities has always made leather the obvious choice for our products. We embrace the uniqueness that leather offers and believe it enhances not only the performance of the product but the feeling and soulfulness that it brings to our shoes.

Form fitting for comfort and fit are main benefits, but it goes beyond that. We can use leather that is engineered to have increased durability and water resistance while not giving up the natural properties that makes leather attractive.

LN: can you tell us any more about the leathers you work with?

We are proud to say all the leather upper materials we use come from respected and environmental conscious suppliers. These facts are quite important to our core customer base as well as the responsibility that we take in our company to have a positive impact not only on the sport but the world itself. We currently source our leather from 4 different tanneries to utilize their expertise in the leathers they manufacture: Pittards for Water Resistant Winter Boots, Packer for Kangaroo leather used in Top-Pro-Level racing shoes, ECCO for core comfort collection Racing shoes, Helcor for durability applications.