Made-to-measure

Gluing soles

For a supplier of a French footwear brand, we inspected a batch of 19,000 shoes and glued soles that had come unstuck back together: approximately 30,000 soles to be glued back together.

A very meticulous job: the operators had to apply glue, using a fine brush, under the unstuck sole and then apply light pressure to make the glue stick. The difficulty here lay in the amount of glue to use: if too large an amount of glue was applied, it overflowed and left marks, and too little glue didn’t stick the soles on sufficiently.

This job required more than 3,500 hours of work and took some twenty operators nearly four weeks.