My name is Mark Busby, I am the Climbing Category Manager for Scarpa North America.
Onto the fun stuff, this is the specialised performance part of the 2016 Scarpa Rockshoe
Collection. All these shoes are quite downturned in their heel-to-toe profile and they're
also quite asymmetric in their footprint, so that's a common characteristic. But what
we can see is that we've got this continuum from a more supportive front-pointing type
of shoe with the boot stick going through to the furrier, which is a much more malleable,
much softer, much more sensitive shoe. So I'll start off by talking about the boot
stick. It's just been in the line for a little while. It's an incredibly good front-pointing
shoe, so if you're going up to do some sport climbing on granite and you're climbing on
tiny little edges, if you're up at Smith Rocks, if you're on real little crimpers, if you're
in Romney, a really, really supportive shoe. We've got this full-length outsole that's
matched with the excess edge, so it's a great front-pointing shoe. When I say front-pointing,
I do really mean that you climb in a slightly different style to how you'd climb in some
other shoes, and once you get used to that, you can really stand on tiny, tiny edges.
So a really important shoe. This is the Booster S. For me, this is the Desert Island shoe
out of the Specialised Performance line. Sure, it's a Specialised shoe, but it's probably
less Specialised than some of the other parts. When you see it, you can just see how much
work Heinz has done in designing it, and one of the things that's really nice about this
shoe is that straight out of the box, it feels broken in, it feels very, very sensitive,
it feels very, very supportive, and we see this brilliant tri-fold active randing underneath
and that kind of huge arch support, and it's just a very, very technical shoe that if you're
trying hard, it's a perfect shoe to move into. So if that's your Desert Island shoe, you
want to keep it for the maximum amount of good sends, so maybe you want something to
train in. And I mean, the sticks is $30 cheaper, so maybe that allows you to train in this
and then keep this for best. However, I mean, I love this shoe, the profile at the front,
this extension active rand just really grips onto your foot, and I'm sure that you could
climb just as hard in this as you could in this. It's just a question of this, and that's
one of the really nice things about the Scarpa line. We've got different combinations of
active rands, different combinations of lasts, and there's really something for everyone
in the line. So if this is a training slipper, it sits kind of that side, if we move over
to the furia, this is a super-specialised, super-performing shoe. It's super soft, super
malleable. This incredible amount of rubber wraps around the front, and it really supports
and sucks onto the shoe. In this shoe, and at all the Scarpa shoes, because of the way
our active rand works, you don't need to downsize too much. And in fact, if you downsize a lot,
it can be really, really bad for you. What we can see is if you go too small, this rubber
can kind of bulge out, and you can kind of get premature wear spots. So particularly
in a shoe like this, don't downsize too much. And you know, this is the route that you send
that particular sandstone boulder problem in, goes back in your bag, and then you kind
of, you go into this guy, or you go training with this guy. So that leaves this new one,
the sexy new Drago. So this beauty was just launched in Friedrichshafen, and it's a limited
release, and we actually said we were going to make a thousand pairs globally, and unfortunately
they're all snapped up at the European show. So it's a July release in North America, and
it's actually the first North American shoe to break the $200 price point. There's so
much kind of technology and build that goes into making something like this, and the Scarpa
factory in Italy is so good at what they do, you know, you can take a shoe, and you can
copy a look, but it's kind of a, it's a difficult, pretty to construct, and you know, that's
part of the reason it comes in at that price point. When we see that, the way that we've
had to pull this rubber up, and we can see that there's actually quite a bit more than
the furia, it's really, really hard to do that precisely every time, of course, every
shoe size in the range, it's really, really difficult to do, and kind of contrasting the
two shoes, we can see that we dropped the lower Velcro strap to enable us to have that
greatest degree of rubber coverage, and that gives us that ability to kind of clamp a lot
more than we've been able to in some of the other parts of the line. If we flip the shoes
over, we can see that both of the shoes have got that partial outsole and the PCB active
branding, but the actual heel cups are different, and I'll just grab the Instinct VS, and we
can see that we've got the Instinct heel, which as I said before is probably one of
the best heels that not just in our line, but in the market today. So, this shoe is
an absolutely aspirational shoe, it's a shoe that I think some people are just going to
absolutely have to have, I think it's a shoe that a lot of our athletes are going to go
and climb in, and it's a real pinnacle piece for our line, so that's really the Scarpa
collection.
