American shoe manufacturer Made Plus has added three new styles to its performance and lifestyle footwear options.
The Annapolis, Md.-based company added the Rippl, the company’s first U.S.-made performance running shoe as it enters the category for the first time. The shoe is available in two options, one is a lightweight performance trainer and the other is a race-day model featuring a Carbitex carbon fiber plate for increased propulsion and maximum responsiveness. The shoe is built on the brand’s new FluxCore platform, blending high-performance engineering with sustainable materials and domestic manufacturing. It also includes a rubber outsole and expanded rubber foam midsole for a fast, energetic under-foot feel.
“Performance is at the core of everything we’re building,” Made Plus founder and chief executive officer Alan Guyan told FN. “Rippl delivers the speed, responsiveness, and precision runners expect — without compromising our mission to manufacture in the U.S. This launch represents the start of an entirely new era of Made Plus innovation.”
Also new to Made Plus’s shoe lineup is the Bangr Pro, a next generation, competition-ready pickleball shoe. It features a reinforced performance upper, upgraded lateral support, and a thick, high-traction outsole featuring FlexGrid+ technology that’s engineered for aggressive stop-and-go movement to provide the responsiveness that competitive players demand.
The third shoe new to the lineup is the Velox TR, a versatile performance trainer for the gym, work, HIIT and everyday movement. The trainer shares the same design DNA with the Bangr Pro, featuring a reinforced upper, responsive midsole and grippy, multi-surface outsole.
The new shoes follow the opening of the brand’s first-ever retail pop-up shop in September, in Downtown Annapolis, a few miles from where it designs and manufactures its shoes. The pop-up is designed to give customers the ability to explore materials, as well as design and customize their footwear. The space is intended to be a hub for innovation and connection between brand and customer. Made Plus expects to create four to five new jobs over a six-month period.
Made Plus is known for its sustainable materials, as well as its shoe manufacturing process where every shoe is made-to-order. That in turn eliminates unnecessary waste and reduces the environmental impact, as well as shortens the development cycles. In comparison to traditional footwear manufacturing that uses more than 300 steps abroad, Made Plus produces its shoes in under 50 steps domestically. The nearly four-year-old brand, still considered early stage in the venture capital world, is funded through an angel investor. Its shoes have retail price points that range from $165 to $200.
In a telephone interview with Guyan, he said production is done in small batches, along with incoming orders. “We do some forecasting stuff for bigger lots that get delivered at a later date. We are a small company that’s still about 15 plus employees, plus some contractors.”
He said the firm’s small factory is “a little bit bigger than a sample room.” The factory has knitting machines, 3D-printing machines and advanced sewing machines set for footwear. “We have computerized stitching machines, we have the bonding operations and stuff like that,” he said, adding that the machines are manufactured in Asia, Europe and the U.S. that combined form “one big kit.”
As for reducing the 300 steps down to 50, Guyan explained: “We do that through advanced knitting techniques, and we [remove] certain parts of the shoe that we don’t think we definitely need, like the foam lining and stuff like that. And we make kind of like a sock [as an] upper. We spend most of our time on a complexity of the component versus the processes.”
The Made Plus founder said focusing on the complexity of each individual component enables the firm to get down to just the needed steps. He noted that the process also helps with labor too, as shoemaking can be labor intensive. “Reducing the way we create the material, using knitting, allows us to reduce the amount of consumption of materials, but also puts complexity [into the] components.”
Guyan said producing locally allows for “special make-ups, quick drops, quick-try products…that [lets us] get to market fast, but also gives us the opportunity to try out things quickly, iterate fast, and then decide which ones are more for our long-term, bigger volume stays.”
He isn’t ruling out the possibility of adding some hybrid production models down the road, depending on what items it may want to scale up and how some materials are sourced.
“Some of our materials are sourced domestically; some are sourced globally. Some of the global components we’ve had to rebuild our supply chain [due to tariffs]. We moved a lot of stuff out of China to Vietnam,” he said, adding that some of the rubber and foam are now developed in Vietnam. Domestic skilled labor is also a consideration, as is making rubber and foam tooling, which Guyan described as a “very hard challenge, let alone the pricing, which would be different” if sourced overseas, particularly if scaling up due to the capex required for higher volumes.
And while U.S. President Donald Trump has said that maybe shirts and shoes don’t need to be made domestically, Guyan said Made Plus’ customers have a different view.
“Our customers are extremely passionate about having product made here. How much we service those customers, how much volume is still to be determined, but I can assure you that some of our sales are just because we are made here, which is a kind of a nice thing,” Guyan said.
The next generation, competition ready pickleball shoe call the Bangr Pro from Made Plus. Courtesy of Made Plus.
