NATALIE CARDENAS
DAVA ARTESANAL
DAVA Artesanal is an artisanal shoe company based out of Oaxaca, Mexico. Working as a consultant and expanding my skills in design for scale and manufacturing, my team and I partnered with DAVA Artesanal to increase and speed their manufacturing process. We looked for bottlenecks in their manufacturing process, and I helped translate and communicate with the company to better understand their needs and pain points. We were able to tackle their biggest bottleneck, and create a new sole making design that would remove 25% of waste, and would speed production by over 150%.
STAGE I
We first had to assess the clients' pain points in the factory and where bottlenecks tend to arise during the operation. The two main points of concern that we found were that it took quite a considerable amount of time to cut a pair of shoes, and the dilenation of the blue on the fabric of the shoe had to line perfectly with the sole, and such had a very low tolerance that was prone to errors. Each error add hours of work.
We introduce the company to a new manufacturing process, which involves heating vulcanized rubber to the form of the machine and conducted a series of prototypes to see the time saved during the process, and if there is a good turnover for the significant investment in the beginning. Our functional prototype involves a small CNC "baby shoe" to model the mechanism and see if it is as cost-saving, user friendly, and efficient.
Our previous rubber was not the correct material and did not melt and adhere well unto itself, so with the added lead time We started working on our final prototype to mimic the shoe production process. We used an induction stove to heat the mold quickly and evenly, as well as used a pressure jig with the foot mold and the shoe material adhered to the sides. These are the parameters and testing that we were able to do in our lab workspaces over long distance, as their factory is based in Oaxaca and our lab was based in Cambridge. We were able to successfully create a shoe with exquisite detail, and even added their logo to the shoe for added effect. We advise them that although the initial investment is quite high, the return on investment is significant enough where they would be able to make their money back well within one fiscal year.
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