Crimping or blocking is the process. It’s actually one of the most demanding procedures in footwear production and could be considered more of an art, than a process. In shoe upper crimping, a piece of material is shaped in three dimensions in order to fit and follow the front part of a finished shoe, based on the design lines.
It is a process that traditionally needs skill attention and has high costs, due to the waste of materials, trimming in the old process and many wasted components.
The classic operation involves a type of machine that plastically deforms the leather or synthetic material in a two dimensions profile, which has big material allowances all around it, since the process is not accurate at all and then based on a trimming pattern the component after forming is re-cut at the design lines.
Due to the nature of the process, a series of issues arise such as surface deformations wrinkles breakings and many more and this is where the art comes in, since there are numerous tricks and variations for each material in order to improve but never solve the crimping puzzle.

Our company has been traditionally developing 3d crimping systems with the latest generation eliminating in most cases all the issues presented above, the needed skill is eliminated together with the wasted materials and the skilled operators.