Tech Tuesday: Lore Cycling Shoes, Customized and 3D Printed for An Exact Fit

When’s the last time you bought a pair of cycling shoes? Did you buy them online or at a bike shop? Did you choose your shoes based on fit, price, or other characteristics, or were you motivated by brand name alone?

Buying cycling shoes off the shelf and hoping they work for you is a process instilled with a large margin of error, much like buying a cycling saddle. The shoes may be too tight, too big, cause your feet to sweat, cause numbness, or not look good on your feet, etc. Silly, I know, but aesthetics do come into play as well as function and design.

Those days are over. Today, Lore Cycling can create a pair of 3D printed cycling shoes molded and customized to the dimensions of your feet. But it won’t be cheap.

Who is Lore Cycling?

Lore is a relatively new company. As a result, I was unable to find much information about them, such as who started the company, what its motivation was for starting a cycling shoe company, and other pertinent information.

What I did find is Lore’s mission statement. It says its quest is the “pursuit of the perfect pedal stroke.” That’s a pretty broad statement and one you hope would be defined by statistics or other data on what a highly expensive pair of cycling can do to make that happen, but those reasons are mostly absent. They do say their shoes are for all cyclists who want the most speed and the best performance.

The Lore Three (pictured above) is the third iteration of the company’s road shoes. Prior to this model, its shoes used BOA dials, but the company appears to have dumped that for a more traditional three-strap system. And the company is also offering, for the first time, a gravel riding shoe called The Watts.

Lore’s 3D Printing Technology

I don’t know a whole lot about the 3D printing process other than, perhaps, the potential steps it takes to achieve a prototype of a finished product: design, engineer, test, and get the final object. But those are just guesses about how the process of 3D printing works.

Lore says it uses a “breakthrough manufacturing technology; the Morphic, Scan+Print Carbon platform. Morphic enables precision fit and biomechanical performance that were previously inconceivable using traditional footwear and composite processes.”

The people behind Lore come from big name companies, such as Apple, Tesla, Nike, just to name a few, so it’s clear they know about engineering and design that produce award-winning products that consumers enjoy. Perhaps, due to their pedigree, that is why they choose to not overkill their shoes with fancy marketing campaigns.

Scan Your Feet With Your Phone, Lore Does the Rest

Lore states it only takes 45 seconds to scan your feet and lower legs. The catch is that you have to purchase a pair of shoes first. At $1,649 for a pair of shoes, this is a decision you should probably spend some time considering, which I would say, perhaps, includes doing the scan more than once to get it right.

The good thing is you’ll need a friend or someone to help you do the scan. What Lore calls a scan is basically a video. If you’re curious, check out the website to watch a video about how to do it. Once complete, you email the video back to Lore where it will take 6 to 8 weeks for them to complete your shoes.

If you’re not comfortable having a friend film your video for you, you can go to a local bike shop that sells Lore shoes and the staff there will help you. The only problem with that is that there are not many bike shops in the United States that sell Lore shoes. I’d say that, basically, the process seems fairly easy and straightforward, just take your time with it.

Last Thoughts

Lore’s shoes look cool and interesting. Would I ever shell out almost $2,000 to try them out? Not without a lot of guilt and potential buyer’s remorse. But there are those in the cycling world who strive to have the best of the best because it brings out the extraordinary in them, at least that’s what they believe.

Molding shoes for a custom fit, however, is not an overly new idea, only the 3D printing process part is. Companies such as Bont, Lake, Specialized, and Shimano used heat molding so riders could customize their cycling shoes. But these processes produced imperfect results, plus it wasn’t the whole shoe designed around a rider’s foot, just the footbed.

Lore can be a lot more accurate with what it is doing, so give it a shot if you feel you can afford it. You might just find your all-time favorite cycling shoes and won’t have to buy another pair for a long, long time.