All images: Courtesy of Armada
For the past five years, Armada has been designing a hybrid cabrio boot for their core audience of skiers and athletes. When asking this audience what they were looking for in a ski boot. They found that people love the way cabrio boots ski, yet the mention of cabrio boots having two main issues arose in the comfort and heel hold.
Cabrio boots get their flex profile from a tongue located at the front of the boot. This tongue design is extremely popular and sought after for its progressive flex. Progressive flex essentially means when you flex your boot to make a turn, the boot flex starts soft and progressively stiffens as the turn progresses. The downside of this design is when you make a tongue stiff enough for an aggressive and heavy skier, the plastic used must be extremely hard and pretty thick in diameter. When a tongue this stiff is compressed during a turn, it just crushes the top of the foot and causes pain. That is why many stiff cabrio boots come with an extremely thick wrap liner, which puts so much material between the top of the foot and the tongue that it doesn’t cause pain. Armada saw this scenario and decided to take a different approach.
Instead of deriving the boot’s flex entirely from the tongue, they added a small cuff which is bolted to the bottom shell boot at the spine. This cuff system is essentially how a 4-buckle boot gets its flex. By adding a cuff to the boot, Armada can distribute the boot’s flex needs between the cuff and tongue while still maintaining a progressive flex. This enables Armada to use a softer tongue instead of using one that is extremely hard. This softer tongue which when skied, will mold around the skier’s foot instead of crushing it. Which in turn will improve comfort and essentially eliminate the need for a bulky wrap liner. Instead, Armada can now use a standard tongue liner, which overall improves comfort out of the box.
Cabrio boots can also struggle with heel hold, which to many skiers can be frustrating, especially freestyle skiers who need their heels locked for butters and rail tricks. Armada addresses this by combining their softer tongue with an instep buckle that is anchored in numerous places below and above the ankle. This design provides a more equalized distribution of force across the instep, improving heel hold and reducing instep pain.
All in all, these are some pretty interesting innovations to improve the skiability and comfort of the Cabrio platform. Last month we were able to test this boot out at Brighton to see this new boot design in action. Check out the video below to see our thoughts.
