If you ask people whether they know BOA fasteners, they either admit "I've never heard of them!" or "Sure, I have the new Li2 system from BOA on my MTB shoes!". The fastening system with the dial is often not recognised as a brand in its own right, but as part of a particular brand's shoes.
Or people are fans of the BOA fastener. And this system has been around for quite a long time. But who is behind this almost inconspicuous rotating wheel? We paid a visit to the headquarters of BOA Technology GmbH for the EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) sales area.
The first surprise: the headquarters are not in a large city. Instead, the company is based in picturesque Mondsee in Austria - in an 800-year-old manor house with a view of the surrounding Alpine peaks. The interview we conducted there with Alois Badegruber, General Manager EMEA /Global Business Unit Director - Mountain EMEA, you will find below.
BOA also has sites in Denver in the USA, where the US headquarters are located. There are also sites in Chiba, Japan, in Seoul, South Korea, as well as in Hong Kong and Shenzhen in China, where production also takes place.
BOA fastener - for almost any application
The second surprise: even if you are familiar with the twist lock system from your MTB shoes, it is amazing how many other areas it is used in: ski and snowboard boots, running shoes, work shoes, golf shoes...
Accordingly, there is more than just one BOA system, but three levels, each with a few variants. For the so-called low power dials - i.e. fasteners for low tensile loads - as used on bike shoes or MTB helmets, there is the well-known Li2, L6 or S3. For mid and high power dials, there are further model lines with M and H. BOA Technology holds a total of 260 patents.
And the spare parts for all these little cogs, trains and guides are available at the BOA headquarters on Lake Mondsee. This is also where the customer service is located. Next surprise: If a wheel breaks or a cable breaks, BOA offers its customers a free replacement. Without any enquiry or investigation as to who is to blame for the defect. However, the "sewn parts", i.e. the contact points of the BOA parts with those of the shoe manufacturer, are excluded here.
Tested and approved
To be able to offer this service, BOA must be sure that its installed parts will last. To this end, tests are carried out in-house. Employees ride their after-work laps, athletes take BOA fasteners with them to training or races and the laboratory also gets down to business.
The top model Li2, for example, should easily be able to be opened 5500 times - that corresponds to around 15 years of normal use. The thin pull rope can withstand more than 24 kilos of weight or pulling force. According to BOA, it has carried out a total of 700 test runs in 2023.
And a fun fact at the end: the dial of a Boa fastener can pop off in the event of a hard impact against an obstacle to prevent it from breaking off. You can then simply put it back on again. This mechanism can also be utilised for cleaning with running water. Simply use a wide slotted screwdriver to carefully lever the cap at the marked point.
Interview with Alois Badegruber, General Manager at BOA
We asked Alois Badegruber, General Manager EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) at BOA, for an interview.
BIKE: I was surprised that BOA is based here in Mondsee and not, for example, in Salzburg or Vienna. How did it come about and how did it start here?
Alois Badegruber: Eleven years ago, or even a little longer, BOA decided to set up a European headquarters and was looking for a location that was somehow in central Europe and had good connections. We knew that we were set for good and solid growth, that we would build up a relatively large amount of business in Italy, that we had an important market, a German-speaking market that characterises Europe.
BOA then had the idea of looking for a managing director, and if you have one, that will also influence the choice of location. They found me after I had already worked with BOA in another position and successfully launched shoes with the BOA fastener and FIT system on the market. As Mondsee actually had a few more advantages than disadvantages compared to Salzburg, we stayed in Mondsee. I'm originally from the area.
And what kind of building is this? I imagined it to be completely different, of course. But a manor house is quite chic.
Yes, this is an 800-year-old estate that used to belong to Mondsee Castle. Back then, castles had to produce their food somewhere and so they had several farms like this to supply the castle. And this was one of them.
We're sitting here in the front part, which is the oldest part of the whole thing. At the back, of course, everything has been renovated and hollowed out and built into and added to over the centuries. It was actually ideal for us because we've now been able to expand three or four times in this building and are well and truly established.
I've already seen a bit of what BOA covers in terms of equipment. But perhaps briefly again, what are your company's main areas of specialisation?
We have two centres of excellence among all our locations worldwide. One is Denver, where we actually come from originally, where our global headquarters are. The second centre of excellence is Mondsee.
This means that certain categories are also managed globally from here and the strategy for these categories is passed on on a global basis. That's workwear, that's everything that's snow sports and outdoor. And cycling, for example, is split 50-50. Once in the US and once here.
Ultimately, all of our brand partners based in this region are supported from here, regardless of their category. And also the technology, i.e. everything relating to factory training, factory support, development training and brand support, prototype construction, concept realisation and so on. This is all done here for our partners.
How does it work: Is it the manufacturers who approach BOA and say, we would like to have this in this new shoe somehow? Or do you say we can imagine doing this with this or that shoe - are you interested?
That's both and. Basically, we are not desperately looking for new partners. I actually have to say that most of them approach us. And we now have a selective process. So it's not that we necessarily want to work with everyone, because it should make sense somewhere. And we have our ideas about how it should work.
And we work with the partners we have. You can say that sometimes the partner comes up to us and says, hey, I want to do this and that. How do we do that? Or I've done something before. Does it work like that? Or we approach partners when we see an opportunity somewhere and see an initiative, then of course we roll out this initiative to our partners. Be it if we have a new part, if we have any new configurations or new findings.
We have scientists in-house. And these studies that come out are then scientifically tested and must also have a certain significance and relevance. We work closely with the University of Denver because of the proximity to our FITLAB in Denver.
So that means that your scientific work finds its way into shoe development to the extent that you say something works better this way than otherwise according to the study - and the shoe manufacturer then adapts its products?
Exactly. So what you find out there is what BOA brings to the customer. You discuss what you can do, where you can improve a product, how you could make it better. We always talk about two types of configurations. One is lace replacement, i.e. simply replacing the lacing with a Boa system. This is where the banal advantages of Boa come into play.
However, it is better if the shoe is actually perfectly constructed to really utilise all the advantages that Boa offers. With overlap panels, straps that go over the midfoot area, you can really improve the fit of the shoe considerably. And therefore also the power transmission and so on.
What is the next step at product level, what is BOA planning?
The parts that we sell and manufacture today look completely different to those that we made 10 or 20 years ago. And that's exactly how we're continuing. We have a clear idea that an L7 will come at some point and, of course, that these parts will become more and more sustainable.
You can already see this in products where we have installed a Kastor Bean coil, use significantly more regrind (editor's note: recycled plastic from production) in the materials and thus improve the product itself through the design, making it more durable, but also making it more environmentally friendly.
Sustainability: So what is your company doing in this direction?
Yes, sustainability is of course a very important issue. Unfortunately, we manufacture plastic parts. If you make them durable, then you're already taking a good step, because then they won't be replaced so often. So you produce a lot less waste.
We have also taken steps to recycle our own production waste, which thankfully works very well with the injection moulding process, known as regrind. When I started with BOA eleven years ago, 50 per cent of the virgin plastic we bought was converted into our products. The rest was waste.
And that has changed massively. We keep the waste part very small because we use the material again and again. Then we have done many, many things to simply make the packaging one hundred per cent sustainable and simply switch to 100 per cent recycled materials.
Are there also targets that have already been defined in terms of sustainable production?
Yes, we say that we actually want to be Virgin Plastic-free by 2031.
How about taking the step towards something completely new, such as your own shoe?
No, that doesn't really make sense. We are specialists in this fit system market. That's our business model. Making shoes now, distributing them, stocking them and... It would be like Shimano or Sram making a bike. I'm very, very sure they won't do that.
Marc Strucken
Editor
