For 15 great years, we worked with an amazing custom orthotic insole prescription company called TOG to make fantastic orthotics. We had a great experience with TOG over many years, but eventually, it was time for us to move on and go our own way. This was when the journey to create our own custom orthotic insoles began. It turned out to be a slightly more challenging journey and anticipated, like a lot of the best journeys.

We took what we learned about customer orthotic insoles from working with tog, but more importantly, working with thousands of patients over the years. We combined all these learnings to create what we believe to be a superior orthotic insole, one of the best on the market today. In our otherwise humble opinion, at least.

The secret to a tremendous custom orthotic prescription is that it needs to be customised for the person. Still, it also requires the right strength and flexibility to support the body’s tissues biologically appropriately. Many of the custom orthotic insoles on the market are about as flexible as your television remote, whilst others are made of foams so soft that they supply very little support to the foot under weight-bearing. We believe that the Goldilocks zone is a solid but flexible orthotic because the arch of your foot is strong but flexible.

The first challenge we faced in making our custom orthotic insole prescription was the biggest one: the development of materials. The current materials used to create custom orthotic prescriptions are very hard or soft plastics. In the middle, however, many good orthotic insoles on the market are made of a plastic called PETG. 

PETG is a good material, but we believe it could be better. It lacks some of the qualities of the human foot and is also prone to cracking when exposed to the extreme stress of millions of foot strikes while walking on hard surfaces. TOG orthotic insoles were great, but they did tend to start cracking beyond the 3-year mark, especially with heavier patients.

Our approach to this challenge was to work with an engineering company. They conducted an exhaustive search of every light, flexible material on the planet and narrowed the choices to a handful of options. Through this process, we came down to five possibilities: five materials with the correct balance of strength, flexibility, and lightness necessary for an orthotic: strong enough to support the foot, flexible enough not to harm the foot, and light enough to walk and run long distances in the long term.

One of the five materials was PETG. We were aware that the industry might ultimately use PETG for custom orthotic prescriptions because it is simply the best, so we had to remain open to that possibility.

The next step was the most fun by far. We worked with the engineers to create a robot that destroys orthotics.

The robot had one arm that anchored the custom orthotic to a bench and another arm that hammered the orthotic with 100 KG force 60 times a minute. Admittedly, it didn’t have a cool robot face or anything, but it was definitely an orthotic-killing robot. 

This meant that we had a custom orthotic killer who could test the orthotics and see how they responded to the type of stresses they needed to absorb if they were going to last for years being stomped on thousands of times a day. Bearing in mind that a custom orthotic must be compressed 10,000 times a day, even in an average active person, this adds up to over 5 million steps yearly. Let alone what the custom orthotic prescription goes through when you prescribe it to an ultra-marathon runner, as we do.

So, once the robot was made, we started using it to kill custom orthotics. The first three materials we tested were obscure plastic polymers with a strong track record for strength and flexibility, some of which are used in aerospace. The first of these only lasted a couple of hours of punishment—two hours of being bashed 60 times per minute by the cruel robot before it cracked. The second two materials were formed into orthotic insoles and received the same punishment, and neither lasted much longer between 4 and 6 hours.

This process meant that after researching thousands of material options, we came down to the industry, standard PTG, and another material known as Nylon 66. Virtually everybody involved at that stage assumed that we would end up using PETG like the rest of the industry, which would’ve been a little disappointing, but ultimately, it was no bad thing. Custom orthotic prescriptions made out of PETG are highly effective and highly durable. It’s exactly what TOG orthotics had been made out of, and they have served us well.

So next, our custom orthotic killing machine tested the PETG. The PETG orthotic was placed in the machine. A few last rites were given, and the punishment began.

PETG performed dramatically better than the other orthotic insoles. It took an entire day and a half, almost 36 hours before the PETG orthotic finally cracked under the strain of the robot’s interrogation. But crack it did.

It seemed certain then that our orthotics would be made of PETG. It had far outperformed any of the other materials we had trialled, yet the Nylon 66 remained tested.

Going through the motions, we made the orthotic out of Nylon 66 and were immediately impressed by how much lighter it was than the other orthotics. However, we needed more confidence that it would be strong enough to beat PTG and be used for customer orthotic prescriptions at our clinics.

The Nylon 66 orthotic was inserted into the machine in the same. way, And the punishment began. At this stage, the smashing of these orthotics started to feel more like a sport than an engineering task. We were on the phone to the engineers every couple of hours. Checking in on how the orthotic insole was coping with the punishment. Yet 24 hours had passed remarkably. Then another 24 hours passed without any developments, another 24 hours and another. Eventually, the Nylon 66 orthotic was battered for six days. Which was the most extreme punishment imaginable, being completely flattened out 60 times per second, 24 hours per day, but it kept on trucking.

On about day 6, one of the engineers decided, out of curiosity, to turn the machine off for a moment and take a look at the orthotic. At that point, the Nylon 66 custom orthotic insole had lasted five times longer than the PETG orthotic.

On close inspection, the engineer noticed a slight but perceptible bend had started to develop in the nylon 66. On observing this, he concluded that the Nylon 66 custom orthotic would never break, but it would eventually slowly lose its shape if we left the robot on long enough. We had made an unbreakable orthotic insole.

After around five times the punishment of its nearest rival, the Nylon 66 orthotic had simply developed a minor deformity, while all the others had first deformed completely and then eventually cracked.

To say that we were delighted would be an understatement. I have given you the short version here, but this was the end of a two-year journey.

All this happened seven years ago, and to this day, we still haven’t had a single pair of custom orthotics made for Nylon 66 bend or break. No matter who used them or how hard they were used. The only challenge with this is that the orthotics themselves maintain the ability to correct the foot without breaking down for so long that, eventually, the top covers do wear down and require replacing. Not that we’ve had anyone complain about that.

Nylon 66 Orthotics are extremely flexible, extremely strong, and built to survive an apocalypse. We believe that we found the best material for any orthotic—certainly the best material that we could find on the market today.