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Emilien: Hi, I’m Emilien Arbez. During my 11 years at Salomon, I’ve held various positions, from footwear engineer to project manager, including the development of new industrial processes, always with the same guideline: 3D for innovation. I took charge of digital product creation in March 2020 to co-write the digital transformation of Salomon.

Today, I am in charge of the Digital Product Creation team in the Footwear category, which aims to provide the right digital tools, which are in perpetual evolution. Our goal is to facilitate the collective intelligence at the service of the company’s performance and the professional and personal development of everyone. The digitization of our products at different stages of the development process allows us to set up this state of mind, and thus transform the creation chain.

Léa: Hello, I’m Léa Le Fort and I’m a 3D designer in the footwear department at Salomon. After a first experience in the digital studio at Louis Vuitton during my master in digital design at ISD in Valenciennes, I chose to go into footwear. I was then lucky enough to do my end-of-study internship in 2020 at Salomon within the design team, which was totally new at that time.

I’ve been actively participating for two years in the writing of the 3D process for footwear design at Salomon, with the integration of the Substance 3D tools.

Pulsar: The first shoe model fully conceived in 3D

Emilien: It’s the first project on which we worked fully in 3D across all the validation phases of our process. This project allowed us to do tests in real conditions, but not without challenges as it fell in the middle of March 2020. It was at this very moment that we started using Adobe’s Substance 3D Painter software. The tool seemed to fit perfectly with our needs and our production constraints: a tight timing to put in volume (model) the sketches of the designers, no specific 3D tools dedicated to footwear, and a limited experience at that time on more or less successful attempts to model our products, due to the complexity of the modeling process.

Rendered with Substance 3D Stager

With a tight schedule, from a design sketch to the proposal of 3 models of our new Pulsar range, Léa was able to demonstrate the power of the new workflow. In 6 weeks she was able to combine the different 3D modeling solutions that we integrated with Painter to propose the following 3 visuals:

Pulsar Trail Pro (Illustrator sketch/3D model):

Our 3D transformation journey

Emilien: The need to implement 3D in our design pipeline had been present for a few years, and it clearly materialized in 2020 when our management decided to create a digital transformation team within the Footwear category with the aim of improving the employee experience, improving our development agility, reducing low value-added tasks, and providing viable solutions to reduce our environmental impact by proposing a better validation process. In the digital product creation mindset, we see the 3D object like a diamond that needs to be worked on, and this is what we are working on with the help of tools like Substance 3D in our creative pipeline.

Visualization is one of the keys for success in accelerating decision making, strengthening the link with creative direction and reducing our time-to-market by validating the product in the marketing touch points. The Adobe Substance tools allow us to reinforce the user experience, offer us a lot of flexibility and a reduced adoption time for the designers by importing digital assets from other tools.

Guillaume Meyzenq, SVP Consumer Category Running, Outdoor & Sportstyle, Salomon.

The bright future of 3D at Salomon

At Salomon, what the Footwear team has demonstrated over the past two years with the integration of 3D with a simplified workflow has triggered requests to adopt Substance 3D in other categories: Apparel & Winter Sports.

The ease of use of Substance in relation to the communication benefits the tool provides is appealing to our product designers, who are increasingly asking to integrate 3D into their daily work. This creative complement is in a very advanced phase so that our product designers can become more proficient in 3D.

And more to come with Substance 3D Designer…