Happy New Year! Things are still fast and furious at 3N2 Headquarters in Orlando. One of our flagship products for 2010 – the Accelerate PT – has arrived! We’re very excited about this product. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Accelerate, it is 3N2’s premiere line of women’s fastpitch footwear. The PT in Accelerate PT stands for Pitching Toe and we’ve managed to create one helluva pitching toe on the Accelerate PT. We worked with our professional fastpitch athletes to test prototypes for over a year and feel we’ve created the absolutely best pair of fastpitch pitching toe cleats on the market. I’ve posted a video here of Michele Smith who had a chance to break down the Accelerate PT at the NFCA show in Nashville. I’ll shut up and let her walk you through what makes the PT special.

P.S. The Accelerate PT is currently for sale on the 3N2 website.

In my last post, I mentioned how great our factory partners are. Some of these factory partners reside in China, which has really become the Athletic Shoe Capital of the World. Despite the global economic downturn, our factories continue to provide for a high quality of life for their employees. Factory workers still come in at 8:30AM have a 1.5 hour lunch and finish work at 5PM. All meals are paid for by the company and housing is provided. Not to mention free health care and education on site at the factory. It is extremely comforting for me to know that our factory workers are happy, appreciated and well taken care of. Like any business, this leads to higher job satisfaction which, in turn, leads to a higher quality 3N2 shoe.

So what am I doing here in China? I am overseeing our quality assurance (QA) team to ensure that quality and delivery expectations for our 2010 product line are met. I’m also cultivating relationships with factory owners and working on new development projects with our team. We have a truly talented 3N2 team in China that handles our day-to-day development and production oversight but there is always a need for HQ to personally visit to make sure that all objectives are aligned and we’re moving towards better products for our loyal baseball and softball customers.

This afternoon I was elated to watch our new Accelerate PT [pitching toe] product on the production line. This is a great new shoe that promises to become the standard bearer for our line of fastpitch softball cleats. Every detail we had discussed over the last year and a half is being executed. I even saw some new equipment and processes being employed that our team developed in the last several months to ensure solid bonding of the pitching toe on the shoe.

I am very excited about this product and I cannot wait to have it out on the ball fields. Our fit test results last year were phenomenal. We had several collegiate girls wear the product in practice and in over forty plus games and the toe showed only minimal wear. We’ve had rave reviews as well from our NPF and Japanese Professional league pitchers.

I know I promised a video review of our Momentum trainer in my last post, but it looks like I’ll have to get that to you when I return to the States. Stay tuned.