What Is Gore-Tex® ?

Hey I am Andre and I work with W. L. Gore associates and I am here to talk about Gore-Tex®. So what makes Gore-Tex® different? What is Gore-Tex®? Who really knows? But I can tell you a few things. Is it a spray? Is it a treatment? Is it something you do to the leather? It’s none of those things. What Gore-Tex® is, it’s a promise to the consumer and a technology behind that promise. Gore-Tex® is really unique because we are the only component manufacturer in the entire world that guarantees the protection and comfort of a shoe to a consumer. That’s like the meatballs guaranteeing the deliciousness of the spaghetti at the end of the day. Crazy stuff. It all starts with this. We make this product here, expanded polytetrafluorethylene. Say that three times fast if you can, expanded polytetrafluorethylene. It has 9 billion pores per inch, it’s chemically inert, thermally stable and it makes an amazing thing once you bond it with fabric materials to make a Gore-Tex® fabric. That fabric is a three layer fabric that’s gets made into this by our partners and this is the Gore-Tex® Bootie. And what it does is it gets inserted inside of a shoe. It’s waterproof and breathable and this is the thing that become the heart of any Gore-Tex® shoe. Now even though we know that the fabric is breathable and waterproof, we also know that if we built things around the fabric bootie, that can impede the waterproofness, it can impede the breathability and it can make it a really miserable experience for the consumers. So we work with our partners to make sure that everything that goes on top of this Gore-Tex® Bootie is the right thing. Not too much glue, not too much material to impede breathability or increase heat and enough of the things on there that are waterproof.