KLM PAVES WAY FOR MASS-MARKET ORTHOTICS
By Steve Toloken - PLASTICS NEWS STAFF
August 30, 1999
Vacuum former KLM
Laboratories Inc. hopes to do for corrective footwear what Lenscrafters did for corrective
eye care: shift it from a specialized, custom business to a mass-market operation.
Its tool: an injection molded polypropylene shoe insert, or orthotic, designed to ease
foot pain.
The Valencia, Calif., company has vacuum formed
orthotics since 1973, based on individual casts of feet. The company was started by a
podiatrist.
But in the past few years the firm has developed a way to injection mold relatively common
designs, opening the way to a much cheaper, and therefore mass-market, product. Most
companies injection mold one design per shoe size, but KLM says it is unique in injection
molding 61 models.
"We started studying certain feet,'' said Kirk Marshall, one of three owners of the
family-run business. "Feet fall within a narrow range. They are not all snowflakes
out there in the world. They are predictable.''
So the small firm added injection molding machines, and in February bought a local
mold-making shop, AJC Enterprises Inc., for undisclosed terms. Now, it is looking for ways
to distribute these products nationwide and build customer recognition.
That will take time, the company said. It also faces other hurdles, such as how people
will decide which model they need. One possibility under development, KLM said, is
computers that could sit in retail stores and analyze foot shapes.
The company does not want to open retail stores a la Lenscrafters, and briefly tried
distributing an earlier version of the product directly to shoe stores. But it found that
approach unworkable, Marshall said, and now is looking to sell to distributors.
"The orthotic industry is a good 20-30 years behind the eyeglass industry,'' said
Kent Marshall, Kirk's brother and another co-owner.
A third brother, Scott Marshall, also owns some of the firm. The company was started in
1973 by their father, Dr. Howard Marshall, who served as chief of the podiatry section of
the University of Southern California Medical Center from 1978-1995.
The company has 24 vacuum forming machines and three injection presses of 90, 120 and 190
tons in its 18,000-square-foot factory. Its three-person tool shop also is in Valencia.
Its injection molding is done under its PFI Inc. subsidiary, which includes a custom
injection molding business that has done work on sprinklers, caulking guns and custom
bicycle racing products.
The company's idea emerged from the changing health-care market in the late 1980s.
Health maintenance organizations were driving down costs and putting pressure on custom
orthotics, which can cost $200-$500, Kirk Marshall said. So the company searched for ways
to lower prices and started developing computer models of the thousands of designs it was
using.
It kept track of how often different designs were ordered.
"Over the course of five years and 100,000 pairs of orthotics, a bell curve
developed,'' Kirk Marshall said. "We found that 61 of those shapes did 68 percent of
the work.''
So the company built injection molds for those 61 designs, and initially just used them as
a cheaper way to fill doctors orders.
The injection molded products could retail for $15 or $20, Kent Marshall said.
KLM initially worried about cannibalizing its vacuum forming market with injection
molding, but now thinks that the cheaper products will open huge new markets, Kirk
Marshall said.
Only about 1 million people in the United States use them now, he said: "The goal is
to get more people to wear them [instead of] custom orthotics -- they are expensive and
not everyone can afford them.''
Source: Plastics
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