Built for the Job Site
Technology & Materials
From breathable linings to reinforced toe caps, Kiwi Workwear is engineered to meet the needs of real workers in real conditions.
Apparel Technologies
Comparing hi-vis options? Compare our apparel side by side.
What it is. Zephrix™ is a 4.1 oz birdseye mesh polyester, the fabric on every Kiwi hi-vis shirt and hoodie. Capillary-knit channels pull sweat off the skin and spread it out to dry.
Why cotton is the wrong answer. Cotton is comfortable in a chair and hostile on a jobsite, for a reason that is chemical rather than a matter of taste. Cotton is hydrophilic, it loves water, so it absorbs sweat into the fiber itself and holds it. A saturated cotton shirt holds many times its weight in water. It goes heavy, it goes cold, it clings, it chafes, and it stays wet for hours because the water is inside the fiber where the air cannot reach it. In summer that is misery. In a cold wind after you stop working, it is a genuine hazard, because a wet shirt strips heat out of you far faster than air does.
How wicking works. Polyester is hydrophobic, it does not absorb water into the fiber. That is the starting condition, not the mechanism. The mechanism is capillary action. Fine channels between and along the fibers pull liquid water along them by surface tension, the same physics that pulls water up a paper towel. Sweat is drawn off your skin, transported along the channels, and spread across a large surface on the outer face of the fabric, where it evaporates fast because evaporation rate scales with exposed surface area. The water is moved and thinned rather than absorbed and stored. That is why a wicking shirt dries in minutes and cotton dries in hours.
Why birdseye. Birdseye is a knit structure with a repeating pattern of small geometric openings across the face. It does two jobs. The openings are direct airflow paths, so the fabric ventilates rather than sealing against you. And the structure creates the capillary channel geometry that does the wicking. Breathability and wicking are not two features stacked on top of each other here, they are two consequences of the same knit. At 4.1 oz it is heavy enough to hold the hi-vis fluorescent color and the reflective tape properly and light enough to disappear on a hot day.
Shop Safety Gear With This Technology
What it is. AirMesh™ is a 3.1 oz open-knit polyester mesh, the fabric on Kiwi safety vests.
Why a vest is a different problem. A vest is not a light shirt. It is a layer worn on top of whatever you were already wearing, which means it is the second or third thing on your torso and it is trapping everything underneath it. If you build a vest out of solid fabric you have added a wind-blocking, heat-trapping shell to somebody who was already working in the sun. The vest is not there to clothe you. It is there to make you visible, and every gram and every closed pore it adds beyond that is a cost with no benefit.
How the mesh works. Open-knit means the structure is mostly hole. Air moves straight through the fabric rather than around it, so the warm, humid air sitting against your shirt gets carried away and replaced. This matters more than the fabric weight does. A layer that traps still air is an insulator regardless of how thin it is, because still air is what insulation actually is. Break up the still air and the layer stops insulating. At 3.1 oz, AirMesh™ is the lightest fabric in the Kiwi line, and the mesh geometry is what makes it feel like nothing at hour eight in July.
The compliance constraint. Mesh has a hard limit that solid fabric does not. ANSI/ISEA 107 sets minimum square inches of fluorescent background material, and a mesh only counts the material that is actually there, not the holes. Open it up too far and the vest stops complying. AirMesh™ is specified at the point where the airflow is maximized and the vest still meets Type R, Class 2 or Class 3 background area. That is the whole engineering problem in one number.
Shop Safety Gear With This Technology
What it is. Perlyx™ is the coated shell fabric on Kiwi hi-vis jackets. It is a PU-coated Oxford polyester, built at 200D on the sherpa-lined and 3-in-1 jackets and 300D on the quilted jackets.
What the numbers mean. Denier, the D, is a measure of yarn weight, specifically the grams per 9,000 meters of the fiber. Higher denier means a heavier, thicker yarn, which means a denser, tougher, more abrasion resistant cloth and more weight to carry. 200D is the balance point for a shell you wear over layers and move in all day. 300D is the heavier grade used where the jacket is doing more work as an outer armor. Oxford refers to the weave, a basketweave structure where multiple warp yarns cross a heavier weft, which produces a fabric with a distinctive fine ribbed hand and excellent tear resistance for its weight.
Why it matters. A hi-vis jacket has a job that fights itself. It has to be bright, and brightness comes from fluorescent dyes in a light fabric. It has to be worn outside in bad weather. And it has to survive being worn every day by someone doing physical work. A bare polyester shell wets out, goes dark, gets heavy, and loses both its visibility and its wind resistance the moment the fabric is saturated.
How the coating works. The polyurethane coating is applied to the inner face of the shell as a continuous film. It does two things at once. It closes the interstitial gaps between yarns, which is what stops wind, because wind through a garment is simply air passing through the holes in the weave. And it gives the face a surface that rain beads off rather than soaks into. Wind blocking and water repellency are the same mechanism here, which is why you get both from one treatment.
How it is incorporated. Perlyx™ is the outer shell fabric itself, not a spray applied after the fact, so it does not wash out on a normal care cycle the way a topical DWR does. It is the substrate that the reflective tape is stitched to and that the liner zips into.
Shop Safety Gear With This Technology
What it is. StormSentry™ is the closure system on Kiwi jackets. It combines a non-conductive front zipper, a full-length storm flap covering that zipper, and a high ETP™ snap collar.
Why it matters. The shell fabric is the part everyone evaluates. The closure is the part that actually leaks. A zipper is a mechanical row of teeth with a continuous channel running down the front of your torso, positioned exactly where wind-driven rain hits first. You can have the best shell in the world and still get a wet chest through the zip line. Cold works the same way. Wind does not need a hole, it needs a channel, and an exposed zipper is a channel.
How it works. The storm flap is a full panel of shell fabric that lies over the closed zipper and is secured down its length, so wind and rain hitting the front of the jacket meet fabric, not teeth. Any water that does track down the flap face runs off the outside rather than finding the zip channel. The ETP™ snap collar carries the same protection up past the throat, which is the second place wind gets in and the place people notice it most. The non-conductive zipper keeps hardware appropriate to a jobsite garment.
How it is incorporated. Built into the front of the jacket as part of the shell, with the flap sewn along the zip line and the collar snapping closed above it. On the 3-in-1 jackets it works with the TriZone™ liner, so the sealed front is intact in all three configurations.
Shop Safety Gear With This Technology
What it is. TriZone™ is a detachable fleece liner that zips into a Perlyx™ shell, producing three garments from one purchase. Shell alone. Liner alone. Both together.
Why it matters. A work jacket has to cover a season, and a season is not one temperature. A 30 degree February morning and a 55 degree March afternoon are two different garments. The usual solution is to own two jackets and get caught wearing the wrong one, or to own one jacket that is a compromise at both ends. The 3-in-1 answer is older than the marketing term and it works because the two functions of a cold weather jacket, weather protection and insulation, are physically separable. The shell blocks wind and rain and does not care about temperature. The fleece traps warm air and does not care about rain.
Why the three configurations are actually three. Shell alone gives you a wind and water resistant layer for a mild, wet day, worn over your own shirt. Liner alone is a real standalone fleece, with its own hand pockets, its own chest pocket, and an embroidered Kiwi logo, so it is a jacket you would wear off the site and not a stripped-out insert. Together, the shell blocks the weather and the fleece traps the heat, and you have a cold-weather jacket. Same hi-vis compliance, three seasons.
How it is incorporated. The liner attaches at three points, a full front zip, snaps at the sleeve ends, and attachments at the back neck. Three attachment zones matter, because a liner secured only at the front zip rotates inside the shell when you reach, bunches at the shoulder, and drags the sleeve up your forearm. Locking the sleeve ends and the back neck keeps the two layers moving as one garment.
Shop Safety Gear With This Technology
What it is. Noctis 360™ is the Kiwi reflective tape program. 2-inch silver reflective tape, applied in bands that give a full 360 degrees of return from every approach angle. It measures a coefficient of retroreflection of 380 cd/(lx·m²) on new reflectors. The ANSI/ISEA 107-2020 minimum is 330.
What retroreflection actually is. This is the piece most people have backwards. Reflective tape is not bright and it does not glow. It has no light of its own. What it does is send light back to where the light came from, which is a much stranger property than being shiny. A mirror reflects light at an equal and opposite angle, which means a mirror on your back sends a driver's headlights off into a field. A white shirt scatters light in every direction, which means the fraction that makes it back to the driver's eye is tiny. A retroreflector returns light along the incoming vector, straight back at the source. Since the driver's eyes are a few feet from the headlights, that beam comes back essentially to them. To that driver you look lit up. To someone standing beside the road, the same tape looks grey.
Why the number matters. Coefficient of retroreflection, measured in candelas per lux per square meter, is how much of that returned light you get per unit of light landing on you. It is the difference between being seen at 200 feet and being seen at 400 feet, and at highway speed that difference is measured in seconds of reaction time. Noctis 360™ runs at 380 against a required 330, which is roughly 15 percent above the standard's floor. On a wet night, on a curve, with headlight glare, that margin is the whole point of the garment.
Why 360 degrees. A hazard does not agree to approach from the front. Reflective on the chest only protects you from vehicles you are already facing, which are the vehicles you can see. The ones that hit people come from behind and from the side. Noctis 360™ is banded so there is return from every angle of approach, and on the two-tone garments it is paired with high-contrast trim so the shape reads as a human being rather than as a floating stripe. Contrast is doing separate work from reflectivity here. The tape gets a driver's attention at distance. The contrast trim is what makes them recognize what they are looking at in time to act.
Shop Safety Gear With This Technology
What it is. Umbra™ is the dark lower paneling on two-tone Kiwi hi-vis garments, colored and positioned to conceal dirt, stains, and scuffs. The name is Latin. The umbra is the innermost, darkest region of a shadow, the part where no light gets through, which is precisely the job these panels do for grime.
The built-in conflict. Hi-vis clothing is fluorescent yellow or orange because it has to be, and fluorescent yellow is the single worst color on earth for hiding dirt. Every job that requires hi-vis is a job with mud, grease, concrete dust, or all three. So the garment that must stay bright is worn in the exact conditions guaranteed to make it filthy. That is not a design oversight, it is a genuine conflict written into the category, and most of the industry just ships the conflict to the wearer. The result is a shirt that looks unprofessional in three weeks and gets retired long before the fabric or the tape is finished.
Why a dirty hi-vis garment is a safety issue, not a laundry issue. Fluorescence is the reason a hi-vis garment looks brighter than everything around it in daylight. The dye absorbs ultraviolet light, which your eye cannot see, and re-emits that energy in the visible range. The fabric is effectively returning more visible light than falls on it. A film of dirt attacks this mechanism twice, once on the way in by blocking UV from reaching the dye, and once on the way out by blocking the emitted light from leaving. A soiled garment is therefore measurably less conspicuous than a clean one, and its daytime performance degrades first, because daytime conspicuity is exactly what the fluorescence provides. This is why ANSI/ISEA guidance treats heavy soiling, like fading, as a retirement trigger. A hi-vis garment does not stop working when the fabric wears out. It stops working when it stops being bright.
The soil map. Dirt on a work garment is not random. It lands where the work happens: the lower front and hem take the kneeling, the hand-wiping at the waist, the tool belt rub, the lean against a truck bed, and the splash line off wet ground. The upper torso and shoulders stay comparatively clean on almost any job. Umbra™ places its dark panels directly on that soil map. The zones that take the abuse are the zones engineered to hide it, and the zones doing the visibility work, the fluorescent background and the Noctis 360™ tape above it, stay bright.
What that buys you. Three things, in increasing order of importance. The garment looks professional for its whole service life instead of its first month. The fluorescent area keeps performing, because the soiling concentrates where there is no fluorescence to degrade. And the garment's compliant life gets longer at both ends: it hides the dirt that would otherwise force early retirement, and it needs fewer aggressive wash cycles to look presentable, which matters because wash cycles are what age reflective tape. A garment that needs washing half as often keeps its tape performing longer.
The compliance boundary. Dark paneling is not free. ANSI/ISEA 107-2020 sets minimum square inches of fluorescent background material per class, and every inch of Umbra™ panel is an inch that does not count toward it. The panels are therefore sized and placed so each garment still meets its rated class, Class 3 on the shirts and jackets that carry it, with the dark area held low and the fluorescent area preserved up top where approach-angle visibility matters most. And Umbra™ appears on two-tone hi-vis garments only, never on the all-black pieces, which have no fluorescent area to protect and would make the badge meaningless.
Shop Safety Gear With This TechnologyFootwear Technologies
Choosing between boots? Compare our footwear side by side.
What it is. GripTREK™ is the Kiwi outsole program, a slip and oil resistant lugged outsole engineered for traction across mixed surfaces. It is built in two constructions depending on the boot.
Why it matters. Slips, trips, and falls are consistently among the largest categories of workplace injury, and the outsole is the only part of a boot that touches the problem. Traction is not one property. Grip on dry concrete, grip on wet steel, grip on an oily shop floor, and grip in loose dirt are four different physics problems, and an outsole that is optimized hard for one will be worse at the others. A racing slick has enormous dry grip and is lethal in the wet, because the mechanism that gives it dry grip is the same mechanism that traps a water film.
How the geometry works. Lugs give you two things. The edges bite mechanically into soft or irregular ground, which is how you climb a dirt slope. And the channels between them give displaced liquid somewhere to go, which is how you keep contact on a wet or oily surface. Without channels, a fluid film sits between the rubber and the floor and you are hydroplaning at walking speed. The lug spacing also lets the outsole shed packed mud as it flexes, so the tread does not fill in and go smooth. The rubber compound is doing the other half of the job, staying compliant enough to conform to microscopic surface texture while resisting the oils that would swell and soften a lesser compound.
The two constructions. Most Kiwi boots use a cemented EVA and Rubber MD outsole. The EVA layer keeps the sole light and flexible, and the rubber carries the tread and the wear. This is the right answer for a boot you walk and climb in all day. The Kiwi Premium cap-toe family uses a heavy-duty rubber lug outsole on Goodyear welt construction, which trades some weight and flex for maximum durability and stability on rough ground.
Shop Footwear With This Technology
What it is. Nubora™ is a two-layer cushioning architecture. A flexible EVA midsole underneath, an ultra cushioned mesh and PU insole on top, and a supportive heel-to-toe drop through the footbed.
Why it matters. Standing on concrete for ten hours is a load problem, not a comfort preference. Every heel strike sends a shock wave up through the foot, the shin, the knee, and the lower back, and concrete returns essentially all of that energy because it does not deform. The foot is built to be shock absorbed by soil. It gets none of that on a slab. The fatigue you feel at hour eight is accumulated impact that had nowhere to go.
Why two layers instead of one. Because EVA and PU fail in opposite directions and cover for each other. EVA is a light, closed-cell foam that compresses easily and springs back fast, which makes it excellent at absorbing the initial impact spike and terrible at holding its shape over months. It takes a compression set, meaning it packs out and stops rebounding. PU, polyurethane, is denser and heavier. It compresses less and rebounds slower, which makes it a mediocre shock absorber on its own and outstanding at resisting compression set. It holds its loft long after EVA would have gone flat.
Stacking them gives you the strengths of both. The PU insole is the layer against your foot, providing sustained support that lasts the life of the boot. The EVA midsole underneath takes the sharp impact energy before it reaches you. One layer handles the spike, the other handles the shift.
The drop. A supportive heel-to-toe drop means the footbed sits slightly higher at the heel than at the forefoot. This is not a style choice. It reduces the tension load on the Achilles tendon and encourages a natural heel-to-toe roll rather than a flat slap, which is easier on the calf and the plantar fascia across a long day.
Shop Footwear With This Technology
What it is. DryVault™ is a sealed internal bootie, a full waterproof sock built inside the boot between the lining and the upper. It wraps the entire foot as one continuous unit, from the toe, around the sides, under the arch, up the heel and past the collar.
Why it matters. "Water resistant" and "waterproof" are not marketing synonyms, they are two different constructions. A water resistant boot relies on the upper itself. Tight seams, dense stitching, a leather or treated fabric that sheds water for a while. That is genuinely useful and it is what most of the Kiwi line uses, because most work is not standing in a puddle. But an upper is made of panels, and panels are joined by seams, and every seam is a row of needle holes. Given enough time in standing water, the water finds the holes.
Why a bootie. A bootie changes the problem. Instead of asking a hundred stitched joints to each hold out water, you build a second, independent, sealed barrier inside the boot and let the leather do the job leather is good at, which is abrasion and structure. The bootie has no meaningful seam count exposed to water, so the leather can wet out on the surface and your foot never knows. This is why a wet leather boot with a bootie still feels dry inside, and why the two systems are not interchangeable.
How it is incorporated. The bootie is stitched and sealed into the boot during construction, sitting behind the breathable mesh lining and in front of the upper. Kiwi pairs it with dense precision-stitched seams and a tightly constructed upper, so the boot is fighting water on two fronts rather than betting everything on one layer. You do not see it, you do not remove it, and it does not need to be reproofed.
Shop Footwear With This Technology
What it is. Aramor™ is a flexible aramid fiber plate that sits underfoot, laid between the outsole and the insole across the full length of the footbed. Aramid is a high-tenacity synthetic fiber. It is the same fiber family used in cut resistant glove liners and in ballistic textiles. In Aramor™ the aramid is Kevlar®, built up as a dense, layered, woven textile rather than stamped out of sheet metal.
Why it matters. Stepping on a nail is one of the oldest and most common serious injuries in construction. A framing nail through a work boot sole ends a shift and sometimes a season. The traditional answer is a steel midsole plate. Steel works, and it also adds weight to the part of the boot you lift ten thousand times a day. It conducts cold straight into your foot in winter. It resists the natural flex of the sole, so the boot fights you at the ball of the foot. And it sets off metal detectors.
How it works. Aramid resists penetration differently than steel does. Steel resists by hardness, a sharp point has to shear through the metal. Aramid resists by fiber density and load spreading. When a point presses into the weave, the surrounding fibers pull into tension and distribute the force across a much wider area than the point itself. The point has to break a large number of individual high-tenacity filaments instead of piercing one continuous sheet. The result is a plate that resists punctures from nails, screws, and sharp debris while staying light and staying flexible. The Kevlar® plate is rated to 1200N of puncture resistance.
How it is incorporated. The plate is built into the sole assembly during lasting, sandwiched in the stack so it is never in direct contact with your foot and never visible from the outside. It runs the full underfoot area rather than covering only the heel or only the forefoot. Because it is non-metallic, it is one of the components that makes an all-composite build possible.
Shop Footwear With This Technology
What it is. ScuffShield™ is a reinforced TPU toe cap with a textured rubber exterior, bonded over the outside of the toe box. TPU stands for thermoplastic polyurethane. It is an engineering polymer that sits between hard plastic and rubber on the property scale.
Why it matters. A safety toe protects your toes. It does nothing for the leather sitting on top of it. The toe box is the first part of a work boot to fail cosmetically and often structurally, because it is the part that meets the world. Kneeling on concrete, dragging your foot on a ladder rung, kicking a pallet into place, catching the toe under a lip of decking. The leather scuffs, then abrades, then splits, then the stitching lets go, and a boot that is still structurally sound looks retired.
Why TPU. TPU is chosen here for a specific combination of properties. It has high abrasion resistance, high tear strength, and it stays flexible instead of cracking, which matters because the toe box has to bend with every step. A rigid plastic cap would protect the leather and then fracture at the flex point within a season. The textured rubber exterior adds a second sacrificial surface and a bit of grip when you use the toe to brace or push.
How it is incorporated. The cap is molded and bonded to the exterior of the toe box, wrapping the high-wear radius where the vamp meets the outsole. It shields the toe from scuffs and impact in the exact zone that takes the abuse, without adding stiffness to the rest of the upper.
Shop Footwear With This Technology
What it is. YTorq™ is a Y-shaped composite shank set into the midfoot of the boot. The shank is the structural spine of a boot sole. It sits in the waist, the narrow section between the heel and the ball of the foot, and it controls how the sole behaves under load.
Why it matters. Work happens on bad ground. Rebar mats, rock, scaffold planks, trench edges, ladder rungs. When you plant a foot on an uneven edge, the ground applies a twisting force to the boot. If the sole has nothing resisting that twist, the load transfers straight into your ankle and knee. That is the classic rolled ankle. But if you solve it by stiffening the whole sole, you get a boot that cannot flex at the toe, which is exhausting to walk in and which fights every step.
Why the Y shape. A conventional shank is a straight bar. A straight bar resists bending along its own length reasonably well and resists twisting poorly, because there is nothing to stop the two ends rotating relative to each other. The Y geometry solves this. The stem of the Y anchors into the heel. The two arms fork forward and outward toward the ball of the foot, one to the medial side and one to the lateral side. Now a twisting force has to work against two separated arms pulling in opposite directions, which converts the twist into tension and compression the structure can carry. The forefoot stays outside the fork and remains free to flex naturally. You get torsional rigidity where you need it and forefoot flex where you want it. Because the shank is composite rather than steel, it also contributes to a metal free build.
How it is incorporated. Molded into the sole assembly under the arch, invisible in the finished boot, working every time you plant a foot on something that is not level.
Shop Footwear With This Technology
What it is. MorphFit™ is a removable insert at the bottom of the boot cavity. With the insert in, the boot fits standard D width. Take the insert out, and the same boot fits extra wide EE.
Why it matters. Width is the fit dimension the industry mostly gave up on. Length is easy, so everyone stocks 7 through 13, and width is hard, so most work boots come in exactly one. If your foot is wide, your options are to size up in length, which gives you a boot that slides and blisters, or to accept a boot that compresses the forefoot. Neither is a small problem when you are wearing them for ten hours. And carrying real width runs is brutal for a retailer, because two widths across seven lengths is fourteen boxes on the shelf for one style.
How it works. The volume of a boot is fixed by the last it was built on. You cannot change it. But you can change how much of it your foot gets. The MorphFit™ insert sits under the footbed and occupies vertical space in the cavity. With it in place, the foot sits higher in the boot, where the last is narrower, and the fit is a standard D. Pull the insert and the foot drops lower into the boot, into the wider part of the cavity, and the fit opens up to EE. Same boot, same last, same box. The width is a decision you make when you put them on, not one the buyer made for you six months earlier.
How it is incorporated. The insert ships in the boot and is removed by lifting out the footbed. Nothing to buy, nothing to order, and no second pair required.
Shop Footwear With This Technology
What it is. Veldura™ is an anti-scratch microfiber, used as panel material on the upper. Microfiber here means a synthetic non-woven built from filaments finer than a single silk fiber, densely entangled and bonded into a sheet.
Why it matters. Leather is a spectacular upper material and it has one weakness, which is that its surface is finished. Full grain, nubuck, suede, and crazy horse all present a face that has been sanded, buffed, oiled, or napped, and that face is what scratches. Once the finish is broken you have a light mark on a dark boot, and enough of them make a boot look worn out long before it is worn out. On a job where you look at customers, or wear a uniform, appearance is part of the product.
How it works. Microfiber resists scratching for a structural reason. A scratch is a hard object dragging across a surface and displacing it. A leather grain is a continuous surface, so a hard edge cuts a continuous line in it, and you see the line. A dense microfiber non-woven has no continuous surface to cut. It is millions of individual filaments, and an edge dragging across it deflects filaments rather than severing a face. The filaments recover. The mark does not persist. The same structure resists abrasion, because there is no coating to wear through, and the material is the same all the way down.
How it is incorporated. Veldura™ is used as panels in the wear zones on the upper, working alongside the leather rather than replacing it. The leather gives you the structure, the break-in, and the character. The Veldura™ panels take the scuffing and keep the boot looking professional. On the Trek line it is paired with suede and nylon in a lighter build. On the 69200 it sits alongside crazy horse leather, which is a deliberate pairing, because crazy horse is meant to develop character and Veldura™ handles the abuse that would otherwise be damage rather than patina.
Shop Footwear With This Technology
What it is. Aferra™ is the all-composite construction and metal free lacing system. There is no metal anywhere in the boot's structural path, so it passes through a metal detector.
Why it matters. Some workplaces put a metal detector between you and your job. Airports and aviation-side work. Courthouses, correctional facilities, and secure government sites. Certain manufacturing lines with metal detection on the floor. If your boots trip the arch, you take them off, every entry, every day. That is a genuine daily tax on the people whose work is inside a controlled perimeter, and the usual workaround is to wear an unprotective shoe and carry the boots, which defeats the purpose of having a safety boot.
Why it is hard. Making one component non-metallic is easy. Making the whole boot non-metallic is the problem, because a work boot has four independent places metal likes to live and all four have to be solved at once. The safety toe. The shank. The puncture plate. And the hardware, meaning eyelets and speed hooks. Miss any one of them and the boot still alarms. This is why Aferra™ is a construction, not a part. It is the name for all four solutions holding simultaneously: a composite toe instead of steel, the YTorq™ composite shank instead of a steel bar, the Aramor™ aramid plate instead of a steel midsole, and non-metallic hardware instead of brass or steel eyelets.
How it is incorporated. The lacing system runs 4 reinforced non-metallic eyelets and 2 speed hooks. That is the visible half. The rest of Aferra™ is the three invisible components above, specified together so the boot passes as a unit. The name is Spanish for "it grips," which is a bonus rather than the reason.
Shop Footwear With This TechnologyWork Glove Technologies
Not sure which glove? Compare our work gloves side by side.
What it is. DexLock™ is an ultra-thin polyurethane dispersion coating, PUD, applied to the palm and fingers of a knit glove shell.
Why it matters. There is a permanent trade in glove design between protection and feel. Every unit of coating thickness you add buys you durability and chemical resistance and costs you tactility, and tactility is not a luxury. If a technician cannot feel a fastener start to thread, they take the glove off, and a glove in a pocket protects nobody. The most common cause of a hand injury on a job with gloves available is a hand that was not wearing one.
What PUD is. Polyurethane dispersion is a water-based system, meaning the polyurethane is carried as fine particles suspended in water rather than dissolved in a solvent. That matters for how thin a film you can lay down. A dispersion coats the individual yarns of the knit rather than filling the gaps between them, so you get a continuous protective surface at a fraction of the thickness a dipped nitrile or latex coating requires. The palm stays flexible. The glove does not board up.
Why thin equals grip. This is the part that seems backwards. A thin coating grips better than a thick one, because grip is a conformity problem. To hold a tool you need the glove surface to deform into the tool's surface texture at a small scale. A thick, stiff coating cannot conform, so it contacts only the high points and you are gripping on a fraction of the available area. A thin PUD film lets the underlying knit do the conforming while the polyurethane provides the friction, so you get contact across the whole palm. That is bare-hand precision grip with a protective layer between you and the work. The coating also carries abrasion resistance and protection against oils and workplace chemicals, and it is why an oily fastener does not squirt out of your hand.
How it is incorporated. Applied to the palm and fingers of a seamless nylon and spandex knit shell, leaving the back of the hand uncoated so the glove still breathes. The coated palm carries the EN 388 abrasion, cut, tear and puncture performance on these gloves.
Shop Work Gloves With This Technology
What it is. Synapse™ is a touchscreen ready fingertip construction. The fingertips of the glove operate a phone, tablet, scanner, or panel without taking the glove off.
Why it matters. The job moved onto a screen and the gloves did not follow. Scanning a pallet. Signing a delivery. Checking a drawing. Answering the foreman. Punching a code into a panel. In a modern warehouse that is not once a shift, it is dozens of times a shift, and every one of them is a glove off and a glove on. That is not just wasted minutes. It is a hand that is bare and holding something, next to a machine, in a facility that requires gloves. The glove that gets removed forty times a day is the glove that is off when it matters.
Why a plain glove does not work. A capacitive touchscreen does not detect pressure. Under the glass is a grid of electrodes projecting a faint electric field. Your body is a conductor, so when a bare fingertip touches the glass it draws a small amount of charge away from the electrodes nearest the touch. The controller reads that local dip in the field and computes where your finger is. Pressure never enters the equation. A standard glove is an insulator, and an insulator between your finger and the glass breaks the electrical path. No charge moves, so as far as the screen is concerned, nothing is touching it. Pressing harder changes nothing, because force was never what the screen was measuring.
How it works. Synapse™ fingertips are knit with conductive fibers integrated directly into the fingertip of the shell. The fibers restore the electrical path from your skin, through the glove, to the glass, so the screen sees the same charge draw it would see from a bare fingertip and the tap registers normally. Because the conductivity is a property of the yarn itself rather than a coating printed onto the surface, it cannot rub off. It lasts as long as the fingertip fabric does. The name describes the function: a synapse is the junction a signal crosses, and the fingertip is the junction where your touch crosses to the device.
Shop Work Gloves With This Technology
