The Crown Carbon Armour Shinpad

The Product

The Crown Shinpad is the most durable hockey shinpad on the market: It provides increased comfort, protection and impact resistance in a market saturated with substandard plastic shinpads that are consistently leading to serious injuries. I was responsible for the design development and launch of the Shinpad working with Crown Hockey in 2021.

Brief

In collaboration with Crown Hockey I was set the brief to get the shinpads from an idea: use the expertise and materials gained from the development of the hockey sticks to make a shinpad that would outperform anything else, to a marketable product. There was a very clear need for this product from the start with many athletes reporting broken shinpads and leg injuries resulting from normal play.

Research

We ensured that the product was developed collaboratively with these end users from start to finish to ensure that it was fit for purpose. This meant co-design with sponsored athletes, feedback from a wide range of players and surveys through Crown's social media presence.

Development

I was responsible for the design development of the product ensuring that it could be made using batch production and the performance was maximised whilst keeping costs within specification. This included designing tooling with a wide range of manufacturing methods and incorporating User Insights at every step.

Impact

The Crown Shinpad has received overwhelmingly positive feedback from its users and sold out at launch. Crown is currently in talks with Sport England about wider adoption with the Mens GB Hockey Team due to the alarming rates of injury and several GB players have already separately requested pairs aside from the sponsored players.

Reflection

This project was a great opportunity for me to learn out about bringing an actual product to launch for market. From the start there was a very clear need: to reduce leg injuries for hockey players and a clear measure of success: Is the feedback from users good and does the product sell.