SnapLaces Review

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SnapLaces Review

SnapLaces
SnapLaces on Amazon
Grade: B-
Teacher’s Comments: Makes shoes more comfortable, but not a good fit for all styles.

I’m a big fan of elastic laces on my golf, athletic and general walking shoes. They hold the shoe solidly in place, while still allowing plenty of flex. Pressure that laces can create across the top of the foot disappear. Switching from tie to elastic laces makes

Most of the elastic laces I have seen thread through the shoe like regular laces and use a lock of some sort to secure. The ends of the elastic cords are managed with a tie clip.

SnapLaces take a different approach.  With SnapLaces, short segments of elastic thread though eyelets to form a loop ended by a plastic buckle hook. A package comes with four cords and buckles, so it may be necessary to skip eyelets on a shoe to make it work. To secure, you hook the plastic buckle over the loop formed on the other side.

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The system is very comfortable, and works pretty well, with a couple of caveats.

First, I am not sure I like the skipping of eyelets. I think there has to be reason why designers have five, or six, or seven eyelets. Fashion might be the answer in some cases. For athletic shoes, I think it might have to do with applying the proper pressure at the proper points.

Depending on whether you have an odd or even number of eyelets, the laces will either be balance or not. If you’ve got an uneven number of sets — say, five — you’ve got to decide whether to put two adjacent to each other at the bottom, or at the top. I think that has to create some uneven pressure.

I found that SnapLaces were not ideal for my Ecco golf and workout shoes. All of these have little loops on the tongue through which the laces cross, keeping everything in place. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to thread the SnapLaces on these shoes so that they crossed through the loop and held the tongue properly in place.

Ultimately, I settled on testing the SnapLace on a pair of  casual shoes. These still have the tongue loop, but since I’m not powering my way down a fairway, or working out, it probably won’t be an issue. On the casual shoes, the SnapLaces really did wonders for improving the comfort.

From an aesthetic point of view, I think the SnapLaces look much better than some other after-market elastic laces (I have some shoes that are designed with elastic laces and those of course look really good.). The elastic is a solid color and the buckles  unobtrusive and flush with the top of the shoe.

SnapLaces are for me a mixed bag. Given the proper shoe design, I think they work quite nicely.

 

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