Sizing up the sports helmet market





July 26, 2008 04:07:00 Kenneth Kidd
Feature Writer

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Ten years ago, Roger Ball was called to a pivotal meeting in Vermont, or what has since turned out to be one.
The Toronto designer had created one of the first helmets made specifically for snowboarders. It sold amazingly well in North America and Europe, but in Japan, the world's third-largest snowboarding market, it was a dud.
Burton Snowboards, the Vermont-based manufacturer of the helmet, wanted to know why, so they contacted a handful of Japanese snowboarders and flew them to New England. Was it the helmet's style, the colours?
"They said, 'No, no, we love all that stuff,' " recalls Ball. " 'We just can't wear it because it's so tight on the sides of our heads. Even if we squeeze it on there, we get a splitting headache.' "
Then came the party trick. One of the Japanese leaned forward in his chair and rested a coffee cup on the relatively flat surface at the back of his head. "We have," he summed up, "a different shaped head than you."
Ball, who now teaches at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, admits that what might seem obvious in hindsight came as a revelation. "It's just the sort of chauvinism in the West. It had never occurred to me that (other) people were a different shape."
He wasn't alone. For decades, manufacturers in the West have been producing headgear based on the slightly oval heads of Caucasians, mostly using an industry-standard set of size and shape templates originally taken from U.S. air force pilots. That was fine for European customers, but it blithely ignored four-fifths of the world's population, not least Asians, whose heads are generally rounder in shape. The discrepancy is especially problematic with protective headgear such as bicycle helmets, where a proper fit is crucial.
But that's about to change.
In September, Hong Kong Polytechnic will start selling its own set of 10 head templates, based on high-end 3D scans that Ball and his team have done of 2,000 people in six Chinese provinces.
Ball's project, dubbed Size China, is already winning accolades.
"That's quite an achievement to really go there and take a good sample of the Chinese population," says Marc Rioux, a research officer at the National Research Council in Ottawa, which has begun collaborating with Ball on 3D imaging.
"This is really to help design products for the Chinese market," he adds. "Right now penetration is pretty poor, at least for helmets, because they don't fit."
Then there was last week's International Design Excellence Awards, co-sponsored by Business Week magazine. Size China not only won in its category, it was named co-recipient of Best in Show. The other winner: Apple's iPhone.


THE WONDER IS, it took so long for a Westerner to come up with something like Size China. Apart from the West's traditionally ethnocentric view of the world, there are at least two possible reasons.
China itself is only now coming into its own as a mass consumer market of 1.3 billion people. "You've got to remember, 10 years ago it was Third World," says Ball. "Now they have some leisure time and they can afford a motorcycle and they want to buy a luxury brand, where they really didn't have that before."
The other answer revolves around Ball himself.
After the Vermont encounter, Burton had asked him to design a product specifically for the Japanese market. But when Ball had trouble finding any useful templates or data on Japanese heads, the project was quietly dropped.
Skip ahead to 2004. Ball had just sold his share of a Toronto design company and landed a teaching job in Hong Kong, where he now lives with his Taiwanese wife.
Lost in translation, though, were a couple of the terms of his employment. He would be expected to spend 60 per cent of his time teaching, 30 per cent on research and 10 per cent serving the university at large. "When I got there, I didn't know that," laughs Ball. "So they said, `What's your research area?' And I was, like, `It's a, it's a, can I get back to you on that?'"
Then he remembered Vermont, and the anecdote instantly struck a chord with his Asian audience. It also came at a time when the Hong Kong government was trying to promote design, partly to dispel Hong Kong's reputation as the home office of knock-offs.
The government kicked in 85 per cent of the roughly $1 million that Ball needed to raise. The rest came from a handful of industry players, including Strategic Sports, the Hong Kong manufacturer of Burton helmets. Another sponsor: New Era, the Buffalo-based hatmaker that supplies all on-field caps to Major League Baseball.
It didn't take long for Ball to start quantifying some of the differences in shape and contour.
To take one example, if you looked at the top of a typical Caucasian head, the ratio of the length to the width would be 1:0.74. On Chinese heads, the ratio is 1:0.86.
In other words, a Western motorcycle helmet that fits a Chinese person in length would be tight in width. Conversely, a Western motorcycle helmet that fits an average Chinese person in width would probably be too long – not the perfect fit that safety requires.


THERE MAY BE ANOTHER reason it has taken so long for Caucasians to quantify Chinese shapes, something Ball discovered the first time he presented his findings in public last fall, at a conference in Austria. "These people were squirming in their seats and I could see they were getting upset," says Ball.
It didn't help that he came with pictures of the heads he had measured, each with an identifying number. For an audience in that part of Europe, it evoked too many Nazi associations for comfort.
"It's a touchy subject for some people," says Rioux. "It has been so much abused in the past, people trying to make non-scientific connections between measurement and other things."
Once you start recognizing physical differences in people's shapes based even partly on race, there are always going to be people who try to equate those differences with capabilities and intelligence.
"This is different," says Rioux, noting how the NRC has long been involved in producing consumer specifications for manufacturers. "It's really an engineering project."
After his Austrian debacle, Ball has also grown used to dealing with criticism. "I tell them, 'Yeah, there is racism involved in this project, you're absolutely right, and the racism is thinking everyone is the same size and shape as you.' "
It's how such information is put into practice that matters. "The Nazis used Helvetica in their posters," says Ball, "but that doesn't make it a bad typeface.
"I'm just studying shape. If you want to draw some other conclusions, then I'm not going to support you on that."
Size China, in fact, is just the first step in what Ball hopes will evolve into a more elaborate, global set of shape templates based on people living in all continents. At which point we'll simply have a catalogue of human forms, one that acknowledges not everyone on the planet, nor even in the same country, has exactly the same contours.
"The idea is to have a sort of shape genome for the entire world, so if you're designing glasses or helmets or whatever, you can start with the shape of the person you're designing for, instead of just designing for yourself and hoping it fits somebody else."