FLEX APPEAL How Carbitex became a major behind-the-scenes player in footwear. / By Daniel P. Smith
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lthough it is 6:30 a.m. on a Tuesday morning in Hong Kong, Junus Khan is wide awake and entertaining a series of questions with an unexpected enthusiasm, even a wonderfully philosophical bent. A decade ago, after two years of tinkering with carbon fiber in the garage of his Kennewick, WA, home, Khan launched Carbitex, a fast-emerging player in the footwear space given its pioneering work in flexible carbon fiber composites. The company’s handiwork is present in a variety of partnerships across the run specialty channel these days, including last fall’s release of the $375 Speedland SL:PDX as well as the recent debut of the Altra Vanish Carbon. But Khan and Carbitex are just getting started. “If this were a baseball game, we’d be at the top of the second inning right now,” Khan says. “And I think this is going to be a long game with extra innings.” Finding a Place In Performance Run Khan is an unlikely pioneer in the carbon fiber world. He graduated from Rutgers University with a degree in Environmental and Business Economics, yet ditched a potential career in finance for a turn in the automotive industry — specifically, the supercar realm. It was there Khan learned about materials and discovered an opportunity to leverage carbon fiber’s benefits – namely, incredible strength at a low weight – in different consumer formats. Though carbon fiber as we know it today is a decades-old concoction, it is 12
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Carbitex continues building its presence in the performance run space with a client roster that includes the likes of Adidas, Altra, Saucony and Scott.
a relative baby in the materials world, Khan notes. Early on, the military utilized carbon fiber for items like missiles, helmets and drones, while aerospace and automotive naturally embraced the sturdy, lightweight material for aircraft and race cars as well. Over recent years, however, the material has increasingly filtered into mainstream consumer use in bicycle frames, tennis rackets and, yes, performance running shoes. When Khan founded Carbitex in February 2012 after two years of mad scientist-like study, he initially crafted partnerships with companies in the luggage and consumer electronics space before deciding to focus his upstart company on footwear, where he saw a relevant market fit and robust opportunity
for technologies capable of heightening performance. “Running is like the Formula 1 of footwear,” Khan says. “It’s an industry invested in pushing barriers that much further.” When Nike’s Breaking 2 project introduced the carbon fiber-plated ZoomX Vaporfly 4% to the world in May 2017, Khan says “the cat came out of the bag.” It catalyzed many across the industry to launch – or intensify, in some cases – similar projects and Carbitex fielded many inquiries. Quickly, Khan noted two camps: those who wanted to replicate Nike and those who saw what the Swoosh did and thought they could do something different. Carbitex partnered with the latter.
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4/23/22 6:03 PM
