Company: Nfinity Footwear, Atlanta, GA
Company Description: Nfinity is the nation's only company dedicated to making performance footwear exclusively for female athletes. Founded in 2003, they have quickly become the market leader in innovation and design. This year, they introduced the first team sport shoe to address a woman’s pronounced Q angle, a major cause of ACL injuries. Nfinity is a 7 time winner for web design, new product development and ads.
Nomination Category: Company Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Business Innovation of the Year

Nomination Title: Nfinity Shoes

Tell the story about what this nominee achieved since January 1 2008 (up to 500 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

Nfinity Shoes, the first woman’s performance team sport footwear company, is the
only brand to design and produce high performance athletic footwear exclusively
for women.  While other companies adapt men's products for the women's market,
Nfinity has pioneered a new category of athletic shoe dedicated exclusively to
the female athlete.  Nfinity is the only shoe company in the world that focuses
on proprietary engineering innovations designed to alleviate injuries to women
specific to their physiology, while delivering superior style, comfort, and
performance.  Founded in 2003, Nfinity introduced the world's first
high-performance cheerleading shoe for women and was ranked 9th on Inc.
Magazine’s list of Top 100 Consumer Product Companies in 2008. 

Nfinity Shoes debuted the revolutionary technology BioniQ™ this year. Nfinity’s
BioniQ™ technology addresses the pronounced Q Angle (the angle between hip and
knee, which increases the likelihood of ACL injuries) found in women.  This
ultra-lightweight technology conserves the energy needed to keep the foot
aligned and helps protect when an athlete becomes fatigued.

BioniQ™ is supportive and encourages the foot into a natural alignment that
relives stress on the knee. The midsole features sequenced cushioning to keep
the foot in an ergonomic performance enhancing position.

Nfinity’s experts researched the female athletes and found they were more than
four times as likely as their male counter parts to suffer from non-contact ACL
injuries.  In creating this technology Nfinity addressed one of the major
factors contributing to the non-contact ACL injuries – a woman’s pronounced Q angle.

“A pronounced Q angle increases loads at the knee during landings that have been
shown to predict non-contact ACL injury risk in female athletes,” says Assistant
Professor of Kinesiology at the University of Michigan, Scott McLean, Ph.D. “The
Q angle cannot be modified, but the potential risk may be reduced through
training the neuromuscular system, which is the current trend. Another option,
that BioniQ™ is aiming to innovate, is to manipulate the shoe-ground interface
such that alignments can be modified and loads across the knee are more
effectively transferred, reducing pressure on the ACL.”

“We understand that women athletes need their own shoes, not the male version
that has been modified for female use, so we build our shoes with the
physiological needs of women in mind,” said Tate Chalk, Nfinity Shoes CEO.
“Nfinity believes that the same amount of time, research and technology should
be used in the engineering of women’s shoes to allow for competition at the
highest level.”

The revolutionary BioniQ™ technology is in three categories of woman’s
performance footwear – Basketball, Cheerleading, and Volleyball.

List hyperlinks to any online news stories, press releases, or other documents that support the claims made in the section above. IMPORTANT: Begin each link with http://, and enclose each link in square brackets; for example, [http://www.youraddress.com]:

http://www.nfinity.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nfinity_shoes
http://www.wbca.org/releases/NfinityPR2009.html
http://www.inc.com/inc5000/2008/company-profile.html?id=200801190

Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the nominee or the leader of the nominated company:

Nfinity Shoes was founded in the fall of 2003. Nfinity revolutionized the
cheerleading footwear market by developing the world’s first spring-floor
cheerleading shoe. The company’s first orders were sold using one sample pair of
shoes and 150 promotional t-shirts. In only 5 years, Nfinity has become the #1
shoe in competitive cheerleading - beating out giants like Nike, Adidas, and
Reebok. At the most recent World Cheerleading competition approximately 75% of
all the athletes, and fully 90% of the winners sported Nfinity shoes.