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A Stinky Problem Means a Big Opportunity
Stacey Burling | The Philadelphia Inquirer
It is soccer season, which means that millions of families are coping with early weekend games, fragile egos, and a smell so vile that words can barely do it justice – the smell of soccer cleats and shin guards cured in wet grass and sweat.
Some exude an odor remarkably like one of the most repulsively acrid, tenacious scents on earth: cat urine. Others, said one dad, are more like rotting vegetables.
Or worse.
“I called the exterminator,” confessed Diane Price, of Upper Dublin, as she sat on the sidelines at the Al Perlini Soccer Tournament in Montgomery County this month. One of her three soccer-playing sons was on the field. “I thought there was a dead mouse in my garage, and it turned out to be the shoes.”
A quest to find the source of this awful scent, and a solution for it, quickly devolved into a game of pass-the-buck: It’s the growing popularity of synthetic shoes. No, it’s the leather. It’s the kids; some of them just smell. It’s parents, who don’t take care of the shoes or the kids.
Finally, two experts on sweat – George Preti, a chemist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, and James Leyden, an emeritus professor of dermatology at the University of Pennsylvania – shed some light. The source of the nasty smell in cat urine is volatile sulfur compounds. Bacteria that colonize some people’s feet also produce sulfur compounds. What you think it smells like depends on your experiences, Leyden said, but it is “almost universally perceived as offensive.”
Whether some shoes make the problem worse they couldn’t say, but the bacteria thrive where it’s wet.
This stinky-shoe situation is a great example of what Richard Lancioni, chair of Temple University’s marketing department, calls “unrecognized need.” Shoe manufacturers may put tons of research into producing lighter, faster shoes without worrying enough about what happens when their technology meets adolescent perspiration.
Voila. A chance to make money.
