Norsewear
2025 Sub-contractor or SME of the Year – Product: Norsewear — Norsewear supply the NZDF’s physical training and combat socks. A well-known local New Zealand business, Norsewear identified an opportunity to work with the NZDF to reengineer these socks. User testing helped deliver an improved design trialled by over 500 people across a range of environments and put through extreme use durability testing. Design of the combat socks not only involved a significant amount of testing, but over 1600 lines of code written to ensure the production machines accurately follow designs to put structure, padding, stretch, and warmth where it is needed. These combat socks are a bespoke design built around and for New Zealand military people.  They worked closely with Defence to continue to forecast demand to ensure the local, traceable material is available for the following year. Norsewear took on risk by expanding production and heavily invested in product technology – sourcing quality raw material and adapting the manufacture and production process – to arri