New laces for my TNF Hedgehogs
Published on 14th January 2011 
Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutesAm I the only person whose trail shoes outlast their laces? Well, it's happened to me with a few of them and my North Face Hedgehogs were the latest to gain disintegrating laces and these are very thin too. Being long and narrow has meant that they are getting wet and getting caught in the chainset of my bike, so the wear and tear can be explained easily with the other sheath coming off to show the white layer underneath.
A visit to a shop didn't seem to yield success, so I went having a poke around the web to discover that a Leicestershire company called Fabmania appeared to have what I needed, and I gave them a go. After all, the cost was around £3.30 plus postage and that can't break the bank with PayPal handling payment processing duties.
Delivery was via Royal Mail, so they dropped through my letter box without further ado a few days later. Changing from old to new was without any stress or strain, too. Whatever concerns I had about the laces fitting through the eyelets on the shoes proved groundless, and an old pair of trail shoes show look a little less tatty than they did.
It all highlights that the internet can be a marketplace for things that are challenging to find elsewhere (the list includes electronic and computing goods too). This is happening with all sorts of things now, and a certain online retailer becomes a port of call for the most esoteric of items. The days of finding a bricks and mortar stores laden with useful things appear to be behind us, and I can name a few that come to mind.
Thus, it is good to find a smaller enterprise that does what you need. There is more to Fabmania than laces for trail shoes, since they have a whole portfolio available, as they need to do to be a successful business. Given what else they have, it was a bonus to have things work out the way that they did.
