mythos
mythos
I'm Chris Karanikas. I've spent my career in footwear chemistry and materials, and I built Mythos Technical Solutions to bring that work directly to the brands, vendors, and manufacturers who need it.
For most of my career I worked inside the footwear industry on the problems that decide whether a shoe performs: the foams in a midsole, the adhesives holding it together, the rubber on the outsole, and the manufacturing processes that have to produce all of it at scale. I spent years in senior chemical engineering leadership at Nike, where the job was rarely a single clean question. It was usually a material that behaved one way in the lab and another way on the line, and a room full of people who each needed a different part of the answer.
Mythos Technical Solutions exists to bring that same work to companies that don't have it in-house, or that need a senior set of hands on a specific problem. I work with footwear brands, chemical companies, and material vendors across the USA and Asia, the two regions where most of this industry's materials and manufacturing actually live.
The thread through everything I do is the same: take deep material and chemical knowledge and turn it into something a team can actually decide on. A bonding failure, a foam that won't hit its density target, a supercritical foaming process a supplier wants to adopt, an outsole compound that performs in one factory and not another. These aren't textbook problems. They sit at the intersection of chemistry, process, and people, and they usually need someone who has stood on a factory floor as well as in a lab.
I don't hand over theory. I work through the problem with the R&D, sourcing, sales, and manufacturing teams who have to live with the result, and I leave them with clear technical direction they can move on.
The credibility I bring is built on both formal training and years of applying it where it counts. The training matters because footwear materials problems are, underneath, chemistry and engineering problems. The experience matters because knowing the chemistry is only half of solving them.
Not the symptom that got reported, but the chemistry or process underneath it. Most of the value is in framing the problem correctly before anyone spends money chasing the wrong fix.
A bonding failure touches R&D, the supplier, and the factory floor at once. I bring those groups into the same conversation rather than handing one of them a report.
The work routinely involves proprietary formulations and unreleased products. That stays protected, always.
The goal is never to make you dependent on me. It's to give your team clear, practical next steps they can own.