Winding number versus Chern--Pontryagin charge

In the usual d dimensional SO(d) gauged Higgs models with $d$-component Higgs fields, the 'energies' of the topologically stable solitons are bounded from below by the Chern-Pontryagin charges. A new class of Higgs models is proposed here, whose 'energies' are stabilised instead by the winding number of the Higgs field itself, with no reference to the gauge group. Consequently, such Higgs models can be gauged by SO(N), with 2 \le N \le d.