While mass customization seems to be the future of fashion, 3D printed clothing is still in its infancy. So, the ability to order items personally tailored via 3D scans may seem like a logical inevitability to the futurists in the crowd, it will take some time to get the concept off the ground. This may be in part due to the fact that most 3D printed clothing attempts to craft textiles from rigid thermoplastics. In turn, we’ve seen a number of startups seek to bring the on-demand, customization offered by 3D printing to the soft fabrics we’re accustomed to wearing. These include firms like Unmade, Electroloom, and Knitic, all of which have their own approaches to the problem. The latest seems as though it may be pretty far along in the prototyping process and ready to launch a full business devoted to the technology of 3D knitting shoes.
JS Shoes has hit Kickstarter with a line of shoes crafted through a combination of 3D-knitted, single-piece uppers and attached lowers. Combined, you’ve got a pair of knitted shoes fitted with sold heels for a comfortable fit and functional foot. To begin with, the startup is offering two lines of shoes, the Classic Line and the Love Line. The Love Line is a vibrant rainbow-colored shoe that customers can purchase at an early bird price of $109, with no personalization, while the Classic Line allows customers to select a fun interior color to be knitted inside of a simple, grey exterior. A pair of these can pre-ordered at the early bird price of $69. And the ability to “buy one by one”, as JS Shoes says, allows wearers to mix and match their shoes.
At the moment, it looks as though these shoes can only be ordered in standard sizes, so that the customization isn’t yet woven into the platform, aside from some simple color choices. However, the company’s founder, Xiaoxi, suggests in their Kickstarter video that the ability to customize the shoes to the wearer’s feet is there. With a software interface, it’s possible to imagine that customers could modify colors and patterns online to generate the necessary output to instruct JS Shoes’ fleet of industrial knitting machines to create the proper shoes. What would be missing, though, is a the ability to create custom yarn, which is not a trivial part of the problem.
I’m definitely not familiar with the knitting technology used in industrial settings, but it looks as though I will have to become familiar with it, as more of these stories come out. What I can say is that JS Shoes is not the only firm to use a machine like this. Shima Seiki appears to be a leading manufacturer of industrial knitting machines, which include systems dedicated to glove knitting. Unmade, mentioned above, also uses an industrial knitter for custom clothing. The next stage, then, might be for one of these companies to bring dying into the process, followed by unique shapes, for a truly custom process. In the meantime, JS Shoes has at least gotten themselves a start and, once they build true customization into the process, they may have a pair of shoes that looks just as comfortable as they are custom.
