A 3D printing, waste-free shoemaker
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New tech lets brands create styles quickly, with lower costs and fewer resources
Spotted: With the fashion industry sending around 92 million tonnes of textile waste to landfills each year, there is an urgent need to tackle the problem of fashion waste. Hilos, a company specialising in 3D-printed footwear, is working to reduce waste with a platform that creates footwear on demand.
Hilos’ technology combines the outsole, midsole, and insole into a single 3D printable unit. This allows the company to increase production speed and easily customise both style and size. A study conducted with Yale University produced an environmental evaluation of 3D printed footwear and concluded that Hilos uses half the emissions and 99 per cent less water than traditional footwear manufacturing. Plus, the printed products can be easily disassembled at the end of their life and are 100 per cent recyclable.
Debuted earlier this year at Milan Design Week, the company has now launched its new ‘Studio OS’ platform, an AI-powered, no-CAD 3D design platform that makes it even easier for brands and independent designers to turn ideas into products. Using inputs like a sketch, mood board, or loose prompt, the cloud-based platform generates a 3D file of the chosen design.
This design can be easily tweaked, and users can order a sample of the 3D-printed final product before officially launching. The system allows users to rapidly and sustainably create as few as 100 pairs of shoes on demand, and lines created on Studio OS can either be printed by Hilos’ supply chain partners or directly on the user’s factory floor.
According to the company, it typically costs between $120,000 and $250,000 just to create moulds for an initial size run, and 12 to 18 months to go through the design and development stages. By contrast, the StudioOS platform enables creators to go from the idea stage to a market launch in just 90 days, allowing brands to rapidly change their styles to suit the market.
Written By: Lisa Magloff and Matilda Cox