“Companies like Nike and Adidas and the rest have intellectual property or brand recognition based on how their shoes fit and feel. If you went from Birkenstock, for example, to Nike, you would quickly realize that their insoles are completely different. You don’t want to lose your intellectual property on how the consumer feels about your shoe. That doesn’t mean that big brands aren’t going to take risks, but it’s calculated. Their use of 3D printing will be objective and limited.”
But when big brands release 3D printed designs, it’s not just vaporware.
“Every time a major brand launches a new 3D printing PR initiative, technological advancements occur,” Polk says.
“They are learning a lot about the new materials they can use in 3D printing, but for the big brands, the convenience is not there yet. “Insurgent brands can try new materials and different designs because they don’t have a fixed consumer in mind.”
The change is underway
Comfort was the most important thing to him when, in 2015, Troy NachtigallMarie-Curie Fellow studying customization and footwear at the Wearable Senses Lab at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, co-created a pair of custom 3D-printed shoes for a Dutch politician. The shoes (dress, not sneakers) took 100 hours to print and were made of a series of smooth vertical curved lines that flexed. The politician loved the shoes and said they were the most comfortable pair she had ever owned.
But the perception persists that 3D printed shoes must be inflexible, sticky and uncomfortable.
“3D printed shoes are cool, but only a small percentage of us are so obsessed with them that we would buy them without hesitation,” Nachtigall told WIRED. “In general, consumers are reluctant. You might think: What does (a 3D printed shoe) bring to my life? But thanks to data science and machine learning, this is going to change, allowing manufacturers to truly personalize shoes for each individual.”
That makes it a fantastic space for disruptors, he says, because we will soon see data science join the human movement. “Walking is quite complex and comfort is key. Computational manufacturing allows 3D printing companies to design not only based on the shape of a foot but also based on the individual’s weight and pressure profiles. Big sneaker companies probably won’t “They will be the first in this because they are integrated into an industrial system that suits them at this time.”
But Nachtigall believes the sector is finally about to change. “We are witnessing a change. Just as in the 1950s with footwear, when the Dutch took the shoe industry out of the Netherlands and moved it to Asia, a similar shift (in production techniques) and in the use of new materials could soon occur. . I was recently in Hong Kong and spoke to a professor specializing in polyurethane who told me about the changes that Asian manufacturers are making to FDM filaments, changes that are quite surprising: mixing things and seeing if the mixture would actually print.
“Disruptive 3D printing footwear companies are now working to print the behavior of the shoe, print the rebound, the flexibility and control all of that very deeply. This will allow us to obtain better shoes.”
And it sells better, says Nachtigall. “Footwear is a beautiful area to work in,” he adds, “because it brings together many different considerations at the same time, from aesthetics to plasticity to the elasticity of materials. “If we add AI, we will soon address the complexity of human locomotion in a way far superior to anything we have seen before.”