INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
While the Adidas Futurecraft 4D shoes are cool looking sneakers, the story behind those shoes is even more interesting
The sportswear company has partnered with Carbon to design a new kind of sneakers.
Behind the Futurecraft 4D, you can find a process that is
not that new — 3D printing
Many companies promised an industrial revolution by bringing back factories to service-driven countries, such as the United States and
But this partnership between Adidas and Carbon could turn that wild dream into a reality.
What you saw there was basically this integration
of hardware, software and chemistry all coming together to take a digital model, print it very fast, but do it out of the materials that
have the properties to be final parts,& Carbon co-founder and CEO Joseph DeSimone told TechCrunch Matthew Panzarino.
And the
secret sauce behind Carbon process is its cloud-based software tool
You use a primitive CAD, define some mechanical properties and it gets manufactured in front of your eyes.
It quite hard to buy Futurecraft
4D shoes right now because production is still extremely limited
Adidas CMO Eric Liedtke is hopeful that it going to change over the coming years.
Ultimately, we're still ramping up the innovation
It will be faster, more limited material
Ideally, the vision is to build and print on demand,& he said
&Right now, most of our products are made out of Asia and we put them on a boat or on a plane so they end up on Fifth Avenue.
You could
imagine Adidas reducing the stock in its warehouse
&Instead of having some sort of micro-distribution center in Jersey, we can have a micro-factory in Jersey,& Liedtke said
When it comes to material, this manufacturing process lets you partly use corn-based material.
And it not just design
Making shoes on demand lets you optimize the structure of the shoe for different sports and bodies.
In this case, we took 10 years plus —
maybe 20 years — of science that we had on foot strikes, and running, and how runners run, and where the impact zones are, and what we
need to design into it from a data standpoint
And then, we let the creative takeover,& Liedtke said.
Carbon isn''t just working with Adidas
The company is quite active on the dental market for instance, working on resins
&We now also have the world's first 3D-printed FDA-approved dentures,& DeSimone said.
It interesting to see that a simple product, such as
a pair of shoes, can become the representation of a long process of research and development, engineering and design.
