Around the World
Stories from Electroloom’s travels
Summer came and went, and we have had a lot going on. Building a business and a technology has taken us around the world, and we want to share what we have been up to so you can better understand what our day-to-day is like.
Conferences
In 2015, we have had quite a few opportunities to finally share our technology with people at conferences. It has been awesome to engage with large audiences, and to build new relationships with people in the fashion space.
In September, we attended Brit + Co’s Re:Make festival, a two-day event to explore technology, creativity, and the future of making.
While there, we ran into several of our Kickstarter backers, and met other people (especially makers) with a keen interest in fashion-tech.
Next up was Chic 2015, one of Shanghai’s largest international fashion conferences. We were in the smart fashion section, sponsored by the 360 Fashion Network. In the course of 3 days, we met retailers, designers, makers, and brands from around the world.
One of the most valuable aspects of going to conferences and engaging with the public is having frank conversations. At Shanghai, our fabric was subjected to 3 days worth of touching, feeling, pulling, and observation. Having real-time engagement and feedback is something that is often hard to come by, but it's something that has already informed technical discussions and planning for the future.
Understanding the Scale of Factories
Toward the end of October, we had the amazing opportunity to go tour a textile factory in Southeast Asia. Their facilities were impressive—on their massive campus they handle everything from knitting, to dyeing, to printing, to final assembly of full garments.
While building our technology, it is important for us to understand the mechanics of the global textile supply chain and the manufacturing processes that are involved. In many ways, we are attempting to shrink the factory paradigm down to a single machine. It is no easy task, but one that certainly is put into perspective when walking around a full-scale textile factory.
When you understand the amount of energy that can be saved by shrinking the manufacturing process, you can begin to understand a core component that motivates us to build this product.
Technical Progress
We’ve set a lot of internal goals for the ways we would like to improve our technology. Some of them have quick turnaround times—a matter of days, perhaps weeks. Other goals are less quick, and require months of work in the lab or our workshop, toiling away at experiments and prototypes.
One of the larger areas of focus is improving our material quality. We have a lot going on under the hood, but we thought it would be cool to share a little bit about how our fabric will start to change. The reality is that thread, yarns, and textiles have been around for a while. Materials have had centuries (if not millennia) to be perfected for use in the world of fabrics. Because Electroloom is fundamentally reimagining how textiles can be created, there is a lot of chemistry that has to be perfected in order for these new fabrics to be developed.
Which is why we get so excited when we see progress, like increased elasticity. Check out the gif below!
Previously, stretching our fabrics would cause them to permanently deform, or worse—tear. The above GIF shows an experimental fabric that was able to stretch and recover, which is an important property for things like garments.
In addition to improved mechanical properties, we’ve also been exploring ways to make our fabric look and feel better. Below is an example of an improved texture pattern that we have successfully embedded in some of our fabrics.
Onward!
As always, we’ll be in touch. Winter is coming, and we’re hard at work building partnerships, improving our technology, and getting ready to ship out rewards.
Thanks for coming along this journey with us—more to come soon.
❤ the Electroloom team
