Just in Time Manufacturing at Nimbly’s Knitwear factory
Mariano deGuzman and the Nimbly team explain best design practices for knitting machine-made clothes, and talk about the future of just in time knitting at their made-to-order knitwear factory.
The Nimbly facility is a sunny warehouse room. Near the entrance is a couch space, and a rack full of samples. Further down are some desks with computers, and a wifi hotspot box (there’s no ethernet routed to these industrial buildings).
They have programmable washing machines, a quality control and mending area, and all the way in the back is their grand 4-bed Shimaseiki knitting machine.
The Origins of Nimbly: From Kickstarter to Today
I found Mariano when I was researching custom knitwear manufacturing and came across his enticing 2013 Kickstarter campaign: “Appalatch’s 3D printed sweaters fit perfectly, are sustainably sourced and 100% made in America.”
When I got the opportunity to visit LA, I cold emailed him, and he invited me to their factory to see what they were working on. After the Kickstarter in December 2013, they bought a knitting machine ($100,000) for fully fashioned knitwear manufacturing, where the torso and sleeves are knitted in one piece, and then linked together.
“We didn’t realize how labor intensive it would be to do the linkage.” To do the linking, a person has to manually hook the stitches of the garment onto the linkage machine. Ellen Freeborn says it took her 8 hours to link up the first sweater, but she managed to get it down to 1 hour.
A Much Needed Upgrade
Now, they’ve upgraded to a Shimaseiki machine (around $200,000) that allows them to do whole garment manufacturing. In whole garment manufacturing, the arms and the torso of a sweater are knit at the same time with separate yarn feeds, from the bottom of the sweater to the top.
When the machine reaches the armpit where the arms and torso need to be joined, it starts to knit them together. The sweater leaves the machine complete, and the only post processing required is pulling out the waste yarn from the beginning, inspection, mending, and washing.
Kyle examines the machine as it knits its next piece. “We’re doing development right now,” he explains. “After you’ve figured out how you want to knit your sweater, you don’t have to watch the machine.” The machine is programmable, which allows Kyle to quickly tweak and test designs.
The machine knits garments right when they’re ordered. The elegance of Nimbly’s setup is in its efficiency. They don’t need a lot of space because made-to-order means they don’t need to store any garments, and they generate very little waste.
Kyle gives me a rundown of the Shimaseiki software, which costs $30,000. The main interface is a grid, and each colored cell is a type of stitch. He demonstrates adjusting the curve of a sleeve by adding and deleting cells.
Shimaseiki provides some default designs for sweaters and dresses that you can modify, so you don’t have to start your design from scratch. The software also has a really cool simulation where you can make sure that the machine is actually going to do what you intended.
Avoiding Pitfalls and Common Design Mistakes
“The best designs are contoured around the shape of the body.” Ellen shows me some elements of poor design. “We can’t do deep necklines, because the machine is holding onto the stitches at the bottom of the neckline as it knits up. The fabric gets bunched up, causing dropped stitches.”
Similarly, they have to be careful about where the sleeves attach. The machine knits together a mismatched number of rows between the torso of the sweater and the sleeve.
The machine takes 30–45 minutes to knit a sweater, and about an hour to knit a dress. Kevin Sladak tells me that the goal is to set up a cluster of 3–4 machines, and an additional facility in New York.
They don’t have any software developers currently, but the company is looking for programmers to get started on advancements like dynamically queuing garments for machine clusters. “The [Shimaseiki] machines run a version of Android, and engineers at Disney have managed to reverse engineer some of it to make their own compiler.”
Just in Time Knitwear: The Way of The Future?
The industry has long had the tools for just in time manufacturing of knitting garments that are made to measure. On one hand, this technology allows manufacturers to make exactly the amount people want to buy, which saves money and reduces waste.
On the other hand, at $150,000 to $200,000 per machine, if the Nimbly facility were at peak efficiency and working 24/7, they could manufacture about a thousand sweaters per month. With this much upfront cost it’s a difficult industry to break into.
There are mass manufacturing facilities overseas that use specialized whole garment knitting machines to mass produce many of the same items, like socks or gloves. Perhaps we’ll have to wait until the machines get cheaper for the potential of just in time made-to-measure manufacturing for knitted garments to be fully realized.
