One In A Million Jeans
unspun’s custom jeans bring 21st century innovations to weaving and sustainability in the fashion industry. Bucking the trend of fast fashion, unspun is 3D scanning users and creating custom, high-quality jeans.
“This whole company revolves around sustainability,” Miles Pekala tells me, as he narrates a tour of the unspun space in San Francisco’s Design District. Having lived previous lives as an engineer with Megabots, as well as a volunteer sewing theatrical clothing, Miles is perfectly suited for his job here as the Automation Lead.
unspun is part of a wave of anti-fast fashion. This means made to measure, high quality pieces meant to last many wears. For $250, customers get their body scanned, and a money back guarantee until the jeans fit them. Some people can easily find clothes that fit them, but for others, it’s a transformational experience.
We’re joined by Kevin Martin, co-founder. “When we took these product photos,” Kevin motions to a poster on the wall, “we scanned the model and had jeans made for her. When they came back from the factory, we thought, ‘Oh no, these can’t be right’ — they didn’t look like a regular pair of pants. But the model came and put them on before the shoot, and started crying. She had never had a pair of jeans that fit her, and these were perfect.”
unspun’s technology masters fit by gathering extensive data on each person’s individual shape, which is only possible through the body scan and software they’ve developed. The pants are free until they fit. Kevin remembers one customer who came in a couple Thursdays in a row for a re-fitting. The customer had never purchased a pair of pants that fit from any other company, so he felt he had nothing to lose.
“Whenever a customer requires more than one fitting, we learn more about how to fit pants on unique bodies.” The dedication pays off. “We build relationships with our customers to understand their pain points to ensure satisfaction and create deep loyalty and trust between us and them. There’s great customer loyalty once you get the fit right.”
unspun manufactures all of its direct to consumer jeans in the same city as they are sold. The jeans sold in San Francisco are made at a small factory downtown. However for their B2B partners, who use unspun technology to power their own customization, unspun engineers work with a factory overseas to manufacture the garments.
After working with a particular factory extensively, they’ve honed their process to be able to produce pants with an overall measurement tolerance of one centimeter — impressive, as most factories have tolerances measured in inches. A fifth of the factory floor is reserved exclusively for unspun, rearranged to accommodate sewing individual pants all at once, rather than sewing the same part of many pairs assembly-line style.
When asked about the sewing skill required, Kevin explains that skill isn’t the only factor: “The factory levels their workers based on their experience. At first, they gave us their twenty-five years experienced veterans, but we would ask them to follow the curve of the pattern to sew the pants, and they would ignore the pattern and sew it straight. We couldn’t speak the language, but you could tell by their look that they didn’t like us telling them how to do their job. So we use their three years experienced workers.”
Working with factories to do made to measure so precisely is a challenge, but the real work ahead is yet to be done. Not only is unspun using body scans to calculate the shape of jeans, they intend to eventually retire their cut and sew process in favor of using robotic manufacturing, creating the most optimal fit using seamless 3D weaving.
Not only would this reduce waste fabric produced by the cut and sew process, it also gives the denim a chance at second life. The biggest challenge in recycling textile fiber is that when the clothes are shredded in the recycling process, the resulting fibers are too short and therefore unusable for most applications.
Engineering their own looms means unspun will have control over details such as using the same continuous warp thread throughout the whole jean, so that it is easy to recover long yarn fibers when the garment is worn through and ready to be recycled.
Beth Esponnette led all the initial research, including building multiple early-stage prototypes, while working at the D.School at Stanford. Since then, she’s been joined by co-founders Walden Lam and Kevin to build the technology further, and the team is vying to be the first to have a customer-ready application for their 3D weaving technology.
In their office they have one proof of concept loom which is a blown-up, hand assembled version of the actual robot they would need to make their jeans. Unlike knitting, where the fabric is made up of thread loops in loops, weaving involves threads going vertically and horizontally — the warp and weft threads.
In any loom, the warp threads are held taut, and the weft thread woven in between — over every other warp thread, and under the rest. To do the weaving, a part called the heddle brings half the warp threads up and half down, so that the weft can move in a straight line to perform the weave. In the loom that unspun is developing, the heddles are individually actuated. “The heddles vary based on which topological shape you want to make.”
Beyond function, there are additional benefits to customizing looms. Miles complains about how the looms currently used in factories often have extremely inefficient energy consumption. “I could upgrade one old AC motor to a modern induction motor, and remove 80% of the energy consumption.”
Amy Loomis, another tour attendee, remarks that it took forty years for industrial sewing machines to upgrade from old stepper motors to new servo motors, despite the clear energy and noise benefits.
“If the industry is THAT resistant to change, our business is never going to work,” Miles says. But Kevin points out that their challenge is not in optimizing the current processes, but entirely rethinking the problem of ‘I have yarns, and I want clothes’.
“The existing system as a whole is very efficient in all the little steps, but super inefficient in the big picture.” And so, the unspun team continues to usher in a future of mass manufactured, bespoke clothing.
