The Way You’re Making Clothes Is All Wrong – WWD

Amid this heyday of digital fashion, one tech-focused company has its eye decidedly fixed on physical clothes — and is trying to change everything about the way they’re made.

San Francisco-based CreateMe is developing a system for on-demand clothing manufacturing and embellishment at scale that takes cues from assembly line production. Think Henry Ford meets Tom Ford, but tricked out with robotics and cloud computing.

The twist: The garments aren’t attached with thread, but bonded with an advanced polymer, effectively replacing sewing with high-tech glue.

WWD caught up with the company at SXSW, where, as a Warner Bros. partner, its new CreateMe Live on-demand customization tech was put to use, printing up and embroidering hundreds of sweatshirts, bandanas and other swag daily with Tweety Birds, DC superhero emblems and more.

CreateMe Live serves brands such as Levi’s and Ralph Lauren, as well as live events. But it’s just one part of a broader system that — the company hopes — may change the face of apparel production.

What holds it all together looks like literal glue, or rather, the advanced polymer. CreateMe’s approach to automating garment production can’t work without it.

Fabrics and knits are soft and stretchable, making sewing impractical, if not impossible, to automate at high speeds and at high volume, Campbell Myers, founder and co-chief executive officer, explained to WWD. To get around that issue, CreateMe came up with a new process to apply dots of polymer instead to mimic stitches.

“It allows for automation, because you can lay down the dots in a particular pattern, very easily,” he added.

Anyone imagining the stiff, weak hem tape or bonding web sold in stores might feel dread at this point, but that has no place here, assured Myers. The company has been working with materials science experts, running as many as 20,000 experiments to create different stretch profiles, to zero in on a polymer that’s as flexible and durable as stitching, if not stronger.

“We want to feel like it has the hand-feel of a sewn garment,” said cofounder and co-CEO Vib Prasad. “The intention is to create and replicate.”

It’s also about manufacturing speed. “It’s so much higher than what would be in a normal facility,” Myers added. With advances, like the polymer and machinery that can relax and tension the fabric in real time, “the system is modeled out to move it about two minutes per minute.”

The production velocity has obvious implications for how quickly brands can create or respond to trends. When football star Tom Brady debuted his new menswear collection, CreateMe jumped in to produce a few of the pieces that were needed quickly, the company said.

Myers sees a benefit for sustainability as well, since higher throughput won’t have to require larger facilities. “This is so much faster, and that means you can put smaller facilities closer to big markets, closer to where the raw materials are,” he noted.

CreateMe’s ambition is as expansive as the 35,000-square-foot factory it’s building in South San Francisco. The four-year-old company employs a hardware engineering team of 60 people, including 10 PhDs, along with 40 software developers, with technical talent hailing from places like Disney, Google, Coach, Lululemon, Intel, Amazon, Microsoft, DoubleClick and IBM.

Altogether, they’re designing, testing and building multiple components across software, hardware, machinery, material science and more. Wrapping one’s mind around the various components can feel like going through a gauntlet of tech, but it all fits together to form an end-to-end system.

An interface allows designers to create or submit designs, and in the factory, robots cut and assemble the pieces — bonding, not sewing, the garments. Cloud-powered customization features allow brands to send changes, even during the run. So If a client needs to, say, tweak sizing for a particular lot based on regional demand, or switch to a different capsule collection and back again, the system can adapt quickly, especially if there are no major material changes.

The embellishments can change, however, and that’s crucial in this environment. In fact, the company places a top priority on surface design, or printing.

“It’s all about surface design. We see it as almost fungible, and because we built it into how we architected our system, it’s very extensible, very flexible for us to go from one unit to 10 units, or go to a different pattern, or go to a different size,” explained Myers. “A lot of companies that have tried to think about this, they tried to do it from using robotics, which is not an easy thing. That has to be reprogrammed every single time.”

Repetitively stamping an image on a T-shirt is one thing. But applying a variety of colors and patterns, without switching lines to accommodate different fabrics or reprogramming the machinery, is another.

For the SXSW activation, CreateMe collaborated with Alan Gonzalez of “Project Runway Redemption” on a Tweety Bird-inspired bomber jacket. The entire process, from design to production to its appearance at the festival, took less than 10 days, according to the company. The six jackets it brought to give away apparently set off a frenzy, with mobs of attendees trying to claim one.

Beyond the factory floor, the process culminates at the point of purchase with CreateMe Live’s self-contained kiosks. As the experiential or consumer-facing part of the equation, the terminals — which look like larger, souped-up vending machines — can customize printing on the spot.

The company has a raft of patents in the works, and it’s even working on its own polymer compound. But even as it navigates all the development for its myriad technologies, hoping to drive smarter production of physical fashion, it can’t help but see a role for itself in the digital world, too.

“The kiosk will have QR codes,” said Myers. “Picture the use case: Generation Z has a lot of NFTs now. They will be able to walk up, scan it and get their one-to-one.”