3D Printing's Bioplastic Utopia with Sylvia Heisel

Hi, welcome to another episode of Fashion Made. Today I'm speaking with Sylvia Heisel.

Hey David.

Hey, how are you doing?

I'm good, how are you?

Yeah, very well, thank you. Sylvia, today we are obviously talking about 3D printed fashion. Um, you, uh, run a consultancy on the topic.

Yes, we do. You know, 3D printing for fashion is super early. Um, I think it's a little behind most other industries where we're sort of lagging in 3D printing and additive manufacturing, but we see it as a super exciting area where there's a huge amount of potential for apparel, and that's what we're working to develop.

Fantastic. And what are the nuanced challenges within 3D printing for fashion and apparel?

You know, textiles and drape is of course the hardest. Getting something to really, to really drape is still very, very challenging and probably not ready for prime time, not ready for scale yet. But coming very quickly The, you know, we've made a lot of prototype garments and each one has a lot of innovation from the previous one because the technology is changing so quickly on the materials and on somewhat on the equipment as well of what can be manufactured this way so that what we're making now couldn't have existed a year ago because the materials just weren't there. So it's a very fast innovation process at the moment. That said, it is still not— you cannot compete 3D printing a t-shirt as opposed to traditional manufacturing. Where there's a lot of innovation right now is with bioplastics. And with making bioplastics which feel like fabrics and which start to drape and feel, you know, at this point they're probably like leathers and vinyls and things pretty easily. They're not like silks. But again, what we're making now couldn't have existed a year ago or 2 years ago. And within a year or two, we'll have things that are way ahead of what we have now. Hmm. Um, wow.

That makes it hard to plan.

Yes, really hard. Uh, but really exciting. Uh, when you start thinking about what will be possible and when you start, you start going, okay, well, this is what we want to have clothes like this. We want to have products that are like this and then designing for that. And building the equipment and developing materials to make that possible.

So you're almost trying to forecast where it can go in 5 years' time. And at that point, you're trying to forecast what materials and what machinery and equipment you're going to have available, the software that we'll have developed to create the design, and then the actual design itself. So you really have to have a futurist head on to achieve this.

You know, one of the things it is, most other manufacturing industries are a lot further along in use of 3D printing than apparel is. And there, so there's a lot of use cases where they've developed, and a lot of situations where The equipment and the materials exist, but they exist only in laboratories and universities as yet. And the problem isn't that the technology isn't there, it's that the technology isn't there at scale. So if we can envision what we want for apparel, the technology probably exists already, but in a university or so.

Okay.

And to make little swatches, not to make clothes.

Yeah. So you're, you're linking a lot of 3D printed fabrics or textiles. It's, it's, it's all a linking, um, process to create a drapable garment. Is that correct?

Yes. The pieces that we're doing now, you know, we've made a number of prototype pieces and it's really about showing the industry what's possible and making sort of, yeah, development pieces for shows and expositions. And the pieces we've been making are primarily designed flat and/or printed flat pieces as textiles and then joined together as if they were, as in traditional clothing. So you're just printing without cutting out, you're printing only the pieces. Um, designing and printing a flexible, drapable piece really in 3D as a single unit is still further off. Wow.

Okay. What needs to happen for that to be achieved?

For that utopia where we'll, you know, just press a button and have a full garment come out printed in 3D. The hardware and the equipment has to get much more advanced than it is right now. It will happen, but that's a little further off. There are a lot of robotics things working on that, but there's a lot of moving parts. Printing smaller pieces, as yet printing accessories, printing handbags, And, you know, shoes, of course, are being done. And smaller clothing pieces is quite possible. And printing flat pieces without any waste is very possible. And I think that's where you'll first see it, is that you can do that easily at this point. No one has done it. You know, the equipment is not there to do it. At scale affordably yet, but the technology all exists. So it's just about building the machines and making it happen.

So some of these innovations are a little way in the future, but, um, it's interesting that you talk about the bags and the accessories that we can 3D print now, and I think I'd like to talk a little bit more about that because With technology in fashion and apparel, a lot of the conversations can often be around what is going to happen in the future. The reality is there's an incredible amount of technologies and applications that are being used really successfully today. Um, so within 3D printing for apparel and accessories, can you expand a little bit more? On some of the great things that are being done today?

Sure, you know, a lot of companies are already using 3D printing very successfully for prototyping and for certainly on hardware and trims and, and things and findings and, you know, buckles and branding and things on, on bags and and things like that, that you can really— a lot of companies are already doing that of product development. And you can design, you can create hardware, you can manufacture in small quantities for luxury goods using 3D printing. And then you can also design for injection molding and for items that will then be produced in a traditional manner, but you can iterate and you can sample very quickly, um, and at much, much lower costs.

And how, um, prevalent is that at the moment?

We're seeing quite a lot of the larger companies doing that. It's still not, you know, a lot of the factories are hesitant, um, I wish it was much more prevalent.

Yeah, I was going to say.

I wish it was more prevalent, and it's one of the gaps that we've been doing a lot of teaching because one of the gaps has been in fashion schools aren't teaching a lot of technology yet. So the students coming out don't necessarily know how to work with these new technologies like 3D printing that engineering students and industrial design students and students learning other manufacturing fields all come out with a lot of knowledge about how 3D printing works, and fashion students, it's still not really being taught to them.

Yeah, why is that?

Um, I have no good answer. I'm not sure. I don't know. I, um, we're certainly getting lots and lots of requests from students saying that they want to learn and lots of— we've done some workshops teaching at schools and we're developing that because the students are really excited about it. I think it's just not within traditional curriculum and it takes a while for schools. I don't know.

So yeah, I guess the same thing applies to 3D printing and that my immediate instinct is that the 3D printing side is probably going to be behind the 3D design side. Even though they tie in quite nicely with each other.

They tie in really nicely. There is, there is sort of a little bit of a gap and I think a huge opportunity to connect the 3D design software with 3D printing and additive manufacturing as a manufacturing system that the— when you're doing the 3D visualization software, all works back to traditional patternmaking. Whereas the 3D manufacturing software is all based on design software that is really for solid products. Yeah, rather than textiles or flexible things. And, and there's a gap there that represents an amazing opportunity for somebody.

Yeah, who's gonna do it?

Anybody? Anybody's listening and they do?

Yeah, we want a piece of it, by the way. I'm hopefully going to speak to a guy who heads up innovation at the London College of Fashion. In a few weeks' time. So, this is one of the things I'm really going to put to him. And I know that we've had speakers over at our Hong Kong event from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where they are starting now, and in the last, I think, 2 years, have now started to offer their design course with a 3D module. Included in the curriculum, and obviously this is where it starts within educational establishments.

Wonderful, yes, it really— and it's so easy, it's so much easier for students to pick it up and to understand visualizing everything in 3 dimensions and working with design, 3-dimensional design And visualization is, you know, it comes very quickly, especially if you've done any— for anyone that's grown up doing gaming of any kind or so, it's sort of a natural for them. And there's no question that that's the future of how things will be designed and how, as an industry, we'll communicate Clothes are three-dimensional, our bodies are three-dimensional. It's a little crazy that we still work with— also that we design still with everything flat, sketches, and working in some cases without data in design software and Illustrator and things that don't that don't have data and any kind of actual measurements attached to them.

Oh, fit is obviously the number one issue that people are trying to solve now, and actually, slowly but surely, solutions are coming in. I mean, you're absolutely right. An industry that's so ubiquitous where every single person on this planet is a consumer of apparel. It's, you know, alongside food and drink. If you could bottle air as well, you know, it would be along the same kind of lines. And it's incredible that the design and development and manufacturing process for these things is still largely a two-dimensional process. It's slowly changing. I mean, it's actually ridiculous when you think about it. So hopefully, you know, consultancy like yours is going to help companies realize at least one side of it, which is the 3D printing side. Do you think that we're going to get to this point of designing, selling, and then making the product anytime soon?

I think we're going to get there in stages. I think we aren't ready to— I think a whole product is It's difficult at this point to start from scratch in most, you know, in most cases. There are so many different materials and products that go into it, to making a single garment or accessory, that it's hard. But we're seeing a lot of, a lot of our projects are around partial manufacturing and using 3D printing that for customizing end steps and details.

Okay, like how?

Like, like you order, you know, if you, you order a suit and the suit will be three-quarters made and then customized to you with the hems, the custom buttons with your monogram, some end tailoring to make it fit, and shipped to you. So somewhere between 75 and 90% of that garment is pre-made, but the finishing and the fitting and the personalizing is done after you've ordered— placed the order.

Okay.

Uh, and that kind of thing We're working on a number of projects that way where it's about personalizing details to order and creating situations for that, for customizing parts and accessories.

Okay.

Yeah.

So is that a little bit like when I can go on one of the sport shoe manufacturers' websites and go and design it myself, but really all the requisite parts have already been made and it's just kind of finishing colors, you know, I'm not changing the structure of a product.

Right, exactly. You're not, and you're not redesigning. I think, you know, everything that we've worked on, and this is not something I have data on, but just I personally observed, is that most consumers don't want to design from scratch themselves. They want experts. To do it. Oh, yeah. What they want is to have a little bit of creative input and a little bit of a personalization of it, but not to start from scratch and create a product.

Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. You know, I used to think about that kind of thing with Windows and Macs. Windows is a much more customizable bit of software. But really, it can get too deep sometimes. And I always found the nice thing with Max is that it was kind of set up pretty well and you could just add a few finishing touches. And, you know, and I think that probably same kind of ethos applies here as well.

It has to be fun for the consumer. It has to be, you know, it's fashion, it's apparel. We're selling something that people should enjoy and should enjoy shopping for.

Yeah.

And so if you make it too difficult, it doesn't work. But if you use customization to make it fun and to make it more special, there's this great opportunity there. I think. And then the fit thing also, you know, we're using, you know, the customizing at the end to tweak fit is of course a great opportunity.

Absolutely. How do you see the balance being when you're customizing something as variable as fit?

You know, so many— so much depends on what the garment is, or what the fit can be, anything from length and—

Yeah. Oh, it's a myriad, isn't it? Hard question to answer.

It's a big hard question. And you know, that future where we all have our avatars and can see the— can visualize in 3D ourselves in the clothes that we're ordering and see, do we like it? Do we want to change it? Is going to— that's still a ways away, I think. You know, partly because, you know, I know my reaction when I first saw my avatar from a body scan, and I thought, "Ugh." You know? Like, you just kind of get really depressed by how, like, small and not quite like a model it looks like, and you think, "Oh, well, yeah." Is that like—

I think that's probably like the first time I heard my voice on this podcast. I thought, oh no.

Yeah.

Did you find it realistic when you did that?

I'm not sure what realistic is. I'm not sure. You know, we all see ourselves in such different ways and at different times, and it depends on your mood, and it depends on, um, you know, when you're— it's compare it to looking in a mirror. In some mirrors you look great, and some mirrors, the lighting is horrible in the room, and, and it just ruins— and you look and you think, 'Ugh, terrible.' I think, for, you know, certainly for more functional clothing, for sportswear and things, I think an avatar is fantastic, that you can see things that you know how you want them to fit. You can really see, okay, this is how I want this to fit, how I want it to feel. It's a little harder when you get into more fashion items and, and you're sort of looking at it and thinking, oh, well, do I look good in that?

Yeah, you mentioned something there, how it fits and how it feels, which got me thinking about the types of materials that are being used in 3D printing for fashion. Are there things that actually feel nice to the skin?

There are things that feel nice. They feel synthetic nice rather than cashmere or silk nice. You know, they are at the area we're mostly working with bioplastics.

Okay.

And I think one of the, one of the things I'm really excited excited about is that we're working with compostable bioplastics with the idea that in the future you'll be able to make fast fashion items that are completely biodegradable. So, you know, you, you buy something, you wear it a couple of times, or you use it a couple of times if it's a bag or so, and then you decide you don't like it and you just toss it and it's out with the vegetable clippings and you don't feel bad about it and it doesn't wind up in an ocean somewhere messing up our planet.

Yeah, yeah, this is— yeah, that's super interesting. So the sustainability side of this is massive.

The sustainability side is huge, you know, that besides the fact that you're at zero waste on materials from the beginning, from what you're making. The idea of developing bioplastics and developing, you know, materials that are compostable and biodegradable, which again, they exist, they just haven't been developed for clothing and for apparel as yet, and they're not at scale, but they do exist and it is possible. And that to me is super exciting. That's— yeah.

Can I ask, Sylvia, sorry, sorry to interrupt, I just wanted to know what's the thing, because obviously there's a market for it.

I absolutely believe there's a market for it, but there's no proof yet that there's a market for it.

So how do we convince them that that this is a massive market because, you know, the way you think about it and the way you're convincing me to think about it, there is huge amounts of financial return here, um, and as well there's a massive sustainable opportunity as well. So it seems to tick all the right boxes. So these people developing these compostable bioplastics, um, how do we convince them that that they should do this for fashion apparel?

A lot of the people developing bioplastics would love to work with fashion, but they're getting so much interest from other fields at this point that their, you know, that business is booming. There's a lot of interest in bioplastics and a lot of growth in that at this point. And fashion hasn't gone running after them. No one's really pursuing that as yet.

Right.

I think it's a massive opportunity. It's, you know, a really exciting one. But again, we're going to have to make, you know, we've made items for proof of concept. To go, okay, here is a handbag, here is a— the dresses are harder. I will say the dresses are harder than the handbags and things at this point, but we've made dresses also. And so this is a totally compostable garment, um, but it's not— it's going to take a— it's going to take an investment, a larger investment from somebody to to produce them competitively for fast fashion. The equipment is there, but it hasn't been optimized. I think, you know, one of, one of the other problems with 3D printing has been that there's a misconception that one printer will print everything. And in the end, it's just a machine that each machine has to be optimized for what it will make the same way you wouldn't so a leather handbag and a silk cocktail dress with the same sewing machine.

Yes.

It's going to have to be, okay, you develop a 3D printer that is specifically for a specific type of garment and a specific material, and then that's what that printer makes.

Okay.

Rather than the sort of general one printer prints everything.

Yeah, yeah, of course, of course. I'd like to just finish off looking into the future beyond the next couple of years and the developments and how you think do you think 3D printing will be used when it has become just a part of manufacturing, a sort of stable component that is established within manufacturing? For instance, do you think people will kind of do this stuff at home, or do you think this is going to really remain in the factory?

I think it will be factories. I really, I don't see home printing. I don't think, you know, I personally, even though I can design clothes, the last thing in the world I would want would be to get up in the morning and think about what I was going to wear that day and then try and make it. I want to walk into a restaurant and buy breakfast. I don't want to make it myself. I don't see that as the future. I think we will have smaller localized factories, and by localized I mean within, you know, 500 miles or 1,000 miles or so rather than across the globe for customization of clothes. And I think 3D printing enables that.

Yeah. Well, I hope it's 500, not 1,000, because, um, yeah, you definitely got your United States of America hat on there. You know, 500 miles would almost cover the whole of, whole of poor little United Kingdom.

Um, but yes, localized factory, you know, depending on how, how big a population is in a place. Uh, but yeah. Localized manufacturing and finishing. And I think 3D printing enables a lot of that, but I don't think it, you know, it's not about consumers printing at home.

Yeah, I think you're right. You know, I always sort of thought, and I've heard a lot of discussions over the last few years talking about 3D printing, that the, um, I'll use that word again, the utopia would be for us to have a printer in our, you know, in our shed or in our garage. And you're absolutely right, it's so impractical because A, who wants to design products themselves and make it themselves, you know, if, you know, you can go to the local store and do it? And B, you would need, you know, probably 20 different printers for all of the different things that you might want to print at home, because as you alluded to earlier on, one printer can't do it all, right?

One printer can't. And it, you know, desktop printers make little plastic objects, and we're really, really far away from the idea of a printer that's affordable for, you know, if we'll ever get there, of a printer, the idea that a printer that was affordable for people to have in their home that could actually print clothing. I don't think that's realistic.

I think, you know, um, no, certainly not as a goal for sort of our industry now to look forward to that's achievable.

No, absolutely not. Um, and I don't think it would, you know, it, I just don't, I don't see why anyone would as a consumer, why would you want that?

Yeah.

Also, so why would we be working for a technology that— to develop something that doesn't benefit anyone and that no one really wants?

Absolutely. So what is the next opportunity then? Sort of what's the thing on the horizon that excites you most and that is maybe your goal, let's say?

I think, you know, Out of everything we're working on, the idea of compostable accessories to me is really exciting. The idea of— and things that are clothing, using clothes and accessories that can be made from bioplastics that are fun and compostable and, you know, fast fashion you don't have to feel guilty about. And I'm really excited about that. And I'm really excited about customization also, of making things being parts of garments and using 3D printing as, you know, more accessories and finishing touches on clothing, but really having— seeing that idea of customized and semi-custom.

Yeah, I think when you say that you could achieve fast fashion with zero waste, that is— wow, well, that would just be something, you know, that would be world-changing. So, hey, good luck to you.

Thank you, thank you.

I really, really hope that, you know, you can be a part of an industry that helps to achieve that, because obviously we're one of the worst polluting industries in the in the world right now, and fast fashion isn't completely to blame, but, you know, plays its part in that. And if we could do something about that area, then we'd really be doing something. So, yeah, as I say, really, really hope you can be a part of that massive change. All right, well, thank you for coming on the show today, and all the best. We'll see you soon.

Okay, David, thank you. Everybody get up!