When people think of what 3D printing is, they might think of plastic knickknacks and miniature figurines that teenagers make in their high school libraries. For HILOS (Human Innovation Lab Operating System), 3D printing means creating footwear that's chic, low-waste, and runway ready.
Brands are overproducing 20% because they don't know what size and styles are going to be needed when, and so they have to overproduce, and they're still missing sales, HILOS CEO Elias Stahl told TechCrunch. HILOS pitched today on the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024.
That overproduction leads to waste, which puts 300 million pairs of shoes into the landfill each year. When those shoes land in landfills, it may take them 30 to 40 years to break down.
A surefire way to minimize overproduction is to only produce what customers actually buy — but on-demand retail services are expensive, since the shoes aren't made in bulk. But with its 3D printing technology, HILOS has found a way to print stylish shoes on demand within 72 hours.
"HILOS has patented new forms of shoemaking specifically for digital manufacturing, so they're specifically for less labor, less component parts," Stahl said. "We take what might traditionally be five or six different materials, combine them into one printed material, so that you can literally print and assemble in the U.S., paying American wages without having the shoe be a $300 shoe."
HILOS is not selling the shoes themselves but borrowing ideas from previous online retail pioneers such as Bonobos. For brands that partner with HILOS, their physical stores can carry less inventory, so when customers come to the store and try on a few shoes, once the customer gets a sense of what size and style fits them well, they can have it shipped to them.
So instead of having 20 [shoes] and having to reorder every 120 days, they can have two and reorder every 72 hours," Stahl said.
To make its 3D-printed shoes, HILOS uses powder-based printing, unlike the cheap, plastic ones you could find in school.
Powder is the most expensive, most industrial, and the highest quality and finish, Stahl said. So when we pull something like this out of the printer, it's got this soft, suede, velvety feel.
This itself is not a shoe miraculously popping out of some 3D printer but instead prints a few handfuls of modular pieces of a shoe to be easily assembled with speed. Not is the shoe made up of the actual 3D-printed material itself, which would probably end up betraying functionality and comfort. It stocks materials such as leather or knits that it also makes use of in a more modular, multi-functional approach.
"This is where a modular product creation process really allows for a lot of efficiencies," said Stahl. "You can have 10 different leather wares that supply 40 different styles."
Even with this modular manufacturing setting, it still takes sometime before one can design a shoe. In its brand technology platform, HILOS has applied AI and AR for converting sketches of shoes more rapidly into printed 3D models.
"We can automate and accelerate that process, so a 2D image can immediately become a 3D file that is manufacturable, that is wearable, and it's end to end," Stahl said.
If the designer uses more analog methods to model the prototypes of their shoes, the AR tools can mimic the design, taking it from physical to digital.
"The idea is to allow the designer to design in the physical world, and to design not through a screen or a mouse, but to be creative where they are creative, to be inspired where they're inspired, because technology, after certain levels, should become invisible," Stahl said.
HILOS intentionally chose to set up its stores in Portland, Ore. It accommodates over 500 brands of outdoor products, plus iconic brands like Nike, Adidas, and Columbia. As one of the leads involved in the Made in Old Town, Portland hopes it will take back onshore green footprint footwear manufacturing in the homeland. The bill was signed by Oregon state lawmakers, and it issued a grant of $125 million for the rehabilitation of 10 buildings and four city blocks.
So what will happen is we will make these huge plants outside town in Guangdong, China, but rather we might actually have our actual towns here in the U.S. where we can do it downtown on demand as well as being highly crafted by a higher-quality labor with this sustainable perception of our reinvention as to how we view our downtown, said Stahl. He added that Portland has really been an incredible home for us.
At TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, HILOS announced a new partnership with the shoe brand Steve Madden, in which Steve Madden will utilize the on-demand product creation platform developed by HILOS to make its supply chain more sustainable.