Revolutionize Your Wardrobe: How 3D Printing Could Change the Way We Buy Shoes (and everything else)
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Interestingly enough, most women to which I’ve introduced the concept of 3D printing have pretty much immediately asked if they could print shoes. For sure, those are expensive and it would be interesting to be able to print as many as you’d like — although 3D-printing enthusiasts know it’s not that cheap — but mostly I think it there is a question of finding a good fit. After all, isn’t the prince authenticating Cinderella using her shoe?
History and context
I came to realize this fitting problem myself when trying Birkenstocks — and if you repeat it I’ll kill you. You see, they are reputed of being comfortable because they are shaped like your foot and support you extremely well. Or at least they must be shaped like someone’s foot, because putting them on was for me akin to walking a beach made of sharp rocks. This demonstrates that there is no one-size-fits-all, all feet are unique and must eventually be treated as such.
In fact, since the beginning of the last century we’ve stopped using any kind of tailored wear, from garments to shoes, because it’s kind of the core of the Second Industrial Revolution: pushing apparel away from its custom phase to become a product.
The only issue with this standardization being that if you decide to define feet sizes with both width and length, I’m guessing you end up with something of the order of a thousand sizes. That is not scalable. Manufacturers just assumed that all feet would have the same width/length ratio and be done with it. On the other hand (or foot) you should account for the width, length, thickness, position of the arch, etc. Impossible with current industrial processes. As a result, shoes have a terrible fit.
Would it be such a luxury to have shoes adapted to your feet? Yes indeed, it would. Luxury is about getting something that is usually mass-produced — shoes let’s say — made using a more artisanal process. There is almost no good reason to do that, in the sense that it costs a lot of money for what would otherwise be small sacrifices. For example if you look for a new pair of shoes, maybe you won’t fit in the model you like the most but eventually you’ll find a brand that is comfortable for you. A bespoke shoe would fit any model on your foot but for ten times the price1.
Problem definition
Let’s circle back to the initial point. Can 3D printing commoditize luxury — or at least comfortable — shoes?
After interviewing a bunch of subject matter experts that are my wife, GPT-4 and Claude, it seems to me that you can summarize comfortable shoes in the following properties:
Fit — How well does the shoe fit? Width, length and all those dimensions mentioned earlier. Admittedly if the shoe fits correctly it should never pinch, never squeeze and never hurt your foot in general.
Support — How well does the shoe share the pressure along the foot’s surface. This is particularly true for high heels that tend to put all the pressure of the body on the toe area.
Strength — Will the shoe break when you walk with it? Again this can be a challenge with high heels and stilettos which for esthetic reason can become quite thin.
Flexibility — Anyone that ever walked with ski boots understands that flexibility is important in a shoe.
Breathability — You don’t want to end up with your feet swimming in a pool of their own sweat.
After digging a bit more on the value-chain behind those attributes, we can establish a Wardley Map of the perfect shoe. If you don’t know Wardley mapping, stay with me I’ll explain.
In case you don’t know what a Wardley Map is, here are some basic instructions to read it.
You can see a simplified model of the shoe landscape. Each “node” is placed:
Horizontally according to their current maturity
Vertically according to their position in the value chain (who needs what, described by an arrow)
Lots of rules allow you to read this map, the most important to keep in mind is that all nodes are eventually going to move to the right. Now onto the reading.
Map reading
Let’s keep in mind here that the goal is “comfy shoe” and not “save-the-planet shoe” or “somehow shoe but unwearable”.
First a few assumptions about our shoes:
Most shoes are strong, flexible and breathable. There are no challenges there. They are in the product section.
The fit and support are often bad, especially for women’s shoes. I’ve put them in the “custom” category because this is the only true way to get fitting shoes.
Then, in no particular order, a few remarks about what is happening in this landscape.
Regarding the materials
Fabrics are commodities that are essential to make the shoe breathable. The good news is that they are a commodity, extremely easy to find. The bad news is that custom tailoring still requires humans to be done and thus is expensive. Since we want to match the foot size exactly, this is a manufacturing issue to be tackled.
Same goes with assembly. While some will be printing the full shoe in one go, it’s a stronger and more limiting statement than just printing the sole for example. In those cases, there is still some form of assembly required. More human labor, more expenses.
My pair of Zellerfeld took about 5 months to be delivered. It’s highlighting the current state of mass-produced 3D-printed objects, which is still relatively uncharted territory.
Steel, and other materials that have stronger mechanical properties, easily cost 10 or 100 times the price of other materials. For example on PCBway, printing out a low-poly Pikachu will cost $3 in PLA and $300 in titaniun. This suggests that we’re far from mass-producing those efficiently.
And regarding the inputs
3D scanners are getting out of the woods. They used to cost a lot of money but now they are in high-end phones and soon will be in every single phone. The precision isn’t amazing yet but according to this case study it’s about 2mm which is just enough to make this relevant to foot sizing.
While very niche at the moment, there are products to measure foot size from a phone. We’ll stick it right at the border between custom and product on the map until the market grows a bit more in this field.
Software-assisted design is now the norm, however I don’t have the knowledge of a solution to industrially adapt any shoe design to any feet scan. This means that we’ll need a new tech to measure feet from 3D models as well as a tech to parametrize and fit designs with those measures.
So if you wanted to made 3D printed shoes today, you would need to organize yourself the following way:
Have your own workshop where you tailor and assemble the shoes
Buy all the 3D printing machines and supplies off-the-shelf
Have a in-house designer for your shoes
Develop a custom software to scan feet and generate appropriate shoes for them
Price point
Those 3D shoes can only be interesting if they bring enough value for the money. While it’s hard to find hard data about prices of such things — especially when compared to luxury where the sky is the limit — we can have a basic idea of the pricing for different levels of shoes:
$50-150 — Mass market, casual shoes
$150-300 — Mid-tier
$300-500 — Designer
$500-1000 — Luxury
$1000+ — Bespoke
Let’s note around here that most of the time, bespoke shoes do not allow the customization of the width, only of colors and materials.
Now, how much would it cost to produce a 3D printed shoe?
What we know:
According to Zellerfeld, a manufacturer of 3D-printed shoes mentioned above, the price point for 3D-printed sneakers is in the $150-300 range, so the cost of manufacturing can be anything between $0 and $300.
Decomposing our potential costs:
Given the price of TPE, if a pair of shoes weights about 1kg the costs of filaments will be about $80.
Add to that the cost of manufacture, let’s count $20/h and 3h of time to assemble the whole thing, we’re at $60.
And the cost of machines
Let’s count overall 10k$ to operate a machine for 10 years
Consider that printing a pair takes up to 7 full days
That’s $20/pair
And the cost of electricity estimated at $5
Let’s count an extra $20 for fabrics and other costs
We’re at a total of about $185/pair
Add up to that marketing, location, etc… You’re in the mid-range tier. This is with no financial optimization whatsoever.
This calculation is obviously simplistic, but it tells us that you could imagine producing fully fitted shoes in the sub-$500 range. This would create a whole new market for people that want bespoke shoes but don’t have a luxury budget. User research would be needed to confirm the exact price point, but this shows a lot of potential.
Current market
If you are looking to create a startup in this field, you need to look at everything currently in phase 2 on the map. That’s what startups usually do: take something that is custom-made and turn it into a product.
For that matter we’ll discard the following:
Steel/metal printing, as we’ve established have have cheaper alternatives
Design, since it sounds very costly to automate while the cost per shoe is extremely low at scale (one design is replicated many times).
The rest is discussed below.
Feet measurement
This field seems to have two kinds of players:
Those who do medical-ish measurements, with dedicated hardware. If they don’t have a plan to develop the second option already in place, they don’t know it but they are already dead.
The second option being people using the phone’s camera to scan feet. This seems to be the case of things like FitMate 3D or TRY.FIT2. Those ones are oriented towards helping online purchase to find the right fit.
In order to test the viability of the concept, I’ve given a go at TRY.FIT and results are quite convincing when compared with manual tape measure of my foot. This proves that not only this technology exists today but on top of that you can buy it for your product.
Parametric modeling
As expected, the shoe design is a pretty restricted discipline and so are shoe modeling tools. The main one I could find is Shoemaster, which allows for complete customization of the shoe albeit completely manually. Mostly, it looks like their software is an entry point to use their hardware.
Overall, lots of brands rolled out some form of 3D printed shoe — mostly as an experiment or without the custom fit feature — but I couldn’t figure anything about the way they do the parametric modeling. They probably all have an in-house solution which works with more or less flexibility and reliability.
In an extremely predictable way, solutions will emerge on the market and will become providers for most brands. The is an open boulevard for startups to fit sketches and designs onto real morphologies.
Which is true for shoes but generally speaking for anything in the world of fashion. For example the startup IMKI uses generative AI to design clothes which them become produced by The Kooples. Add the ability to transform this into a fabrication process automatically into the mix and you can produce an infinite amount of bespoke, unique and on-brand clothes.
TPE printing
The other main, if not largest, blocker that is going to be met at scale is the setup of a printing farm.
According to feedback from people running those:
It is heavy in maintenance
Nothing is standardized, it’s extremely DIY
Labor cost is pretty high
In other terms, there is lot to be done to scale this up. It could definitely be the topic of one or more other studies. Especially given that the 3D printer landscape is evolving super rapidly and many exciting players appeared not only in the FDM space but also resin and powders.
Furthermore, as mentioned above, Zellerfeld seems to have huge production bottlenecks (about 5 months to send a pair of shoes). Showing that it is not easy.
Into the future
With the potential of a $200 bespoke shoe, there sure is a high risk in the coming years for disruption of that industry. Some actors might desire this outcome while some others might try to prevent it.
Shoe brands are a surprisingly diverse industry. I could find at least 9 brands above the $1 billion revenue threshold — including Crocs — and countless smaller brands. Although a brand like Nike with its $44b revenue weights quite a lot in front of New Balance or ASICS which are at about $4b each.
Within those, the main players for innovation would be Nike, Adidas, Reebok and New Balance. Big corporations being big corporations, you expect that at least most of them are going to develop and patent the software part detailed above.
As you’ll need to access customer measurments, communicate with them about production/delivery or tell them about new collections you can expect that a handful of players will emerge from this patent and market war and take a tax on every single pair of shoes — or clothing item for that matter — ever being sold.
In the meantime, whoever owns relevant IP on either of those topics will be greeted by a rain of cash, so here you go patent trolls I guess.
And this only covers the software side. On the production end of things, we can’t dive into the very complex question of 3D print farming but this will definitely a major driver in the upcoming years. This is a topic for another article!
This is true for a category of luxury goods. Some justify their price with other properties like exceptional materials, unmatched durability or simply the authorized reproduction of a LVMH-owned logo on an otherwise cheap product.
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