Electroloom 3D Apparel Printer

Imaging in a few years instead of having to go to your local American Eagle, Target, or whatever store you buy your clothes at, you can simply download a design, and print it out in your home. Sure there has already been several articles of clothing printed out in the last couple of years, however most do not look anything like clothes you see most people wearing. That's because the printers which are printing these pieces of clothing are not made for printing fine detailed pieces that have easy movement.

This may all change within the next year or two. A company called Electroloom has received a grant from Alternate Apparel, to do just that, print clothing. The company, ran by Aaron Rowley, seems to be onto something. They already have a prototype of their 3D apparel printer, which you can see in the graphic below, and Rowley thinks that within a year consumers may be able to purchase their first production run of these printers. There are several goals of Electroloom, but the most important goal of Rowley's is stated here, “Something we are compelled by is embodied energy [which is] essentially the amount of energy that was used to take a raw material to a finished good,” Rowley tells Co.Design. “So a goal of this project is to reduce the amount of embodied energy in an article of clothing.”

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If everything goes as planned, Electroloom will one day have a database similar to that of Shapeways.com, so that users can simply upload and download articles of clothing, select their size, and presto, they have a new article of clothing to print out.

I would think that something which would be more useful would be a sort of smart sewing machine which actually stitches closes rather than prints them. I would think something like that would be possible, and likely a lot cheaper than the Electroloom.