New: Using an App to Create Your Own Shoes

Source: www.3dprinting.com

Printing out shoes. If you would have spoken about that topic 10 years ago, a lot of people would probably have thought you’re on highly hallucinating drugs. However, just like Big Brother proved that George Orwell was right with his novel 1984, a variety of shoes companies now prove that the tech ‘junkies’ from 2004 were right.

Today, 3D printing is being used by Nike, Adidas and many, many more shoes manufacturers. The only problem however is that no-one likes walking on plastic 3D printed materials. And that’s where New Zealand company Three Over Seven enters the game with the Wool Runner. The company started the project with a Kickstarter campaign in February, whereafter they sold out as many as 1,064 pairs of shoes in only 4 and a half day. They ended up making almost 120,000 dollars thanks to this projects.

Very successful, but why are these shoes so popular? This has to do with the comfortable character of the shoes, as they are solely made from wool. This is not just a comfortable material to wear, but the material also allows users to sweat, without making the shoes sweaty. Moisture is not a problem for the wool and the shoes have anti-odour properties. In addition, these shoes have two sides. The first – inner – side is soft, so the skin experiences a high amount of comfort, while the technical – exterior – side prevents the shoes from dirt.

But there is more, because the New Zealand-company has now come up with a clever implementation of a mobile app. This app is a scanner, which measures the size of someone’s foot. After scanning the foot, the information will be sent to the company, after which they claim to be able to bring the shoes to the customers within a single day.

It’s an innovating idea, and we are very curious whether this will be the future of shoes manufacturing. In other words: will it be completely normal to be wearing 3D printed shoes with wool in 10 years? The founders of this company probably think so.

Image Sourcce: 3over7