Big Sneaker Brands Promised a 3D-Printed Revolution. These Are the Disrupters Making It Happen

“Companies like Nike and Adidas and the rest have IP or brand recognition based on how their shoes fit and feel. If you went from a Birkenstock, say, to a Nike you’d quickly realize their footbeds are completely different. You don’t want to lose your IP around how your shoe feels to a consumer. That’s not to say that the big brands won’t take risks, but it’s calculated. Their use of 3D printing will be targeted, and it will be limited.”

But when the big brands release 3D-printed designs, it’s not just vaporware.

“Each time there’s a new 3D-printing PR initiative by a major brand, there are technological advancements,” says Polk.

“They’re learning a lot about the new materials that they can use in 3D printing, but for the big brands, the comfort’s not there yet. Insurgent brands can try out new materials and different designs because they don’t have a fixed consumer in mind.”

Change Is Afoot

Dialed-in comfort was at the top of his mind when, in 2015, Troy Nachtigall, a Marie-Curie fellow studying personalization and footwear in the Wearable Senses Lab at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, cocreated a pair of personalized 3D-printed shoes for a Dutch politician. The shoes—dress, not sneakers—took 100 hours to print and were made of a series of soft, vertical curving lines that flexed. The politician loved the shoes, saying they were her most comfortable pair ever.

But the perception lingers that 3D-printed shoes must be inflexible, plasticky, and uncomfortable.

“3D-printed shoes are cool, but only a small percentage of us are so obsessed with them that we would buy such shoes without hesitation,” Nachtigall told WIRED. “In general, consumers are averse. They might think, What does [a 3D-printed shoe] add to my life? But thanks to data science and machine learning, this is set to change, allowing makers to really personalize shoes to the individual.”

That makes it a fantastic space for disrupters to be in, he says, because we’ll soon see data science meeting human movement. “Walking is pretty complex, and comfort is key. Computational fabrication allows 3D-printing firms to design not just to the shape of a foot but to the weight and the pressure profiles of the individual. The big sneaker companies likely won’t be first into this because they’re embedded in an industrial system that suits them right now.”

But Nachtigall believes the sector is finally about to change. “We’re witnessing a shift. Like in the 1950s with shoes, when the Dutch took the shoe industry out of the Netherlands and moved it to Asia, a similar shift could happen soon [in production techniques] and the use of new materials. I was in Hong Kong recently and talked to a professor specializing in polyurethane who told me of the changes Asian manufacturers are making to FDM filaments, changes which are pretty amazing: mixing things up and seeing if the mix would actually print.

“Disruptive 3D-printing footwear firms are now working on printing the behavior of the shoe, printing the bounce, the flexibility, and controlling all of that very deeply. This will make for better shoes.”

And better sells, Nachtigall believes. “Footwear is a beautiful area to work in,” he adds, “because it brings together so many different considerations at the same time, from aesthetics to plasticity, as well as elasticity of materials. Add in AI and we will soon be dealing with the complexity of human locomotion in a way that is far superior to anything we’ve seen before.”