CARBON
3D sportswear partnership moves forward / Adidas executive takes seat on 3D printing firm's management board
 “Futurecraft 4D” shoes have 3D-printed soles (Photo: Carbon) |
Carbon (Redwood City, California / USA; www.carbon3d.com), the Silicon Valley-based 3D manufacturing company, has appointed Adidas (Herzogenaurach / Germany; www.adidas-group.com) executive Eric Liedtke to its board of directors. The appointment underlines the two companies’ deepening cooperation to make sportswear products from 3D printing.
The announcement came on 18 January, the day Adidas released its “Futurecraft 4D” footwear at selected stores in New York. The release date was also a month after a group of investors that include Adidas’ corporate venture arm Hydra Ventures (Amsterdam / The Netherlands; www.hydra-ventures.com) helped Carbon raise USD 200m (EUR 163m) for its global expansion.
Liedtke is Adidas’ board member responsible for the “adidas” and “Reebok” brands since March 2014. He said he looked forward to contributing to Carbon’s vision “to fundamentally change how the world designs, engineers, makes and delivers customised products at scale.”
Futurecraft 4D shoes have mid-soles made from Carbon’s “Digital Light Synthesis” 3D printing technology. It uses “digital light projection, oxygen-permeable optics and programmable liquid resins.”
When the two companies made their partnership public in 2017, Adidas said more than 100,000 pairs of the sneakers would be produced by the end of 2018 (see Plasteurope.com of 20.04.2017). Carbon CEO Joseph DeSimone was quoted by US TechCrunch media outlet in late 2017 saying there were plans to make “hundreds of thousands” of shoes this year and potentially millions in 2019.
According to Germany's Wirtschaftswoche magazine, 50 of Carbon’s 3D printers have already been installed at Adidas’ production facility in Ansbach, in southern Germany. A sole can be produced in less than an hour at each of these devices and the speed of production would be accelerated later, it cited Adidas strategy head James Carnes as saying.
Watch Adidas' video about Futurecraft 4D footwear on YouTube.
The announcement came on 18 January, the day Adidas released its “Futurecraft 4D” footwear at selected stores in New York. The release date was also a month after a group of investors that include Adidas’ corporate venture arm Hydra Ventures (Amsterdam / The Netherlands; www.hydra-ventures.com) helped Carbon raise USD 200m (EUR 163m) for its global expansion.
Liedtke is Adidas’ board member responsible for the “adidas” and “Reebok” brands since March 2014. He said he looked forward to contributing to Carbon’s vision “to fundamentally change how the world designs, engineers, makes and delivers customised products at scale.”
Futurecraft 4D shoes have mid-soles made from Carbon’s “Digital Light Synthesis” 3D printing technology. It uses “digital light projection, oxygen-permeable optics and programmable liquid resins.”
When the two companies made their partnership public in 2017, Adidas said more than 100,000 pairs of the sneakers would be produced by the end of 2018 (see Plasteurope.com of 20.04.2017). Carbon CEO Joseph DeSimone was quoted by US TechCrunch media outlet in late 2017 saying there were plans to make “hundreds of thousands” of shoes this year and potentially millions in 2019.
According to Germany's Wirtschaftswoche magazine, 50 of Carbon’s 3D printers have already been installed at Adidas’ production facility in Ansbach, in southern Germany. A sole can be produced in less than an hour at each of these devices and the speed of production would be accelerated later, it cited Adidas strategy head James Carnes as saying.
Watch Adidas' video about Futurecraft 4D footwear on YouTube.
25.01.2018 Plasteurope.com [238877-0]
Published on 25.01.2018