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The startup wanted to redefine how we made fabrics, but hype and reality got in the way. Aaron Rowley / Electroloom
What happens to all of those startups that get their five minutes in the spotlight before disappearing into the ether? In the hard-nosed world of technology, a thousand such enterprises will fall before a single one becomes even a modest success. This is one such story. Electroloom launched back in Spring 2015, a radical device that had the potential to upend the world of clothes manufacture. The device could -- theoretically -- create a garment in any shape we saw fit using little more than electricity and raw materials. The 3D printer for clothes also created fabric without stitches or joins, making its products lighter and stronger than typical cloth. And yet, just over a year later, Electroloom had run out of money, with investors abandoning the project. The dream had died as quickly as it had begun, leaving plenty -- including crowdfunding backers -- to wonder what had exactly happened. Now, a year later, company co-founder Aaron Rowley opens up about what went wrong and what exactly killed the Electroloom. It was at California Polytechnic State University that Rowley was first exposed to the process known as electrospinning. Field-Guide Fabrication Electrospinning, to give it its full name, is a process used to make medical implants and air filters. Imagine a sealed plastic box, with an electrically-charged metal plate that can be any shape you desire. A customized mix of liquid polyester and cotton filaments is then sprayed onto it through an electrically-charged nozzle. The airborne fibers are drawn to the plate and form as a series of nanofibers, gradually building into a single piece of cloth. It's not all magic, however, like the fact that the process takes a very long time to complete: up to 16 hours for a single garment. Even though results were slightly crude, the lack of stitches and joins offered the possibility of new ways to create clothes. Rowley's interest in the technique didn't start until after he began tinkering with 3D printing in the nights during his day job at Boston Scientific. He soon found the technology too limiting, saying that "conceptually, the world is not made of completely solid goods." Soon after, he decided that "rigid 3D printing isn't the Holy Grail," and explored other methods of creating objects. It was a short step from there back to the experiments he had undertaken as an undergraduate in college. Electrospinning seemed, at first blush, like a way to break past the orthodoxy of existing manufacturing methods. He teamed up with Joseph White, another CPSU student and friend, to examine the wider potential for the technology. But before Rowley and White could really spend any time really looking into the research, they were thrust into the spotlight. In 2014, the pair applied for a design grant from Alternative Apparel , because the first prize was free access to TechShop, a maker space in San Francisco. They won, and in addition to unfettered access to the hardware space, they received another prize as well: attention. "The reality is, everything just really snowballed. I had been messing around with it," says Rowley. "After we won, there was these investors that heard about it and started talking to us." He was caught up in a "wave of enthusiasm" that stopped him from having the time to "really sit and think, is this the right technology?" He added that "there were a lot of things that I think I didn't think enough about before really committing to it." At the time, Rowley had little more than a document, some renders and a vision for how things would go. But he had optimistically promised that Electroloom would have a workable product within a year. By May 2015, the company launched a Kickstarter designed to develop a number of prototype devices that could be used to finesse the product, much like Oculus' initial run of developer-friendly VR headsets. That's when the problems really started to mount up. "We were making such decent progress, and things were going so smoothly, that it felt reasonable to make certain assumptions." These included the idea that it would be easy to build a desktop Electroloom reliable enough to build a developer community. "The machine created big electric fields which caused so many challenges from an electronics standpoint." Rowley explained that "our hardware couldn't withstand a lot of the fields that we were creating." When they did manage to get the devices working, even more problems became apparent, including a terrible user experience. In a regular 3D printer, a user can place a plastic filament into an extruder and, with some patience, get it working. But operating the Electroloom wasn't that simple, and Rowley "didn't really have a great user experience for putting chemicals into the machine." In fact, the team "couldn't get things to that baseline [level of] quality we thought we needed for people to really get value out of these developer machines." The fabric from the Electroloom. Aaron Rowley / Electroloom
And then there was the fabric itself, which looked great on the video and felt soft to the touch, like a form of suede. But when it was actually worn as a garment, it wasn't the most comfortable thing to have on your body for a whole day. "It held its tension, it had some ability to stretch and it did flow like a fabric," says Rowley. An early experiment involving a misshapen white t-shirt that was taken home by one of the Electroloom team. It was subsequently worn by their daughter as a dress, and Rowley admits that "the dress was a really exciting moment for us." But the team's optimism quickly gave way to despair as they learned that the fabric, for all of its promise, wasn't working. "It would fray very easily, and layers would begin to fray from the surface," said Rowley, before adding that "the edges would [then] begin to tear quite easily." There was also the fact that, while the t-shirts were strong enough to withstand being pulled around on camera, they were very vulnerable to snags and tears on things like door handles. The team began tweaking the fabric to try and iron out these issues, but the various chemistries that they employed all had their own pitfalls. "If we wanted more durable, the fabric got stiffer and then it wouldn't flow," says Rowley, "but if we wanted it to be softer and similar to how clothes feel like, then it got super weak." Later, he added that "we could never figure out how to balance those two characteristics, no matter which way we tried to push it." Unfortunately, this realization came long after the Kickstarter, as it dawned on the team that there were "certain [chemical] things we couldn't hack." And that the sort of resources required to make the process work would raise eyebrows at a chemicals behemoth like Bayer, let alone a tiny startup. Then there was the fact that Rowley didn't really know what Electroloom was for, or who would wind up using it. The company's genesis occurred at the peak of the distributed manufacturing craze -- the notion that you'd 3D-print objects at home or locally, rather than across the world. The hope and expectation was that the notion of the factory would die away in favor of the in-home replicator. But the notion that we were a few years away from having a 3D printer to create any conceivable object in our homes was a laughable one . More reasonably, the sort of looms that Electroloom proposed would be better suited to mass-production factories. The move by shoemakers like Adidas and Nike to "reshore" their production to the West, facilitated by robotic factories, is clearly where the world is going. Unfortunately, Rowley and, by this point, his team, were trying to serve a wide variety of masters. The company had conversations with textile factories interested in building an industrial version of the device. The team were offered, essentially, carte blanche to build a device big enough to fill a warehouse, but were unable to fulfil the deal. Rowley admits that "the industrial route probably would have been to focus on in that capacity." Fundamentally, building a consumer device, initially for hobbyists, "added this huge, huge layer of complexity" that made finishing the job almost impossible. On August 10th, 2016, just short of a year and three months later, and Rowley posted the note " Thanks, and Farewell " to his Medium page. The money had run out, and investors refused to back the project further, saying that the plan to build a desktop loom was a mistake. A variety of factors had played into the company's collapse: slow technical progress, scientific risk and a "poorly defined market opportunity." In the post mortem, it's clear that Electroloom was hyped by its creators and those around them far too early. In the push to take a good, but nebulous, idea to market too soon, the endeavor wound up wasting plenty of time and money. Electroloom is no more, and the underlying technology is trapped in limbo, gathering dust in basements both real and metaphorical. Rowley and White have both been forced to move on, the former joining Vue, a smart glasses startup. Electroloom
Rowley has advice for others looking to build their own hardware company off their own backs as well. "In software," he explained, "you might have a couple of developers who can handle an entire project." By comparison, when building a real product, "it's touched by hundreds of people," and one mistake by any one of those people can ruin things forever. Vue is, however, benefiting from Rowley's scars, carrying over his experience of building hardware projects. The entrepreneur believes that he is "learning a lot that [he] wasn't learning," and that he will always take "more time with diligence on a product." If he had his chance to do it all again, Rowley would have made more of an effort to examine different methods of creating fabrics. "We just made a bet on electrospinning way too early," he said, "but we got promising prototypes and we kind of just said, okay, that's it." He admits, as well, that there was "a lot of naivety on [his] part," as he bought into his own hype. Rowley also believes that there is a problem with Silicon Valley's culture that pushes an unhealthy view of business. He explained that investors and inventors aren't bothering to pay attention to what came before "to understand what their technology should be doing." But the collective blindness to this is down to the "hype around getting funded" and "stories glorifying founders like Mark Zuckerberg and other college drop-outs." He added that Silicon Valley deserves "all of the criticism that it gets." Because, fundamentally, "it does a lot of great things, but it's also a culture where people get away with some ridiculous things." This interview has been condensed and edited.

How Electroloom's clothes-printing revolution died

Electroloom, maker of the 'first 3D fabric printer', closes its doors
Aug 12, 2016 | By Tess
In the world of startups, it is inevitable that some will rise to the top while others flounder and fail. Sadly, today we are reporting on one of the latter as Electroloom, the startup that developed the world’s first 3D fabric printer , has announced it will be closing its doors. After experiencing a promising start over 2014 and 2015, with a successful Kickstarter campaign and a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Electroloom faced a number of financial issues which ultimately proved insurmountable, hence why they are shutting their research and business down. The startups founders made the announcement two days ago through a blog post explaining, “We suffered a lot of problems and mistakes that led us here, perhaps too many to outline in detail. The reality is that a lot of events factored into our inability to raise: slow technical progress, significant scientific risk, a lack of an MVP, and a poorly defined market opportunity.”
That they have to close their doors is unfortunate considering the company’s unique product, which used electrospinning technology to essentially 3D print clothing garments. In other words, the machine could transform a simple CAD file into a seamless fabric item on demand, making such garments as shirts and socks, for instance. Earlier this year, the company even introduced its Electroloom Mini which was reportedly capable of printing small pieces of colored polyester fabric (like a child’s sock) in 20 minutes or less. Despite their new product and their best efforts, Electroloom was unable to raise the funding necessary to continue its innovative research and support the company. According to Electroloom’s blog post, however, its founders are still grateful for the experience they had with the company, which opened their eyes to the new possibilities arising within the garment and textiles industries. As they say, “One thing that stands out as obvious from our experience running Electroloom is that people are hungry for and believe in dramatic changes for the apparel industry. Whether it is to help people express themselves creatively through new and powerful design tools, or to help implement more sustainable manufacturing methods, we have seen the emergence of a new segment of people who care about the future of textiles and clothing. We feel quite fortunate to have played a role in this global conversation.”
Indeed, Electroloom was just one of a number of new companies dedicated to the rethinking of garment and textile manufacturing. And while they won’t be continuing their work, other companies like Kniterate , which is developing a 3D printer for knitwear, and London-based Unmade , which is also combining additive manufacturing technologies with garment making, are continuing to explore and advance the field. So, while we are sad to say goodbye to Electroloom, there is little doubt that the tech garment industry is still going strong.

Electroloom, maker of the first 3D fabric printer, closes its doors

Electroloom Mini 3D clothing printer creates seamless, wearable fabric in under 20 minutes
Mar 7, 2016 | By Kira
Last year, the innovative Electroloom 3D clothing printer hit Kickstarter, successfully raising over $82,000 and literally re-defining what could be meant by ‘fast fashion.’ Capable of 3D printing seamless, ready-to-wear garments based on custom 3D geometries, the Electroloom captured the attention of everyone from fashion designers to materials scientists to at-home makers. As the company prepares to ship out its first batch of Alpha units, it has decided to unveil the Electroloom Mini, a smaller-sized machine that can 3D print fibrous and flexible fabric in under 20 minutes. Electroloom’s technology relies on a proprietary liquid solution and an ‘electrospinning’ process they have dubbed Field Guided Fabrication (FGF), which allows for the direct conversion of raw material into a finished good, with absolutely zero sewing, and only basic CAD skills required. Users begin by creating a mold of the desired garment, be it a skirt, tank top, or even a child-sized dress. The mold can be designed in 3D CAD modeling software, a 2D graphics program such as Adobe Illustrator, or it can even be handmade from just about any fabric. The mold is inserted into the Electroloom 3D printer’s chamber, followed by the proprietary liquid solution. During the FGF process, the solution is guided onto the mold by an electric field, coating and binding the nano-fibers into a seamless, cohesive, 3D fabric. The Electroloom Mini uses the exact same technology as the larger Electroloom system, however as the name implies, it is decidedly smaller. While that means it can’t be used to create an entire skirt in one go, it can 3D print small pieces of colored polyester fabric in 20 minutes or less. This makes it ideal for testing new materials, experimenting with new garment molds, or transporting to trade shows and conferences. Another exciting revelation is that, whereas originally, the Electroloom could only 3D print white fabrics, company has successfully managed to create vibrant colored fabrics without the need for secondary dying, water usage, or post-processing. In fact, according to the company, garments created with the Electroloom 3D clothing printer use 292 times less water than a traditionally manufactured garment. Colored Electroloom fabrics created in a single step (white Electroloom fabric shown on bottom). As the Electroloom Mini demo video below demonstrates, elecrospinning can also be used to incorporate thermochromic pigments into the colored fabrics, i.e. pigments that change color in response to changes in temperature. This opens the door to creating responsive 3D printed wearables —a major trend in the fashion and textiles industries today. The team behind Electroloom has been delivering sample 3D printed fabric rewards to Kickstarter backers since November 2015, however they are still working on shipping out the first round of Electroloom Alpha units, which will be tested by the community and used to improve subsequent iterations. In the meantime, the company has been awarded a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and it will be travelling to various trade shows and conferences around the country with its new and portable Electroloom Mini in tow. Check out the short demo video below to see this innovative 3D clothing printer in action:

Electroloom Mini 3D clothing printer creates seamless, wearable fabric in under 20 minutes

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Electroloom’s ‘3D Printer For Fabric’ Creates Seamless Garments In Any Size
Instapaper, the app that lets you save and share online articles, has just launched a new annotation functionality called Notes. The feature allows users to select a piece of text from an article or other work, and make comments on that text. By default, Notes is set to private so no one can see your annotations. If they so choose, users can share their notes through the Twitter’s textshot feature, which looks like this:
It was incredibly difficult to pick just one quote from this article by @choire http://t.co/hjGxMJa5Gd pic.twitter.com/8hkVw7XYx2
— Brian Donohue (@bthdonohue) June 4, 2015
Users can also share through other third-party iOS applications, such as Facebook, Evernote and Tumblr, or through a new IFTTT trigger. Finally, if you want to share everything by default, Instapaper added a button that lets you choose to “Share All Notes.”
Back in September of last year, Instapaper underwent a huge overhaul as it transitioned to a freemium model . Since, the company has added more and more functionality, such as Speed Reading , and now Notes. Without asking for an up-front payment from the user, the onus is now on Instapaper (as it competes with services like Pocket) to offer premium features that are worth paying more for, instead of using the free version of the service. If you want to check out Instapaper 6.4, head over here . unnamed (1)

Instapaper Launches ‘Notes’ To Let Users Annotate Text

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Electroloom the 3D Fabric Printer
HAX -alumnus Electroloom is builidng a “3D printer for fabric,”  spraying a solution containing a polyester/cotton blend on a template to create clothing without seams. Electroloom co-founder Marcus Foley says the process was originally inspired by techniques used in labs to generate organic tissue. At first, the team simply wanted to see if the process would actually work for something other than cells; once they proved it would, their focus shifted to making it faster and easier to make specific garments. A typical print takes eight to fourteen hours in Electroloom’s current prototype. Foley says the time is directly related to the number of nozzles spraying solution on to the contained metal (or spray-painted cardboard) template. Each nozzle can only spray a miniscule amount of solution at a time for the fiber extraction method to work, so adding more is the easiest way to reduce print times. The team’s Kickstarter campaign recently surpassed its funding goal, meaning early adopters should have their own printers by March 2016. Just selling printers isn’t the team’s end game, however. They freely admit that they’re approaching the market with backgrounds in engineering and science, and need feedback from users with experience in fashion to know how else they can improve their printer to make it broadly useful in the creation of garments. Interaction with early adopters will also help define the company’s business model. For instance, users will need templates for the clothes they intend to make with the printer. Part of the appeal for the printer is the fact that you’d be able to create garments using computer-aided design tools. While that software is available, it might be trickier figuring out how to turn those designs into metal slabs to spray fiber on to; Electroloom is looking into how they can make that easier, perhaps by manufacturing the templates for users with partners in Shenzen. They’re also looking into blends that would result in fabrics other than polyester/fabric. And to save fashion designers time after they’ve printed a garment, they’re working on adding dye into the solution so clothes could come out with their final colors or patterns. 0

Electroloom’s ‘3D Printer For Fabric’ Creates Seamless Garments In Any Size

Boston Scientific

463 startup failure post-mortems

Seed - II

Convertible Note

Electroloom is a 3D printer for clothes capable of creating nonwoven fabrics on unique and complex structures. The Electroloom makes the design and manufacturing of clothing more accessible through a desktop device.

Name	Aaron Rowley
Work History	Boston Scientific, and ev3
Title	Founder, Chief Executive Officer
Status	Former

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Electroloom

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Electroloom Management Team

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