The MeRA system.
Courtesy of CreateMe
Despite the digital revolution and the rise of AI, fashion is still living in a cut and sew world.
That might be about to change.
CreateMe Technologies, a six-year-old company with one foot in the future, is bringing an automated apparel manufacturing system to market that — if its promise is realized — will move production much closer to consumers.
Guarded by more than 95 patents, the technology is a mixture of robotics, digital adhesives and modular design that meets the moment nicely by offering a U.S.-made and tariff-free alternative to Asian factories.
The kicker is that prices for U.S.-made T-shirts, for instance, are on par with the landed duty price on Asian imports at around $6 each. The technology has been tested on about 100 fabrics and is presented as more precise and 20-times faster than standard production, delivering up to 250 pieces an hour.
CreateMe is starting smallish — it has a 35,000-square-foot facility in Newark, Calif., and one machine up and running — but the ambition and potential are both big to listen to chief executive officer Cam Myers.
“Our mission is to redefine how all apparel is made,” Myers told WWD in an interview.
To get there, CreateMe is introducing two advancements:
- MeRA, which stands for Modular-engineering Robotic Assembly, is an autonomous manufacturing platform that takes in fabric on one side and delivers completed looks on the other.
- Pixel, a proprietary microadhesive technology that replaces and can mimic stitching.
The company is starting with women’s intimates — a category that already uses bonded seams — but plans to follow that up quickly with T-shirts and other styles.
“We are the no-thread company,” Myers said. “We think fundamentally all apparel is better made with bonding. The consumer is going to like it better and that’s why it’s so popular. That’s where all the growth is in underwear. It’s seamless, it’s much more comfortable.
“We think the world of the sewing machine is going to go away,” he said, adding that in 200 years since it was invented, the sewing machine has changed very little.
Myers called bonded construction “fundamentally a better mousetrap. In 10 years time I would say a significant portion of apparel will be bonded.”
CreateMe uses adhesives to do away with the sewing machine.
Courtesy of CreateMe
It’s also much easier to use adhesives than stitching in the automation process that already has to deal with not just a handful of Tesla models or a few kinds of iPhones, but with the many styles fashion necessitates, he said.
CreateMe’s new machine operates something like a newspaper printing facility, keeping the fabric flat for as long as possible and then adjusting for 3D elements at the end, adding things like neck bands and addressing shoulder construction.
While the company is just now building its second machine, its California facility has room for eight in total — and each one could churn out 1 million T-shirts annually.
Right now, Myers is looking to nibble around the edges and pick up business in special sizes and other items that are hard to forecast and could benefit from production that’s closer to market.
“The economics really sing for nearshore or onshore production,” the CEO said.
CreateMe can license out its technology and also has two pilot programs set up that will make 50,000 units each.
“We can be extremely flexible, meaning we can be doing a one- to three-week turnaround time and minimum order quantities, minimum color quantities of a hundred units or less,” he said. “There’s not a lot of capacity in the U.S. that can compete at parity to Asia. We have this unique capacity that can be very flexible in terms of fringe sizes, small silhouette runs.”
The company uses a CAD file that requires only small changes to adjust for the automated process.
But if CreateMe’s plan works, those small changes to individual designs will ripple out into the fashion industry in a big way.