3D Printing Speeds Shoe Development

While it’s common for companies to send product designs to outside service providers for prototypes, this practice can have some drawbacks, like slow development times. Clarks (clarks.co.uk), a UK-based footwear developer, used to take this approach. Shoemakers would wait up to two weeks for prototype shoes to come back. They’d make their design changes, then send CAD files back out for another prototype. The cycle would continue as many times as necessary, sometimes for several months. With how fast fashion trends change, Clarks wanted to kick its development process up a notch. So it deployed Z Corp.’s (zcorp.com) ZPrinter 650 to additively build detailed, multi-color prototypes in-house. With it, shoemakers are able to have prototypes in hand within hours. It also allowed Clarks to save on shipping costs.

“3D printing is the technology that brings all of our development advances together,” says Ross Authers, Clarks digital development manager. “We can respond to the market faster than ever, and faster than our competitors, allowing us to experiment with designs we would not normally achieve.” Nowadays, Clarks prints multiple shoe prototypes per day. It brings new models from concept to production in a matter of weeks.