Digital textile factory launches to enable smart textile adoption

from Digital textile factory launches to enable smart textile adoption
by John Weir

STOLL, Germany’s leading 3D knitting machinery company, and Myant have launched a new Digital Textile Factory.

The Digital Textile Factory provides the foundations for the mass application and adoption of Textile Computing, a new industry category that merges advancements in engineering and material science, to provide textile-based solutions for companies wanting to innovate and connect textiles to the world of IoT.

STOLL’s 140+ years of producing 3D knitting machinery and software, transferring textile knowledge, and establishing ‘Knitelligence,’ or knitting innovation, along with Myant’s proprietary technology related to biometric sensing and actuation via textile combine to deliver valuable solutions for partners and customers at a global scale through an accessible virtual network.

The Digital Textile Factory will give entrepreneurs, innovators and established industry players access to a virtual factory for ideation, research & development, and design and manufacturing at scale. In so doing, the founders hope the initiative will propagate and democratize advanced manufacturing techniques and access to the most advanced textile computing machinery in the world. The Digital Textile Factory will also help establish and export standards related to textile computing and its use as a platform across industries.

Tony Chahine, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Myant, says, “Our position at the intersection of material science, advanced manufacturing and the digital world allows Myant, in partnership with Stoll, to catalyze growth across all industries that ultimately want to create bidirectional pathways between end users and the world around them.”

Chahine adds, “I truly believe that the Digital Textile Factory will guide large and small companies alike from a single idea through research and development, rapid prototyping and onto production. When we combine Myant’s technological capabilities with STOLL’s most innovative robotic 3D knitting machines, we are able to integrate technology into textiles with sensors and actuators. Doing so creates a platform for innovation and disruption across major industries including healthcare, transportation and wellness, just to name a few, that will eventually define the future of textiles.” “We believe in a model where manufacturing is geographically distributed to satisfy local needs, this is at the core of our collaboration with Stoll.”

Andreas Schellhammer, Chief Executive Officer of STOLL states, “We are working on the solution to a global manufacturing and production problem,” Schellhammer adds, “Our collaboration with Myant strategically integrates textiles and electronics. The Digital Textile Factory’s purpose will be to tackle quality assurance, validation testing, and localized production – for which custom projects can be sent to an encrypted cloud system that can produce textile computing products worldwide.”