In close collaboration with the Carbon team, adidas is leveraging the Carbon DLS process and EPU 41 3D printing material.
adidas continues to challenge the industry with its relentless focus on innovation to improve the performance of athletic apparel. But their latest idea—creating shoes with variable properties across the midsole to improve shoe performance for different sports—presented a difficult hurdle. Midsoles cannot be injection or compression molded in one piece with properties that vary across the part. Although they can be assembled from multiple parts through a labor-intensive process, this introduces multiple potential points of failure. Confronted with this challenge, the adidas team shifted its focus to the possibility of 3D printing midsoles to unlock the design freedom needed to enhance shoe performance.
3D printing has previously been used mostly to prototype products in development before they were produced with traditional manufacturing techniques. 3D printers are generally not designed for manufacturing scale. Prints are often painfully slow, require wasteful part supports that are ultimately thrown in the trash, and use materials that are vastly inferior to those used for production, resulting in weak and brittle parts. For adidas, the 3D printing industry lacked the production-grade elastomers needed for a demanding athletic footwear application. As a result, while adidas could 3D print prototypes of their midsoles, the final midsole design was still constrained by the ultimate production process, i.e. injection and compression molding. To overcome this constraint and 3D print final midsoles, adidas turned to the Carbon DLS process, its factory-ready 3D printing method, and its high-performance materials to design and directly produce the next generation of athletic footwear. A trailblazing partnership had been forged.
“With Digital Light Synthesis, we venture beyond limitations of the past, unlocking a new era in design and manufacturing. One driven by athlete data and agile manufacturing processes. By charting a new course for our industry, we can unleash our creativity — transforming not just what we make, but how we make it.” Eric Liedtkeadidas Group Executive Board Member Responsible For Global Brands
Carbon’s rapid product development process enabled adidas to iterate over 50 different lattices for the midsole before landing on the current design. Traditionally, product development has followed four steps: design, prototyping, tooling, and production. This process is so slow that many product development programs can only afford three to five redesign cycles before finalizing the design, constraining the product team’s innovation. The Carbon-adidas collaboration made ten times as many iterations possible! Further, each iteration was produced with the same process and material as the ultimate product. These were not just prototypes for assessing a design’s visual appeal: We could actually test midsole performance in the design stage. In other words, Carbon’s technology makes prototyping obsolete. Gone are the days when it was necessary to prototype a product using a technology that does not allow for scale-up.
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