The robotic 3D knitting machine helping keep Australian fashion design onshore and sustainable

Jun 15, 2023

A tiny backyard shed in the regional Victorian town of Mount Macedon has become an unlikely home for the very latest robotic Japanese knitting technology.

The latest 3D knitting machine from manufacturer Shima Seiki can turn cones of yarn into a full, seamless garment in less than one hour.

A new business venture means emerging Australian fashion labels keen to keep their design work onshore can access the technology for the first time.

For decades, Australia has watched its clothing and textile manufacturing disappear overseas, making it increasingly difficult for emerging designers to remain 'Made In Australia'.

Advances in technology are helping keep the design work and manufacturing onshore.

A traditionally knitted garment typically wastes between eight-10 per cent of the fabric it is made from.

After the knitting process is over, it will usually take a worker around 15-20 minutes to link up and a further 15 minutes to press the garment and sew on a label.

Shima Seiki's technology turns the cones of yarn into the almost-finished product in around 40 minutes, with next to zero wastage.

"Then, that garment would only need about 15 minutes of labour," explains KNIT.Melbourne founder Patricia Chircop.

"So that would include latching any loose yarns, sewing on a label, pressing, and packing."

Chircop and business partner Andrew Ross who founded the clothing label Bluey Merino, based in Bowral, New South Wales, formed a partnership to bring the machine to Australia.

"The partnership was set up to invest in WHOLEGARMENT knitting machinery, and be able to offer those to start-up brands, that really didn't have access to this type of technology," Mr Ross said.

"We've been talking to designers now for well and truly six months at least, so there's been quite a great deal of interest from designers to test and validate their concepts on the machine."

Last year, Ms Chircop travelled to Japan's Wakayama Prefecture, home of Shima Seiki, to learn the art of programming the machine's software.

Major brands like Max Mara, Uniqlo and adidas have all experimented with the technology in recent years.

An adidas pop-up store in Berlin last year offered customers the chance to take body scans and 'print out' custom designed clothing.

"It lends itself to mass customisation, which isn't really explored in a meaningful way in the industry at the moment," Ms Chircop said.

"But this technology is really being set up to enable that."

The global fashion industry comes under frequent attack for its record on labour sourcing and the huge amount of waste generated by the throw-away culture surrounding fast fashion.

The ABC's War on Waste revealed last year Australians tossed a massive 36,000 tonnes of clothing into landfill each year.

Traditional 'cut and sew' manufacturing techniques produce tonnes of waste from the leftover spaces after a pattern has been cut.

Ms Chircop said after a year using the machine she had generated a single bag of wasted fabric.

Most of Australia's clothing, textile and footwear manufacturing work has been lost overseas, with just under 5,100 jobs in the sector being lost between 2013/14 and 2015/16, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics data.

"I think there is a backdrop that talks about the fashion industry globally, the waste and what's happening with their labour force in countries which are far from Australia," Mr Ross said.

"We've got millennials that are keen to understand where things come from, how they're produced, and that then translates to their ethos around their brand, so there is a direct connection between wanting to change the fashion industry, and the future we're starting to see open up."

Melbourne-based designer Courtney Holm launched her label A.BCH last year, setting out to create clothing that allows customers to trace every element involved in its construction back to the source.

"From fibre to finish, we make sure that every step in the supply chain is responsible as possible from an environmental and social standpoint," Ms Holm said.

"We teach customers how to care for their clothes to make them last longer, we teach them how to repair them and look after them, and then finally at the end of the garment's they can safely be composted or recycled."

She is one of the first designers to take advantage of the technology, producing a lightweight unisex sweater from an organic cotton sourced from Japan.

"There's a lot of waste when it comes to cutting and all the little negative spaces you have left over when you put your patterns out into the lay.

"So as much as you try to get like, minimal waste as possible, there's always still bits left over.

"Where as with the WHOLEGARMENT knitting, it literally knits the garment up and there's no wastage."

Ms Chircop and Mr Ross plan to invest in more machines in the future, further opening up access to the technology.