Superfeet/ Vimeo
Superfeet vimeo
The cogs turn almost in sync, the frames jumping about and exerting energy as the seconds, minutes, hours tick away.
In the crowd, there are thousands of people, twice as many feet, but currently a minority of which are equipped with custom insoles, shaped to the width and the length and the arch of the feet that carry each runner throughout the 26.2-mile distance.
“I’ve done a few marathons. A lot of wear and tear on your body, though. I had a pair of these Nike Flyknits a few years ago, [they had] no real arch support and I ran with them and I got plantar fasciitis from it. Ever since then, I’ve always had custom insoles. I’m a firm believer in their value; it certainly makes me feel better during runs.”
As a keen runner, John Dulchinos now counts himself among that minority with an extra piece of customised lining separating his feet from the city streets he’s travelling on. As Jabil’s Vice President of 3D Printing and Digital Manufacturing, he knows all too well the barriers that are preventing that minority becoming a majority.
On a solid footing
Following up on a 2017 study, Jabil recently sponsored a new 3D printing trends survey carried out by Dimensional Research to garner a better understanding of how manufacturers are using 3D printing equipment, the impact they project it will have in their respective markets, and the challenges to adoption and implementation. In that survey, 52% of the 308 participants said they now use 3D printing to produce end-use parts, up from 27% in 2017, while prototyping was down slightly from 69% to 66% - though still the largest use case. Meanwhile, 96% of participants said they expected to see their application of 3D printing grow in the next five years, with most people thinking many of the challenges they face with 3D printing are to be overcome in that time: 45% in 2-3 years and 32% in 4-5 years.
“I think a lot of companies are maybe taking non-strategic applications and just test driving: how does 3D printing potentially [enable] a new way to do things and so I think what you’re seeing in those numbers is a lot more companies trying it out in different applications to see where it might make sense,” Dulchinos offers. “I think in the next couple of years, the [usage] growth will come from existing industries, just going into higher and higher adoption. And then in the three to five-year [timeframe], I think some of these new industries that are experimenting now, the economics will make sense and the proof points will be there for those to start to scale.”
Among the barriers that remain in the way of those scalings up and will need resolving in order for those projected growths to materialise, are the cost of equipment (39%) and the cost of materials (34%). These are two key considerations, along with how much floor space a machine takes up and service and material costs, which will be amortised into the cost per build and cost per part when adoption is considered. Dulchinos, as someone who oversees a team harnessing additive manufacturing, is among the Jabil cohort who have to weigh these factors up when purchasing 3D printing equipment.
Jabil/ Superfeet
Jabil/ Superfeet
Cost per part varies, not only on the types of component being made, but the kinds of companies they are being made for. An aerospace or medical customer is more likely to be willing to pay a premium for a 3D printed part, perhaps because it’s been consolidated and lightweighted or it’s been customised, but in markets where manufacturers like Jabil are reliant on how much a consumer is willing to pay as much as they are the client, that’s trickier. It explains where additive manufacturing adoption and application is at.
“I don’t think there’s a board base conversion of additive manufacturing yet,” Dulchinos says. “I think there’s some very specific use cases where it makes a lot of sense: dental aligners, hearing aids, certain aerospace parts, medical implants are all proving to be applications where 3D printing provides a lot of value. And those applications are starting to scale. Beyond that, I think there’s a lot of experimentation going on, looking for those next levels of killer applications. I think we’ll start to see those come out over the next few years.”
Superfeet
Somewhere amidst the industries that have been able to take advantage of 3D printing to, say, additively manufacture customised products and those that are yet to fully proof out the application and begin to scale to mass volumes is the custom insoles market. Projects centred on the 3D printing of customised insoles have been occurring for years, with footwear brands like ECCO teaming up with German RepRap and rs scan and Materialise coming together to set up Phits. More recently, 43-year-old footwear brand Superfeet has also started looking in the direction of 3D printing.
Superfeet is a leading provider of over-the-counter insoles for exercise and outdoor shoes but is increasingly investing time and effort into supplying customised products. Earlier this year, the company partnered with HP and New Balance to deliver customised insoles additively manufactured with HP’s Jet Fusion technology on-demand, and has also aligned itself with Jabil and Radius, the innovation and development consultancy acquired by the contract manufacturer in 2012.
The collaboration is off to a good start, with Jabil offering advise on how improvements could be made to manufacturing processes and supply chain operations to increase savings, and Radius installing a 3D printer at Superfeet’s offices to allow the team to prototype parts independently. The aim of the partnership is to leverage 3D printing technology to maximise performance and comfort, while adopting a localised manufacturing approach. An ambition of Superfeet’s is to get to a point where 3D printing systems can be installed in retailers with insoles being modelled and produced in-store to keep on track with the current walk in, try on, walk out process of buying footwear.
Currently, the footwear brand is enjoying having design, build, analysis and testing occur largely all under one roof, with 40 iterations of an insole product being completed recently inside four months and time to market reduced by more than 50%. The 3D printing technology being used is powder bed fusion technologies: “HP and others,” Dulchinos says.
For Superfeet, having this capacity to hand is bringing about huge improvements to processes and product alike.
“Jabil and Radius, the DPL (Digital Prototyping Lab) and 3D printing changed the R&D landscape at Superfeet by enabling us to customise in ways we’ve never done before,” Eric Hayes, Vice President of Marketing and Product for Superfeet, commented. “It took us two years using traditional R&D to create a custom insole that could be produced in 15 minutes. Jabil, in just four months, proved how we could use 3D printing to produce custom insoles more efficiently and with an extremely high degree of replication at a fraction of the development cost of other methods.
“The partnership with Jabil came down to being able to do it all – or not. With Jabil and Radius, we’re stepping up the use of 3D printing to manufacture insoles more accurately and more efficiently to ultimately deliver a better product.”
Jabil/ Superfeet
Jabil/ Superfeet
It appears to make sense for Superfeet to incorporate 3D printing technology to churn out customised insole products, at least as far as design validation and time to market goes. But once the product is out there, who is prepared to pay for them? Those running alongside, or rather behind, the likes of Dulchinos for 26.2 miles are mostly non-performance runners, not overly concerned with the speed they run at but more so in completing the race to raise funds for charities and businesses. They may never run one again and so likely won’t pay a premium for a product they’ll only wear during training and the four-six hours they spend completing the marathon.
Jabil doesn’t expect them to. Instead, it expects - almost demands - to see the costs involved with 3D printing come down. Per its survey, cost of equipment and cost of materials are challenges for at least a third of companies to grow their application in the next few years. Per its first-hand experience, the costs per part are in the way of reaching mass volumes for a whole host of applications.
“A customised insole is twice or three times the price of a standard insole and so the mass market’s not going to adopt it at that level,” Dulchinos concedes. “These consumer applications, they start at the very top of the pyramid; the performance people and then work their way down. That’s where a lot of these customisation applications sit today. These are the ones, in the next two to three years, we’re looking to see how they move down the pyramid to reach a broader, mass market.
“Aside from the costs of the printing, there shouldn’t necessarily have to be such a large premium. In the long run, with the right digital infrastructure, there’s no reason why these customised solutions can’t approximate what traditional manufacturing is, once the printing process can get to economics that can rival traditional manufacturing processes.
“That’s why we’re big proponents of continuing to drive the cost down because once you drive that, you get a custom insole to 20 or 30% premium over a standard one, then you start to see a much broader adoption.”
