SoftWear only is a robotic company that wants to make T-shirts. “We want to make a billion T-shirts a year in the US, everything we make,” said SoftWear CEO Palaniswamy Rajan.
The company was founded in 2012 with the help of Georgia Tech Advanced Technology Development Center is a partnership with Darpa. Two years later, it happened. In 2017 work began on creating a line to make more shirts. That same year, the company entered into an agreement with a Chinese garment manufacturer to produce a larger one production facility in Arkansas. The deal ended, however, SoftWear now wants to open its own clothing industry.
The length of time it has taken to get here is not surprising. The machine has shown itself well on many stages in the production of garments, from fabric printing that cutting fabric and folding and packing finished garments.
But sewing can be difficult to predict, since fabrics are so dense and stretch to work. Hands can be neatly folded as they pass through sewing machines. Robots are often not strong enough to handle the task.
SoftWear robots overcame these challenges. She can make a T-shirt. But making it as cheap as it is in places like China or Guatemala, where workers earn less than they can in the US, would be difficult, says Sheng Lu, a professor of textiles at the University of Extension.
SoftWear calls its robotic machine Sewbots. It’s high-end tables connected to sewing machines with sophisticated sensors. The company carefully controls how it works, but here’s the key: The fabric is cut into pieces that will be part of the shirt: front, back, and sleeves. The pieces are filled in the work area where, instead of the person pushing the fabric through the sewing machine, the stretching machine stretches and moves. Cameras monitor the threads of each strand, allowing the machine to adjust when the garment is tied.
But no two groups of cotton are exactly alike, they often differ in the harvest until harvest; the variety of fabrics and dyes also enhances the material. Any changes can cause the system to change, disrupt performance, and SoftWear must train its machine to respond accordingly. “The biggest challenge we have faced in manufacturing is the need to be able to use it 24/7 more efficiently and more than 98%,” says Rajan.
The clothing industry produces more than 20 billion t-shirts a year, most of them outside the US. For T-shirt making in the US to be possible, it must be cheaper than importing. But lowering the cost of shipping and importing work is not enough to reimburse US workers for sewing clothes. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that US users use sewing machines make about $ 28,000 a year. That’s about $ 13.50 per hour – more than what is offered in countries where most skirts are made. Lu, a professor of Delaware, says China’s salary for this type of work is one-third of US wages, while in Guatemala it is less than one-fifth of US wages.
A closer look at T-shirts allows SoftWear to address another problem with sewing patterns: switching from one type of clothing to another. A group of talented people can sew men’s sleeves one day and women’s jeans the next day. Such a change is more difficult for robots. The way the cotton project is printed together is very different from the way polyester pants are made. Creating new yarns and weaving different yarns is difficult and expensive. Once the machine is designed to make T-shirts, it is difficult to quickly change the Sewbots to make another one.
Since receiving its initial funding, SoftWear has raised $ 30 million in sales and donations – plus $ 2 million from the Walmart Foundation. Rajan says it will cost tens of millions to produce 1 billion T-shirts a year. To do this, the company will need a number of locations, each with its own Sewbots and skilled staff to take care of it. Rajan says a working Sewbot can make a T-shirt in any 50 seconds. At that point, if run continuously, one working line could produce more than 620,000 T-shirts a year – meaning that it would take 1,607 Sewbots to work continuously up to 1 billion a year. Rajan says the actual number is about 2,000; so far, the company has made less than 50.
Robots are undoubtedly skeptical of public suspicions and job losses. Rajan agrees that SoftWear will hire fewer people than T-shirt manufacturers, but he believes his company will create paid jobs for the people who take care of the machines. “You want to develop staff, and you want to train colleagues,” he says. “Our goal is to have professionals who work hard and efficiently.”