Robots making t-shirts? Glue and sewing bots reshape apparel industry

They assemble cars, perform surgery and handle cargo at airports, but give most robots a needle and thread and they would probably come undone.

That is why practically all clothes sold globally are still made by hand, often by very low-paid workers in Asia.

Those workers may use tools such as sewing machines, but fully automating such labor is difficult. “You have a problem if it’s sewing,” said Cam Myers, founder and chief executive of California-based CreateMe, a robotics company. “You have to keep [two pieces of fabric] in alignment under motion.”

His company takes another approach: forget sewing – glue the pieces of fabric together instead. “Once the adhesive is laid down, you simply line something over it and stamp.” CreateMe has designed robots that do this and the firm is already making women’s underwear this way. It will begin producing t-shirts in the coming months, with mass production possible next year.

Roboticists have eyed the garment manufacturing industry for decades. If machines could ever take over such work, clothes-making could return to Western countries, and the environmental footprint of garments might be slashed in the process. But millions of textile workers could also lose their jobs.

Only a few percent of clothes sold today in the UK are made there. A similar story holds in the U.S. Myers said he has customers seeking to market garments as “made in the US” with U.S.-produced cotton, for example.

“We can use cotton, we can use wool, we can use leather,” he said of CreateMe’s adhesive-based process. If just 10% of t-shirt manufacturing moved back to the U.S. with the help of automation, that would be a huge industry shift, he added.

The adhesive CreateMe uses is thermoset, which means ironing or washing machine temperatures are not enough to melt it and make clothes fall apart, Myers insisted. He added that because these garments lack seams, they are streamlined and can be manufactured on molds that capture the contours of the human body.

Even Myers acknowledged that a key challenge in apparel is that it is “high flex” – in other words, you won’t get very far if you just make white t-shirts. Customers like choosing from an endless array of garments with varying form factors, colors and designs. Clothes-producing robots are still a long way from doing all that.

And the fundamentals remain debated. “We don’t believe that sewing is going away,” said Palaniswamy Rajan, chairman and chief executive of Softwear Automation, based in Georgia, USA. He pointed out that visible stitching is a key component in the design of many fashionable garments, perhaps most famously jeans.

Rajan said his company will soon announce the third generation of its sewing robots, which he claims will make t-shirts at the same cost as importing them to the U.S. However, he declined to discuss any details about the technology.

Multiple firms that spoke to the BBC for this article were reluctant to share information about how their robots work, such is the competition for a slice of the giant apparel market.

Meanwhile, textile workers are already under pressure, having faced factory closures during the Covid-19 pandemic and more recently the war in Iran, which has hit polyester supplies. Automation industry representatives often suggest that workers should aim for better-paying, less repetitive jobs – but simply handing t-shirt production to robots won’t do that overnight.

One key benefit of automating garment manufacturing, however, is that it could drastically reduce the environmental impact of this industry. Every year, 92 million tonnes of textile waste is produced globally. Huge volumes of unsold clothes are incinerated. The apparel industry also consumes vast amounts of water.

“If you can re-shore the manufacturing part, you can just produce there on-demand,” said Gerald Feichtinger at the Technical University of Leoben, Austria. He recently led a study that analyzed whether such on-demand manufacturing could reduce overproduction of garments and slash the carbon emissions associated with transporting them from Asia to Europe, for example. “We can see a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions,” he added.

The paper found that emissions associated with making a t-shirt could fall by roughly 45% when a robot produced the garment in Europe or the U.S.

For their study, the researchers collaborated with an Austria-based garment-making robot company called Silana; one of the co-authors previously worked for that company, though separate research has made similar findings. There are other ways to reduce the environmental impact of clothing, such as simply extending the life of garments.

Claims around automation lowering the environmental impact of textiles should be balanced against the fact that other parts of the supply chain, such as dyeing of fabric or the production of yarn, may not be so easy to re-shore. Feichtinger and his colleagues’ study acknowledges these factors, and he said re-shoring multiple parts of the garment supply chain remains “challenging.”

Michael Fraede is co-founder of German firm Robotextile, which makes gripper devices that enable robots to deftly pick up pieces of fabric. Some work by gently blowing air across the fabric, making it flutter and lift, so it can then be sucked toward a gripper and clamped into place.

Fraede said the market for automating textile production in Europe is likely limited to specialist textiles, such as those used for bicycle bags or airbags in cars – his company’s robots have helped make both such products, among others. “It will take 10 more years before we see the first actions of re-shoring,” he said. “This industry is not used to thinking that way. They are used to saving money wherever they can.”

Others are more hopeful. Lauren Junestrand, innovation and sustainability network manager at the UK Fashion and Textile Association, said, “The UK has huge potential to incorporate robotics.” Garment-makers are using more and more robots for various tasks already, she added.

But even Junestrand said countries such as the UK will probably never be able to compete with competitors in Asia in terms of volume. “I think it’s going to be more of a co-existence,” she added.