Textile products require three dimensional shapes in order to be functional or to fit the human body, like a shoe or a jacket. As textiles are produced as flat materials, it is necessary to cut the material into several pieces and shapes and assemble them together with processed like sewing, gluing or ultrasonic welding. This is mostly done with manual labor as it’s too complex and expensive to work with robots. As textiles are flexible, and the product gets its three-dimensional shape during the assembly, material handling is very complex. 

The current practice of manual sewing and the high labor costs involved into a situation where it’s most cost effective for a company to order very large quantities at a factory in a low wage country with a long lead time. Resulting in many unsold products with high costs for the company (shipping, lost income) the environment (pollution, resource use) and people (exploitation). It is therefore desired to produce closer to the consumer, in smaller quantities and with shorter lead-times. In order to achieve this, we need to reduce the manual labor and replace this with efficient machines that can produce on demand. The current sewing practice is a major hurdle to this and can to a large extent to be replaced by UNSEAM.