Amazon is known as the king of eCommerce. From jewelry to books and household cleaning products, there’s little that can’t be bought on the site.
As of this Tuesday (April 18), on-demand fashion can be added to the laundry list of available items. Amazon announced this week that it won a patent for a manufacturing system that produces clothes on-demand after an order is made. Through its digital production of clothing, Amazon will have the capability to cut and assemble fabrics via textile printers and alter clothes via camera images.
Directly from the patent, the description of this process reads as follows: “Once various textile products are printed, cut and assembled according to the orders, they can be processed through a quality check, photographed for placement in an electronic commerce system, shipped to customers and/or stored in a materials handling facility for order fulfillment. By aggregating orders from various geographic locations and coordinating apparel assembly processes on a large scale, the embodiments provide new ways to increase efficiency in apparel manufacturing.”
While the inventors of this patent have made clear this system could move into making other items like footwear or curtains, the current focus is on the clothing industry. This on-demand clothing manufacturing system has the possibility of turning the fashion production industry on its head. Rather than producing large quantities of the same piece of clothing, retailers would have the potential to produce only what is requested by consumers.
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