In the apparel industry, products are usually manufactured in large volumes – great for keeping costs down, but bad for the environment, as hundreds of thousands of tonnes of unsold clothes end up in landfill every year. A UK company called Rapanui aims at changing that with Teemill – a platform that only prints T-shirts after they’ve been ordered.
Customers – be they creative individuals, companies selling their merch, or startups launching a new fashion brand – upload their T-shirt designs to Teemill’s server, and set up a Teemill-powered online store. That way, when someone buys a T-shirt from an online shop, order information is routed directly to Rapanui’s factory – a converted supermarket in Freshwater on the Isle of Wight. There, internet-connected printers automatically make the T-shirts, impressing the design on the fabric the way an inkjet printer stamps text on to paper. Seconds later, the T-shirt is ready for the workers in the factory to pick up, package and send to the buyer.
Rapanui co-founder Martin Drake-Knight says that orders come from all around the world, and most of them are shipped within an hour. “It’s the same as normal fashion,” he says. “But the materials, the technology – that’s what makes it sustainable.”
Drake-Knight and his brother Rob started Rapanui in 2009; from the beginning, when they were based in a garden shed and their entire budget was £200, the siblings’ plan was making fashion more sustainable. “Rather than saying, ‘don’t buy clothes, that’s bad’, we were thinking [to] change the materials and the processes,” says Drake-Knight.
They tried to reconfigure an Epson printer to screen print designs onto T-shirts (with limited success), and experimented with different materials, inks and dyes to figure out which was most eco-friendly, while also relying on local suppliers whenever possible. They added a traceability map on their website, allowing customers to track the journey of their T-shirts from seed to store. In June 2014, they launched the Teemill project to enable anyone to follow in their footsteps and build a sustainable fashion brand from scratch. Today, they count Bella Freud, the Met Office and Greenpeaceamong their clients.
Even now, the Drake-Knights’ penchant for tinkering remains. Many of the robots in Teemill’s factory – in charge of picking and dropping T-shirts on conveyor belts, sorting boxes and mixing inks – were built in-house with parts from eBay or scrap sites. The robots are easy to repair and their spare parts can be 3D printed on site. All the machines involved, which number to around 100, communicate via Raspberry Pis, small computers more typically used to teach children how to program.
The Drake-Knight brothers are also keen on passing on their DIY ethos and passion for tech down to the next generation in their area to ensure that young locals don’t need to move to London to do new and exciting things. Now, pupils from Isle of Wight schools and colleges work with them, learning how to code, weld and build robots.
“Sometimes, it’s a good thing to have little experience,” adds Drake-Knight. “You can be creative, you can come up with things no one else has thought of.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
