Circular urban production

Athens Knit Lab & Noéma: local innovative skills

Athens Knit Lab is a contemporary 3D knitting lab that seeks to support prototypes and small batch production. Noema, who participated in the first FABRIX hackathon, has a biobased yarn she’s been developing for almost two years, and was in search of a local partner willing and able to experiment in the creation of a circular, zero-waste garment.

The companies involved

FABRIX-awarded SME Athens Knit Lab is a family business: father Vasilios Fasois is co-founder with his daughter Marianna. They operate a contemporary knit design, development and production studio that combines technical knit engineering, 3D shaped textiles, smart-textile R&D, sustainable material experimentation and training. Its

open-lab model helps designers, start-ups and researchers move from an idea to an advanced prototype with less cutting waste and fewer post-production steps.

Noéma came into contact with the FABRIX ecosystem through a hackathon held early in the project, organized by SOFFA. Founder Barbara Panopoulou has been working with European and international partners for the last two years to develop an innovative biomaterial from sugar cane residues. With a sample on hand, she needed a partner to test the manufacturability of her product.

The problem addressed

After collaborating with experts around Europe to develop her biobased material, could Noema find a local digital knitwear studio with sufficient skill to address the challenges of knitting with an entirely new material whose properties were yet to be discovered? 

Athens Knit Lab was up to the challenge and willing to co-invest in the highly experimental and innovative process. Working with a brand new, “alive” fiber presented numerous challenges as the team didn’t know necessarily how it would react to things like heat, or if the fibre would twist and distort the garment, etc.

The FABRIX solution

The team was able to produce a prototype for noéma - a sleeveless 3D knitted zero-waste sweater. They stress that this is very much an innovation project, and believe that the future of fashion is at the intersection of style and innovation that should be fully circular and zero waste. With 3D knitting, Noéma is able to create a garment that can return to and nurture the earth at the end of its life.

Contributed by Cedecs-TCBL.