And then there was the fabric itself, which looked great on the video and felt soft to the touch, like a form of suede. But when it was actually worn as a garment, it wasn’t the most comfortable thing to have on your body for a whole day. “It held its tension, it had some ability to stretch and it did flow like a fabric,” says Rowley. An early experiment involved a misshapen white T-shirt that was taken home by one of the Electroloom team. It was subsequently worn by the employee’s daughter as a dress, and, Rowley admits, “the dress was a really exciting moment for us.”
But the team’s optimism quickly gave way to despair as they learned that the fabric, for all of its promise, wasn’t working. “It would fray very easily, and layers would begin to fray from the surface,” says Rowley, adding that “the edges would [then] begin to tear quite easily.” There was also the fact that, while the T-shirts were strong enough to withstand being pulled around on camera, they were very vulnerable to snags and tears on things like door handles.
The team began tweaking the fabric to try and iron out these issues, but the various chemistries that they employed all had their own pitfalls. “If we wanted more durable, the fabric got stiffer and then it wouldn’t flow,” says Rowley, “but if we wanted it to be softer and similar to how clothes feel, then it got super weak.” Later, “we could never figure out how to balance those two characteristics, no matter which way we tried to push it.”
Unfortunately, this realization came long after the Kickstarter, as it dawned on the team that there were “certain [chemical] things we couldn’t hack.” And that the sort of resources required to make the process work would raise eyebrows at a chemicals behemoth like Bayer, let alone a tiny startup.
Then there was the fact that Rowley didn’t really know what Electroloom was for, or who would wind up using it. The company’s genesis occurred at the peak of the distributed manufacturing craze — the notion that you’d 3D-print objects at home or locally, rather than import them from across the world. The hope and expectation was that the notion of the factory would die away in favor of the in-home replicator.
But the notion that we were a few years away from having a 3D printer to create any conceivable object in our homes was a laughable one. More reasonably, the sort of looms that Electroloom proposed would be better suited to mass-production factories. The move by shoemakers like Adidas and Nike to “reshore” their production to the West, facilitated by robotic factories, is clearly where the world is going.
Unfortunately, Rowley and, by this point, his team were trying to serve a wide variety of masters. The company had conversations with textile factories interested in building an industrial version of the device. The team was essentially offered carte blanche to build a device big enough to fill a warehouse, but had to pull out because some members couldn’t countenance relocating.
Rowley admits that “the industrial route probably would have been better to focus in on in that capacity.” Fundamentally, building a consumer device, initially for hobbyists, “added this huge, huge layer of complexity” that made finishing the job almost impossible.
On August 10th, 2016, just short of a year and three months later, Rowley posted the note “Thanks, and Farewell” to his Medium page. The money had run out, and while investors were supportive, fresh sources of funding were hard to come by. A variety of factors had played into the company’s collapse: slow technical progress, scientific risk and a “poorly defined market opportunity.”
In the postmortem, it’s clear that Electroloom was hyped by its creators and those around them far too early. In the push to take a good, but nebulous, idea to market too soon, the endeavor wound up wasting plenty of time and money.
Electroloom is no more, and the underlying technology is trapped in limbo, gathering dust in basements both real and metaphorical. Rowley and White have both been forced to move on, the former joining Vue, a smart-glasses startup.
