Will 3D Printing Make Sneakers Innovative Again?

3D printing has completely changed footwear’s innovation game, exposing an imbalance between the performance and lifestyle arenas.

It might not seem like it to the untrained eye, to the casual observer, or even to most of the people who virtually line up every weekend for the latest sneaker releases, but the footwear industry has a problem—an innovation problem. In fact, it has had this problem for decades, which might sound absurd for an industry built on the premise that it’s constantly evolving.

That’s not to say that there is no innovation—3D printing has been the biggest development in footwear for several decades, and the past two years saw several big brands tap into the trend by partnering with experts such as German trailblazer Zellerfeld. The company’s growing portfolio of collaborations has resulted in new and exciting designs that are printed using just one material, tailored to its wearer. Many of those, like Louis Vuitton’s LV COBRAS sneaker, or Heron Preston’s HERON01 look like nothing we’ve ever seen before. In many ways, it’s the latest frontier in the industry’s race to beat the competition with revolutionary designs and capture the attention of an ever more restless consumer base.But, perhaps paradoxically, 3D printing is another symptom of the innovation-based ills that have had the industry confined to bed rest for so long. The 3D printing revolution has flown largely under the radar with mainstream consumers and has not been the topic of major storytelling moments for the big sportswear brands—outside a few novel releases, such as adidas’s 4D technology or ASICS’s 3D printed slides, neither of which have caused any real commotion. Instead, it’s still classic sneakers that dominate release calendars and publications’ end-of-year top ten lists. In Complex’s list, nine of the ten best releases of 2023 were from the late ’80s and early ’90s. The only anomaly was the New Balance 990v6—a new version of a sneaker from the period.

The technology’s major benefits can be split into two parts: consumer-facing, production-focused 3D printing, and 3D printing used to aid in the sampling process. With respect to the latter, it’s clear that 3D printing is changing the game, as former Reebok and leading virtual reality footwear designer Joey Khamis explains: “3D printing has opened up the gate of access to producing footwear. What once required hundreds of thousands of dollars to start up production is now something that can be as low as hundreds of dollars.”Khamis himself has benefitted from this access, as he has released two of his own sneaker designs independently. The money saved on modeling and sampling has lowered the barriers of entry for first-time designers and begun to democratize the footwear industry.“The physical prototyping and sampling still is and always will be vital to the design process, and digital tools such as virtual reality help get to a solution much faster,” says Khamis. Essentially, designers or brands can use 3D printing to close feedback loops, save several tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of dollars, and speed up the design-to-sale process.

Those benefits are largely inward-facing, however, and are more relevant to those working in the industry. They’re not immediately visible to the end consumer; their impact is not reflected in the final design of the sneaker, which is what ultimately decides whether a shoe flies off shelves or ends up on the clearance rack.That is where the other aspect of 3D printing’s innovation comes in: the consumer-facing side. And there’s perhaps no company currently doing it on the same scale as Zellerfeld. The company has worked with Heron Preston, Kanye West, Louis Vuitton, Moncler, PANGAIA, and KidSuper, while offering talented independent designers, such as Finn Rush-Taylor, Kitty Shukman, and Khamis a platform to bring their designs directly to consumers.“Zellerfeld’s mission is to democratize the footwear industry while building sustainable manufacturing,” explains founder Cornelius Schmitt. “To do that, the company has been developing footwear-specific printers that are industry standard for 3D printed footwear. Everyone can contribute, and the result is a garden of innovation in which the best product and design can win, which doesn’t necessarily come from the company with the biggest bank account.”Zellerfeld’s shop promises shoes that are “printed, not made,” and that all designs are fully recyclable due to their mono-material construction, factory-free, and printed to the exact shape of customers’ feet. A quick browse of the site shows classic designs like Matthew Schuetz’s Uniform loafer, while others feature intricate details too complex to find on non-3D printed shoes, like the Lotus 1 or Rains’s Puffer sneaker.

Regarding the lack of innovation outside 3D printing in the sneaker industry, Schmitt laughs, “The shoe of the year last year was the adidas Samba! A shoe from the ’70s! If it wasn’t for printed shoes, you could say footwear has never been as boring as it is today.”What all the aforementioned sneakers have in common is that they are either purely lifestyle-oriented or not a viable performance option. Herein lies the crux of the footwear industry’s problem: Innovation is most commonly (and naturally) associated with performance because performance needs innovation. This indirectly affects the lifestyle arena due to the trickle-down effect, where performance innovation bleeds into lifestyle design (Nike Air, adidas Boost, and ASICS GEL stand as shining examples). Printing only serves performance via the originally identified benefit: shorter feedback loops, cheaper and quicker sampling rounds, and a quicker go-to-market. Currently, no brand has unlocked 3D printing’s true potential as a production method for consumer-ready performance footwear.In short, footwear’s biggest innovation in decades only really serves the lifestyle market; it doesn’t move the needle when it comes to performance, where innovation has largely stood still.

Nike, adidas, PUMA, and New Balance are all, at their core, performance brands. Their lifestyle sneakers are only relevant because they are connected, through history and storytelling, to the brands’ performance sneakers. There is a reason why Nike’s most popular Air Max sneakers are still the OGs from the ’80s and ’90s, or why most sportswear brands have a much harder time launching an all-new sneaker than reissuing tried-and-tested silhouettes. Performance still matters. A lot. This is where the lack of innovation is hamstringing major brands. With no groundbreaking performance innovation making it to market, it’s only natural that the consumer will continue demanding classics of the past.But what about Boost? Or the Nike AlphaFly Next%? Or any other running brand’s super shoe? Well, Boost made a huge splash when it first came out, but has since established itself purely as a lifestyle “technology.” Claims that adidas was a performance game-changer were also rejected relatively early on, and it is now commonly accepted that the technology doesn’t provide the energy return that runners actually need to perform better.As for all of running’s super shoes? Sure, records are being broken in these shoes, but how relevant are they for the regular consumer? Chris Kyvetos, cofounder of Australia’s first high-end sneaker boutique, Sneakerboy, and founder of independent footwear label Athletics FTWR®️ is not so sure that we should be blinded by Breaking2 or the race between brands to have the fastest shoes in the world. “If carbon-plated running shoes are the dominant innovation of the last ten years, I’d sum it up by asking who’s benefited from that. If you call a runner someone who runs two-plus times and ten miles per week, less than ten percent of runners are fast enough to benefit from carbon-plated super shoes,” Kyvetos suggests. “Brands have benefited because from 2018 until recently; the story sold shoes. However, what we are seeing now is the brands who rely less on that story and technology are the brands selling more running shoes.”Without a sub-eight-minute-per-mile pace, super shoes provide next to no stability, rendering them useless, if not potentially dangerous, for the average athlete. If the technology only works for the elite few, it can be argued that the innovation is wasted in some ways.“We’ve moved forward because super shoes are clearly fantastic racing equipment, just like Formula One cars,” Kyvetos continues. “However, we did maybe lack a little ‘everyday’ innovation. It looks like it’s coming back, which is great news for the vast majority of people who run.”

Kyvetos reiterates that there is innovation in performance, it’s just not relevant to the majority of the core consumers. It’s also not material innovation or even technological innovation. What we are talking about when it comes to the super shoes—or most performance shoes on the market today—is design innovation. The materials used by all major sportswear brands are largely the same (as are the factories these shoes are produced in, in fact). Take HOKA’s maximalist approach versus On’s more architectural, brutalist design; they look different, they feel and run different, but they’re not industry-changing in the same way that consumer-facing 3D printing has been for the lifestyle market.Real innovation in performance has been left wanting. And because performance innovation has always fed into lifestyle innovation, a disconnect in the system has developed. For the first time, it seems that the lifestyle sector is more innovative than the performance sector.“For the most part, the industry hasn’t progressed as much as you’d think it has over the last 20 years,” says Daniel Bailey, founder and creative director of CONCEPTKICKS®, which is part platform that celebrates innovative footwear design, part product design studio collaborating with leading brands such as adidas Originals and ZEGNA.

However, while Bailey, whose platform has laid the foundations for an increasingly transparent and supportive community of footwear designers, admits that there hasn’t been as much innovation as may appear from the outside, he has a very positive outlook on the state of the industry and firmly believes it is nearing a great leap forward. “A lot of the current “advancements” are more incremental adjustments with catchy marketing campaigns,” he continues. “That being said, I do feel like we’re on the cusp of major shifts in the industry.”The cadence of significant leaps forward in innovation is mostly cyclical—they tend to come after a period of dormancy. We currently find ourselves in such a period, with brands marketing existing technologies or focusing on smaller “adjustments,” as Bailey calls them, as the foundations for storytelling that appeals to customers. If we are to take that into account, Bailey and Kyvetos’s predictions of a brighter future don’t seem so far away.But until then, as always, marketing wins out. The story matters more than reality. It was not Michael Jordan’s Air Jordan 1s that were banned by the NBA, but that didn’t stop Nike doubling down on that narrative, because it benefited the brand the most. As such, a myth became a legend that most of the culture accepts as gospel. Perhaps it’s this attitude that has resulted in performance innovation stuttering.There is no way around the fact that consumer-facing innovation is expensive and risky. What if it doesn’t work? Or worse, what if it works and no one cares? The footwear industry, its brands, and its consumers are stuck in the same cycle: obsessed with retro and content with the status quo. That’s all well and good if we want to wear adidas Stan Smiths or New Balance 990s for the rest of time. (And hey, would anyone complain?)“Sneaker culture’s obsession with retro doesn’t make it harder for brands to innovate, it just makes them less inclined to do so,” says Complex’s Brendan Dunne. “Ideally the revenue from retro can subsidize and fund actual research, development, and design that will go into new shoes,” he says, before adding: “I don’t think we should ever expect sneaker brands to stop selling retros. But also I don’t think we should ever let them get away with only selling us retros.”Looking ten, 20, 50 years into the future, the footwear industry needs innovation to win out. At the moment, it’s companies such as Zellerfeld and designers in the lifestyle sector that have picked up the slack, taking over from where major sportswear companies left off several decades ago.“3D and its potential impact on this industry is still in its infancy,” says Bailey. “[The benefits] will dramatically change the industry, once the cost of producing 3D printed products decreases per unit.”

Zellerfeld’s founder agrees, noting that this is just the beginning of 3D printing—both in lifestyle and in performance. Schmitt doesn’t rule out that the technology will be applicable to performance in the future: “Printing for performance will have its heyday too, as custom-fitting footwear both to the foot and also to individual strategies will redefine athleticism. But given the harder-to-scale complexities, for now lifestyle footwear is the lower-hanging fruit that is being captured by the technology first.”Given time, 3D printing technology will certainly change the landscape of footwear manufacturing and influence consumer behavior massively. Until then, enjoy 3D printed sneakers for what they currently are: revolutionary works of art that have resulted in a 180-degree shift in how innovation is applied to the footwear industry, with lifestyle leading the way for the first time in decades.