Dear OpenKnit followers,

It’s been a while since my last post. But today, I’m very excited to talk to you about what I’ve been working on during the last months. 

When I started the OpenKnit project, more than 3 years ago, I never expected that it would gather so much interest. Although it begun as a final year project at university, I kept working on it as a hobby. After a long period developing the project  in my studio in Barcelona by myself, numerous workshops and exhibitions, and lots and lots of emails and great feedback from all of you (thank you so much!), I realized that my vision could be more than that, it could become a reality. What was the next step to bring the OpenKnit project into the future?

I went on to create a startup!

Building a team of amazing people, I moved to Shenzhen, China, as part of HAX, the first and largest hardware accelerator in the world. There I’ve spent the last 4 months reimagining knitting machines.

Being in China during these months has been an amazing experience. We have met great professionals from all over the world, learnt from very close how things work in a factory and we have been able to develop a completely new machine, from scratch.

One of the many knitting machine factories we visited

Kniterate, is the name of my new company. We are a young skilled team of 5 people and  we are developing the new age of knitting machines, that will change forever how we engage with clothing. A machine that can automate the entire process of creating a garment, right at your desktop.

Provisional industrial design

But at Kniterate, we want to go further and we want to let anybody easily design, print and wear their unique clothes locally. We are developing and entire ecosystem to foster your creativity. As a part of this ecosystem, we are currently developing an online platform that will soon allow you to design and share your wardrobe online. Start testing our beta version!

Sample produced with an early prototype

Join my new adventure and sign up to get updates on our product launch!!

Thanks a million.

All the best,

Gerard Rubio

PS: Kniterate is a commercial branch of OpenKnit. It doesn’t belong to this blog. If anyone is interested in taking up the torch of the OpenKnit blog, please let me know. It would be great if more collaborators joined the project and we all kept it moving forward.