Every design that my team launches through the design studio at Luvu Brands has to be implemented into production. Since 2013, my department has designed and launched over 60 products across all three of Luvu’s sectors. All of these products are manufactured using a combination of Feken-Kirfel CNC foam contouring, Lectra automated fabric cutting, and Eton driven shop floor optimization.
Eton is a conveyor system designed for sewing floor optimization. Pattern parts move on hangers from one specialized sewing station to the next until they reach the end of the conveyor as a finished product.
Feken-Kirfel is a CNC foam contouring machine. When my team designs a foam shape, we have the challenge of also creating the manufacturing files to go along with it. We tell the blade where and how to cut the foam to give us the smoothest, most efficient product we can yield.
Luvu's factory works primarily with polyurethane foam. The foam is poured into a large trough at the manufacturing facility in Americus, GA. They then slice the foam into "buns" and send it to us the way it's pictured. A vast knowledge of foam types is essential for my team and I to know which foam fits best in certain applications.
After my team has a shape we would like to contour out of foam, we then create a CNC program to be used on the Feken-Kirfel cutter. This program shows the Zipline Jr. We designed this product specifically to achieve a huge efficiency in the foam, bringing cost down and maintaining an incredible price-to-value for the consumer.
After the foam is cut on the Feken-Kirfel, it is run down a conveyor belt to be unloaded. We can yield anywhere between 6 and 200 products per bun of foam, depending on the size and shape of the product.
Lectra is an automated fabric cutting machine. My team designs files, called "markers" to be cut on Lectra. Once the marker is created we are able to cut multiple plies of material at a time, drastically decreasing the time it takes to cut each product's pattern.
This is an example of a Lectra marker. These are all the cut parts it would take to make 2 units of a Zipline Love Seat Jr. My team uses the program Diamino to optimize the marker efficiency for these cut parts, minimizing waste and decreasing our cost.
