3D Printing Shoes to Support Footwear Manufacturing Companies

With the growing demand for higher performance, greater design freedom and customization increased sustainability, and extended product life in the footwear industry, 3D-printed shoe growth over the next decade is inevitable. 3D printing is essential to streamlining and simplifying the footwear manufacturing process while making it more sustainable. 3D printing shoes also accelerates the footwear innovation process by simplifying design, prototyping, and production across multiple product categories including consumer and medical shoes and insoles. 

High-performance and longer-lasting materials combined with generative design and fast 3D printing shoe production enhance performance and innovation in shoe manufacturing and makes 3D printing an increasingly viable and sustainable manufacturing platform for volume production.  

LuxCreo provides an industry-leading footwear manufacturing solution consisting of industrialized printers, leading digital 3D production software, and cutting-edge materials. LuxCreo's comprehensive 3D production platform supports leading design flexibility and volume production services with high-performance, durable footwear more efficiently than its competitors. Their technology enables companies to accelerate market entry and easily scale to meet demand. 

The Benefits of 3D Printing Shoes

Advancements in 3D printing improve manufacturing processes significantly for greater footwear innovation. Footwear manufacturing companies using 3D printing attain the following benefits: 

Design Freedom

Excessive tooling and labor time place design constraints on traditional processes like injection molding. 3D printing eliminates tooling and allows manufacturers to optimize structure by adjusting flexibility, fit, weight, etc. for greater customization. Highly accurate 3D models created from digital scans allow easy adjusting to fit geometric specifications for a more personalized level of cushioning, breathability, performance, and aesthetics. 3D printing advances footwear innovation with more intricate and complex design freedoms. 

Prototype Optimization


Modern 3D printers create fully functional and aesthetically precise prototypes without tooling. Prototypes are easily printed with varying designs, textures, or dimensions. Production-ready materials allow footwear manufacturing companies to field test and validate or adjust designs without extensive redesign and prototype building processes.


Increased Sustainability


Advanced 3D printing technology like LuxCreo's patented 3D LEAP technology is highly energy efficient. Eliminating tooling and injection molding during production significantly reduces material, labor, and production costs. The LEAP technology also produces a lattice structure that provides infinite foot support and decreases the need to dispose of shoes in landfills. LuxCreo commits to increasing the percentage of bio-based materials used in 3D printing and is actively developing fully recyclable, highly elastic material for even more sustainable footwear.


Accelerated Production

Traditional footwear manufacturing requires extensive assembly-line labor builds and lengthy prototyping and testing phases creating a complete production time of 18-24 months before the product releases on the market. With 3D printing, however, sketched designs are quickly converted to production-ready CAD files, and 3D printing allows for rapid prototyping and early field testing with fully-functional prototypes to reduce overall production time significantly. 3D printing's lack of tooling and fast printing speeds allow for quick production of final products and replenishing of inventory.

LuxCreo Printer and Software Solutions

LuxCreo offers industrial-grade printers and intuitive software that helps footwear manufacturing companies leverage innovative designs against competitors. Their technology introduces industry-leading printing speed without sacrificing performance quality. 

Printing Solutions

Using high throughput industrial 3D printers allows footwear manufacturing companies to scale easily and meet changing market demand. 

The Lux 3+ printer is a large-format 3D printer that offers fast and accurate high-performance engineering applications. It's suitable for prototyping and production. 

The Lux 3L+ printer is the newest industrial production 3D printer that offers fast and accurate printing of high-performance engineering applications. It's suitable for prototyping and production. 

LEAP technology, built on LuxCreo's leadership in software, materials, and hardware, powers LuxCreo's print solutions to provide ultra-fast printing speed, leading surface finish, and high production part performance. 

Software Solution

Lux software enables accurate and consistent high-throughput and high yield at production scale. Using Lux software makes Lux 3D printers intuitive and efficient. 

LuxFlow creates a fast and simplified digitalized production workflow with six steps: Open--> Rotate tools--> Edit support structure--> Batch--> Optional Marking tools--> Slice 

LuxFlow offers automatic, configurable support generation to optimize product stability. 

High-Performance Materials

LuxCreo's elastic engineering resins have leading mechanical properties, including toughness, resilience, flexibility, and stiffness. Each LuxCreo EM material has incredible elasticity and tear-resistance. They are suitable for producing parts that need bending, stretching, or compressing hundreds of thousands of cycles without compromising performance.  

EM+21 provides accurately controlled model size and perfect details. It has superior resilience and bend resistance. EM+21 is widely used in sports shoe midsoles, industrial cushioning, personal wear, and other high-rebound cushioning and multiple bending fields.  

EM+24 provides fast component molding with excellent dimensional accuracy and detail resolution. It has ultra-high resilience and an energy return of 83%, exceeding Pebax foam material. It is extremely resistant to low temperatures and is ideal for rapid prototyping and elastic processing parts such as sports shoe midsoles. 

EM 01 provides fast innovation elastic resin to accelerate the elastic innovation process. It has high elasticity and high serial expressiveness. EM 01 is suitable for the rapid elastic model and stiffness verification of rubber and polyurethane elastomers for different designs and lattice structures. 

Success With LuxCreo

LuxCreo offers high-performing, innovative additive manufacturing production solutions to meet the unique needs for volume production and mass customization.  

ASICS Custom Matched 3D Printed Flip Flops: LuxCreo supplied 3D printed flip-flops for ASICS at the 2020 Olympics that were custom matched to customers' feet. Sizes included three different lengths and two arch heights to match customer foot scans taken as onsite. 

Sustainable Supply Chain: Flip flop SKUs that were running out were sustainability replenished weekly with Smart Factory on-demand production to match demand, eliminating overproduction and optimizing inventory. 

LuxCreo's Smart Factory-connected 3D printers bring footwear manufacturing companies improved performance and quality and an accelerated production time. LuxCreo's high-performance resins, digital workflow, and powerful hardware enable brands to economically and efficiently bring new footwear innovations to market. 

To learn more about the benefits of our Smart Factory connected 3D printers, materials, and software and how they can work for you contact us or call (650) 336-0888