What ARE “technical soft goods”?

(According to me. Jargon is jargon; call it what you want.)

Let’s start with soft goods.

This is easy. Soft goods = products made of soft materials.

Traditional soft goods typically take the form of flat fabric (or any other soft-ish, 2D-ish material like leather or elastomers) that’s been cut and sewn into shape. Often, the end product is a bag, shoe, or garment, but it could be as complex as upholstered furniture or a car interior.

Some Soft Materials:

  • Knit Textiles

  • Woven Textiles

  • Nonwoven Textiles

  • Foams

  • Elastomers

  • Leathers and Suedes

  • Alternative and Plant-Based Leathers

  • Heat activated adhesives

GOING interdIscIPLINARY

A lot of innovation happens in this space, and the supply chains run deep. But these industries - automotive, fashion&apparel, footwear, and furniture - have largely operated in silos with selective collaborative crossovers.

This has changed significantly in the last two decades as manufacturing processes have advanced, tech has blossomed, and the internet and social media have accelerated germination of ideas across sectors.

Getting Technical.

Technical soft goods is both the advancement and cross pollination of these more traditional industries. Whether it’s taking cues from advanced textile engineering in footwear, where over-molding plastic with textiles has been common for years, or from the intimatewear industry standard foam manufacturing and thermoforming methods, or from how textiles are most effectively wrapped around 3D geometry in high-end car interiors, the sources of inspiration are endless.

And now, with the rise of wearable devices, home technology products, workplace productivity products, and smart…everything, where products are often required to be comfortable, or to fit with the material language of their neighbors, technical soft goods is gaining momentum as a discipline within product design.

Enter the role of the soft goods engineer

While technical soft goods doesn’t imply working exclusively with smart electronic products, the rise of hardware products incorporating textiles means that there’s room for very rigorous physical product design engineering to grow.

Figuring out how to ensure a textile component meets the tolerance specifications of the other components in, for example, a smart speaker, is not an easy feat, especially when textile tolerances are typically millimeters, not microns! Or say you need skin-contacting sensors to pass through a textile housing to connect to an underlying FPC in both an elegant and waterproof way? These are the types of engineering challenges faced in technical soft goods.

You’ll find TECHNICAL SOFT GOODS in:

  • Wearable tech products

  • Audio products

  • Medical devices

  • Consumer tech accessories

  • Gaming products

  • VR/AR/XR

  • Smart home devices

  • Smart mattresses

  • Workplace productivity products

  • Health and fitness products

  • Automotive interiors

  • Furniture

  • Children’s toys

  • Apparel and footwear

  • Soft Robots

  • A lot more… I’ll keep adding!