Knitting Lab Serves as Crucial Hub for Students, Faculty, Industry and Government Partners
The facility is adding to its array of top-notch equipment and expanding its capability to partner on new, innovative concepts.
On NC State’s Centennial Campus, where private partners work hand-in-hand with world-class experts, there is no shortage of highly coveted equipment.
But the busiest of all may be the sock machine housed in the Wilson College of Textiles’ Knitting Lab.
Capable of turning ideas into reality in a matter of minutes, the equipment offers rapid prototyping for clients and students hoping to trial a new product — that is, when there’s an appointment available.
“The sock machine is the busiest machine in the university,” says Andre West, director of the Zeis Textiles Extension, which oversees the lab. “They’re booked out months in advance.”
Part of that demand stems from a practical purpose the machine holds on campus: socks made in the lab have become a popular giveaway at major university events, from commencement to the annual Day of Giving.
But this state-of-the-art machinery – and the immense interest in it – is also emblematic of how the Knitting Lab is forging a path forward as a proving ground for industry and academia alike: a place for partners to trial new concepts, for students to gain unparalleled hands-on learning opportunities, and for innovation that’s injecting new life into North Carolina’s resurgent textiles sector.
A deep roster of private and public sector clients
If you walk into the Knitting Lab on any given day, you’re sure to hear a dozen machines humming under the close eye of laboratory staff.
And the array of projects under that roof is often as diverse as the list of clients, which currently runs 50 to 60 names deep.
“We work on everything from private companies to research that another professor may have, or institutional groups like the U.S. Department of Defense,” notes West, himself a 40-year veteran of the textile industry with vast experience in trend forecasting, fashion and textile design, retailing and manufacturing.
Past partnerships have seen the lab collaborate with corporations spanning the biggest consumer and textile brands, from Under Armour to Adidas and Parkdale Mills.
West’s laboratory team helps support that expansive roster of clients. The Knitting Lab staff is adept not only at working on comfort and performance wear products, but also in assisting with more complex knitted projects such as medical devices, like the heart sleeve the team recently collaborated on.
Another recent partnership saw the lab team up with the U.S. military to prototype heated gloves for soldiers on the front lines.
“There’s always something new happening in the market and you’re always capturing that,” West says. “And that pushes the development of new ideas and creativity to the next level.”
Providing a symbiotic environment for industry, students
Like several of the other innovation hubs on Centennial Campus, the Knitting Lab is something of a symbiotic environment.
It gives public and private partners access to industry-leading equipment and expertise from the Wilson College as they work to develop the next groundbreaking product – or to receive feedback or validation of a concept already in the works.
“The communication is what sets us apart, says Zoe Hezrony, Knitting Lab manager, once a student worker in the lab herself.
“We’re not here just to do something and move on,” she adds. “We’re here to hopefully have them understand, if they want to, what’s going into their product development or their fabrication process.”
Along the way, that process also offers invaluable first-hand exposure to student workers, whether it’s working on a client project or taking a meeting, one-on-one, to discuss specifications and exchange feedback.
Each semester, the lab employs between two and five students collaborating on a variety of industry-funded projects through the college’s Senior Design course that’s central to the undergraduate textile engineering and textile technology programs.
Students also have the chance to contribute to the lab’s work on prototyping for industry partner projects — an unmatched opportunity to gain true hands-on experience.
“The Knitting Lab helped me understand the machines that I’m working with,” says Shayleigh Larsen, a Master of Textiles student and textile design alumna, recalling a knee brace she helped construct for a customer.
“There’s this balance between beauty, performance and programming,” adds Larsen, whose Knitting Lab work helped offer experience that proved valuable during a summer internship with Variant 3D in Malibu, California.
College leaders believe that up-close exposure has similarly helped springboard recent graduates to prestigious industry roles, West says. Look no further than the nearly two-dozen Wilson College alumni he and a group of visitors from the college recently encountered on a trip to Nike headquarters in Oregon.
“Our secret sauce is not secret. Our secret sauce is our students. We’re giving a student a real-life experience in a lab. Then, they are, I’d say, far more likely to get a job in industry if this is something they like,” West says. “You’re planting the seed for future innovation by just training the students we have.”
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