Democracy isn’t a word often associated with fashion, but giving more power to the people is at the heart of Knyttan’s ethos. A studio based in Somerset House, central London, Knyttan is changing the traditional relationship between consumer and designer. Customers can digitally manipulate the colours and pattern for a jumper or scarf on the Knyttan website, before a knitting machine turns the bespoke digital design into a one-off, merino wool reality.
“We’re trying to get people more involved with the creation of fashion,” says co-founder Ben Alun-Jones, whose background is in design and engineering. “Not everyone has to have an amazing design idea or a great drawing to submit. We work with designers to create style guides rather than finished designs and then the customer adds the final flourish, contributing to something unique.
“We do the ‘heavy lifting’ in terms of the design and manufacture, so although the result is different every time we know it’s going to be a nice product. Enabling people to have a hand in creating fashion themselves – even in a limited way – is very powerful.”
Harnessing this consumer-led philosophy, Knyttan has joined forces with the Sprout by HP to create a very special jumper.
The Sprout is a revolutionary creative space that combines immersive, multi-touch technology with a fully functioning PC. “The Sprout provides a different way of working with a computer: it’s about working with physical objects,” says Alun-Jones. “We wanted to look at what the Sprout could do compared with our own process, and find a way for the two to work together.
“Our approach explores how to involve people, putting them at the centre of everything we do. The idea for the jumper came from a simple observation: the first thing you want to scan when you get a Sprout is your hand. We decided to capture as many hands as we could.
“We put the Sprout into the shop [a temporary retail outlet above Knyttan’s studio] over a weekend and invited about 100 customers to scan their hands, making whatever gestures or positions they wanted. Then we used the Sprout to collage them.
“Arranging all the hands was definitely faster with the Sprout than using Photoshop or Illustrator: using your hands to manipulate images is much quicker than with
a mouse.
“We then put the collage into our own design tools and created a two-colour jumper design that was instantly ready to be manufactured.”
Knyttan is in the early stages of business and has plans to develop a bigger range of products for its customers to design. During its successful stint in the new wing of Somerset House, a Stoll knitting machine sat proudly on display and customers were invited to play with pre-existing graphic prints, using touch technology on tablets. More pop-up shops are in the pipeline.
As the company grows, Alun-Jones believes the Sprout has a real role to play. “The Sprout is useful in a business sense; having a desktop with a touchscreen feels much more intuitive. When you scan, you can see immediately if it has worked and, if you need to reposition it, you can do so with your hands, rather than rescanning. When you’re digitising lots of paper, it really saves time.”
If you want to get your hands on the Sprout jumper, described by Alun-Jones as “a jumper that literally everyone had a hand in”, the design is on the Knyttan website. It is available in a range of colours, and customers can manipulate the print to make this special jumper truly unique.
The ultimate creative space
Create whatever you can imagine thanks to Sprout’s revolutionary, immersive, multi-touch technology and Sprout Workspace, the app for capturing, creating, and sharing your ideas. With the powerful Intel i7 Processor and 1TB of storage, Sprout has everything you need to express yourself and get your work done. Find out more about the Sprout by HP here.
