A New Era Begins: Kornit Sets Its Sights on The Future

As consumers continue to become both more demanding and discerning, designers and brands are forced to push the boundaries of creativity, and continually explore new ways to amaze and wow; whether this means experimenting with different and previously unimagined materials, employing vivid colour combinations and/or using new applications.

One of the hottest trends we are seeing in fashion and sportswear is a wide range of embellishments and enhanced textiles that serve both a design and functional purpose. This has traditionally been outside the scope of textile printing, and has required time-consuming manual resources that made elaborate designs both cost prohibitive and extremely complex to mass-produce.

But just as our digital on-demand technologies changed the printing game, recent on-demand 3D technologies are changing the post-printing decoration one.

The Power of 2: A new era begins

As we anticipate the continued growth in demand for post-printing decorations, it’s essential for our manufacturers to keep pace and expand their technical abilities. That is what drove us to acquire US-based Voxel8, an on-demand manufacturer of 3D printing technologies, originally focused on the footwear industry. With the acquisition of Voxel8 ’s technologies, Kornit expands and perfectly complements its core production and decoration capabilities.

The acquisition will also enable our growth to additional market segments, such as the lucrative footwear industry, but also into wearables, orthotics as well as numerous other specialty categories. 

This will act to further cement our position as a truly vertically integrated company capable of offering our clients a broader suite of capabilities — fully aligned with our core sustainable, on-demand, close-to-home production promise.

Added firepower

The acquisition of Voxel8 comes on the heels of unveiling our XDi technology which provided us with the ability to penetrate the high-density, embroidery, and vinyl heat transfer spaces. While XDi gave us a serious boost in manufacturing capabilities, Voxel8’s assets are empowering us to add features such as grip enhancement, elastics/compression, waterproofing, abrasion reinforcement, patches, and impact resistance to name only a few added weapons in our new arsenal.

According to Kobi Mann, Kornit’s CTO, “Getting us into the space of additive manufacturing will enable a complementary solution to the current Inkjet technology with which we currently find ourselves. Breaking the limitations of inkjet is essential in order to make the next great leap forward, and complete the transition to digital within the textile decoration space.”

Beyond print, beyond tomorrow

Voxel8’s unique and innovative IP extends far beyond the immediate impact their assets will have for our customers. The beauty of merging our brain trust and capabilities is that we are fully aligned to digitize more and more parts of the manufacturing supply chain and expand into other aspects of production. By integrating Voxel8’s technologies and assets into Kornit’s core offering, we are not only creating greater value for our customers but solidifying our position as market leaders and marking the boundaries of our territory for future acquisitions and growth.