Gabriella Veszpremi x Inpelsa

My name is Gabriella Veszpremi and I am the designer of Layers. Together with my team, we have been working on the perfection of my own material research. Our aim in this project was to develop a material from waste leather that can be used for many purposes. Shoe sole is a very critical element, so we chose this to test our new material.

During the partnership, Inpelsa was supporting the technology with materials. Material research and development was fulfilled in our Budapest based studio, helped with high quality material from Valencia. For the experimentations, we used leather and more than 20 kilograms of waste material. The combination of different surface treatments, leather types, format and sizes give us a huge variety of test material.

To make the built materials ready for many usages, we involved CNC technology. For this computer numerical control cutting techniques, we needed to build up a 3D modell.

First, we made a clay modell. This modell was not perfectly symmetric, but it was good enough to scan and have starter form for the 3D modell. Later the scanned free forms were modelled.

We made a complex form shoe sole modell because we wanted to test how the material can be manufactured for extremes these forms. CNC cutting was also important since we believed, that with this technology the future manufacturing time could be shorten down.

Result of the CNC cutting was 2 sided. We experienced how this technology needs an extremely hard material to achieve the optimal result. Our material was tested with several sustainable glue to make it hard enough. The result also showed us that the leathers need to be carefully selected, because the many layers with different mechanical feathers can cause surprising results.

By the end of the project, we developed our own material which can be used for purposes in the fashion industry. We also tested new technologies to find the holistic solution between craft and industrial manufacturing. We are looking forward to keeping on working and find the best usage for our layer technology.