Episode 67
We Could Grow Faster, If We Could Build Faster
Why Precision Manufacturing, Capital Needs, and Market Education Slow the Adoption of New Textile Technology
About This Episode
Most textile conversations focus on fashion or sustainability. This episode is about the machinery behind it.
Lanette Freitag built a needle-felting machine from scratch to solve a real farm problem, and it grew into a business selling to universities, research labs, and manufacturers in 31 countries. She explains why scaling hardware is hard: machines are built one at a time, capital is required to scale production, and new technology takes years for the market to understand. Growth isn’t limited by demand — it’s limited by how fast you can build and educate.
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