Adidas just printed a shoe. Not a midsole, not an insert, not a little printed logo glued onto a normal sneaker — the whole thing. The new Futurecool comes off the machine as one continuous piece of upper and sole, and the first 400 individually numbered pairs were raffled through the CONFIRMED app in late August, with a wider global release announced for 2027 at around €180.
To see why that is a big deal, count the parts in the sneaker you are wearing. A normal running shoe is somewhere between twenty and forty separate pieces — mesh panels, foam, a rubber outsole, a heel counter, laces, glue — cut in one factory, assembled in another, held together by adhesive that eventually gives up. Futurecool has no assembly step at all. It is grown as a single lattice, and the ventilation that gives the shoe its Climacool name is not holes punched in fabric. It is just the gaps between the printed struts.
The magic ingredient is that lattice. A printed mesh lets one single material behave like several: fatten the struts under the heel and it feels firm, thin them out under the forefoot and it feels springy, open them up along the sides and air walks straight through. Adidas is doing this with resin printing — liquid photopolymer cured layer by layer with light, the same basic idea as the desktop LCD printers people use for miniatures, just scaled up and repeated a few hundred thousand times. That last part is the actual news. Printed footwear has existed since 2018; printed footwear at volume has not.
You cannot print a running shoe on your Ender or your P1S, but you can absolutely steal the technique. Load a spool of TPU, slow the printer down to roughly 15–25 mm/s, drop retraction close to zero, and set your infill to gyroid at 8–15%. Gyroid is the closest thing an FDM slicer has to a proper lattice: it is continuous in all three directions, so it compresses and springs back instead of collapsing. Print a small cube at 5%, 10% and 20% and squeeze each one. That five-minute test tells you more about cushioning than any spec sheet will.
Try it on your printer. Start with something with a real job: a gyroid-infill insole, a pair of TPU sandal straps, a springy phone bumper, or a set of shoe trees in cheap PLA. If you want filament that actually behaves at those speeds — flexible TPU, quality PLA, and the odd spool of PETG for the stiff bits — grab it from Flarelab and print something today.
Frequently asked questions
Is the Adidas Futurecool really 100% 3D printed?
The upper and the sole are printed together as one continuous structure rather than cut, glued and stitched from separate panels. Adidas describes it as a fully printed shoe, which is a big step past earlier models that only printed the midsole.
What kind of 3D printing does Adidas use for sneakers?
Resin-based photopolymer printing, in the same family as DLP and LCD machines. Liquid resin is cured layer by layer with light, which is what allows the fine lattice struts that give the shoe its cushioning and airflow.
Can I print shoes on a normal desktop FDM printer?
Not a wearable running shoe, no. But you can print the same ideas: flexible TPU parts, gyroid lattices, and print-in-place hinges. Sandals, insoles, clog-style slip-ons and shoe trees are all realistic desktop projects.
Why do 3D printed shoes use lattices instead of solid foam?
A lattice lets one single material behave differently in different places. Thicker struts under the heel feel firm, thinner struts under the forefoot feel springy, and the gaps between them do the job of ventilation holes for free.
Reported from coverage by 3D Printing Industry. Rewritten and expanded for beginner makers by Flarelab.
Originally published at flarelab.com.
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