Professional ballet dancers can go through hundreds of pairs of pointe shoes each year. Could 3D printing change that? German startup act’ble believes it can.
Ballet emerged in Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries, but Italian shoemakers only toughened the pointe shoe in the 19th century, and its basic construction has changed little since. Pointe shoes are still mostly handmade, with skilled makers layering fabric, paper, glue and satin around a shaped last to build the rigid toe box and supportive structure.
The design has lasted because of tradition, not because it works well. Dancers have to break in, pad and modify every pair. A professional’s shoes often last a single day before the shank softens. That makes pointe shoes one of ballet’s most expensive and least sustainable pieces of equipment. Unsurprisingly, chronic foot pain and injury are part of the deal.
Enter act’ble, which moved away from ballet’s legacy of hand-craft toward a technique that could offer what centuries of craftsmanship couldn’t: additive manufacturing. The result is a modular shoe, one that can be refreshed instead of replaced outright.
A modular pointe shoe
act’ble’s shoe comes in three parts: a 3D printed sole, a knitted skin, and laces. The core component is a 3D printed inner sole in high-performance TPU, engineered for the particular demands of dancing on the tips of the toes. Incisions cut the sole into segments, so it bends freely while the foot is flat, then the segments meet and lock as the dancer rises, going rigid at the moment the weight arrives. In traditional shoes, Lindner told 3Dnatives in 2022, “physiological walking is not possible.”
Around the 3D printed sole, a knitted “skin” pulls on like a sock. It does more than hold the sole against the foot, though: its compression takes pressure off the toes and spreads it across the whole foot.
The third component of the reimagined pointe shoe is the laces. Hidden underneath the skin they carry load rather than just fastening things. They click into the sole and wrap around the foot, holding it up so the weight comes off the toes. They come in three widths, which is how the shoe adjusts to the dancer: narrower laces leave beginners more flexibility, wider ones give stronger, higher-arched feet a firmer surface to lean against.
Durability on pointe
New York City Ballet goes through roughly 7,000 pairs of pointe shoes a year and spends close to $1 million doing it. Yet there is still no mainstream way to recycle them.
For act’ble, comfort wasn’t the only problem worth solving. Sustainability and longevity were on the list too. Thanks to its modular design, dancers can replace only the part that wears out first, whether that’s the sole, the skin or the laces. The company also claims its shoes last five times longer than traditional ones.
From thesis prototype to production line
Founder Sophia Lindner is a former ballet dancer who trained for 14 years before studying design. In 2018 she built a pointe shoe prototype for her bachelor’s thesis and called it React. It was never meant to be a product, but dancers, choreographers and dance medicine specialists who tried it thought otherwise, so she kept going. What followed was more than a hundred design iterations, with a new 3D printed prototype coming off the machine every couple days.
The manufacturing has changed since then. When act’ble spoke to 3Dnatives in 2022, the soles were being laser sintered. Today production runs on HP Multi Jet Fusion at Something Added, a Barcelona firm specializing in additive manufacturing for footwear.
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*All Photo Credits: act’ble