Product Industrialisation at Cosmo Labs, San Francisco

Cosmo Labs is the R&D centre for Cosmo factories based in Hong Kong.

It specialises in ideas combining fabrics, vacuum forming and electronics, in what it describes as "Soft, Hard, Smart" - soft materials, onto hard goods, with embedded electronics.

One of the machines it uses is the Formech 1372 large format vacuum former, which is used to test in real-time and validate ideas, rather than send projects to outside prototypers.

Grant Bell, VP Design and Operations, Cosmo Labs, said: "The Formech has been one of the key pieces of equipment that we've started using to be able to validate some of those ideas we have, and we really look forward to pushing the boundaries of what we can do to new materials and innovation using the equipment that we have in our location."