We Could Grow Faster, If We Could Build Faster

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.