Fashion Tech journalist Amanda Cosco speaks with Marina Toeters, a wearable technology and fashion design educator and the founder of By Wire, a design and research facility focused on fashion tech. At By Wire, Marina brings together technicians, fashion designers, students, and businesses to push fashion into the future. She develops prototypes, performs R&D testing, and educates in areas of fashion design and textile technology at three different educations institutions. Working with companies like Phillips, Marina integrates emerging technologies into clothing and helps bring real fashion tech products to market.

Fashion tech journalist Amanda Cosco takes you inside Fashion Tech Berlin, THE conference on the future of Fashion. Our episode begins with Lisa Lang, the founder of Fashion Tech Berlin and the stronghold of the fashion tech community in Berlin and beyond. Amanda then takes you through the show floor to meet exhibitors and designers bringing fashion tech products to market, from robotic dress kits to electromechanical necklaces.

Up until this point, a lot of the fashion tech products we've seen are costume and concept pieces—meant strictly for the stage, the runway, or for photo shoots. How do we move fashion tech forward from prototypes to products that truly touch consumers lives? In this episode, Fashion Tech Journalist Amanda Cosco interviews Fredrik Timour of Neue Labs, the company responsible for Automat. Automat is a toolkit for enabling fashion tech. It lets designers get their hands dirty with creating wearables without having to learn code. With toolkits shipping later this summer, Automat is posed to be the plug-and-play solution for creating connected clothing and interactive garments.

Fashion tech journalist Amanda Cosco interviews JJ Wilson of Kit and Ace, a fashion brand pioneering high-performance fabrics for a full-contact life. After spawning the athleisure movement with their first company, Lululemon, the Wilsons have launhed a second family company. Amanda and JJ's conversation touches on high-performance fabrics for a new generation of consumers and the importance of lifestyle branding.

The space race is on to forge the future of fabrics, and Canada is emerging as a key player. In this episode, fashion tech journalist Amanda Cosco interviews Thomas Ducellier, Executive Director of the Printed Electronics Flagship Program at the National Research Council of Canada (or NRC for short). Recorded in Oulu, Finland, Thomas and Amanda discuss the NRC's initiative to push fabrics into the digital age.

FashTech Journalist Amanda Cosco shares conversations from the show floor at Augmented World Expo (AWE) 2016, one of the largest events in North America looking at augmented and virtual reality + wearable technology. Amanda explores how the digital is penetrating the physical in conversations with Metaverse Nails, SubPac, Machina, Nuheara, Myant, Octagon Studios, Athos, and Augment. AWE 2016 took place June 1-2 in Santa Clara California. Watch Electric Runway's vlog covering the event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRIbxGrIoSc

Fashion tech journalist Amanda Cosco interviews Al Linke of Cat Clutch, an acrylic and LED handbag you can customize with your smartphone. Al explains his journey from creating a one-off concept piece for his wife to creating a viable consumer product.

Fashion tech journalist Amanda Cosco speaks to Randy Rubin, the founder of Crypton and CEO of Crypton, a company that has been pioneering smart fabrics for almost 30 years. Crypton has made a name for itself in the upholstery world by developing high-performance fabrics for furniture that are both stylish and stain-resistant. Now, through the recent acquisition of Nanotex, the company is turning its attention towards apparel.

We speak with Zach Pearl, artistic director of Subtle Technologies, a maker meetup turned art tech festival. For its 19th year of festival programming, Subtle Technologies has honed in on the future of fashion with a festival entitled "Seamless Visions: New Textiles + Wearable Technologies." Alex touches on fashion's new multimedia component, and how textiles are one of the oldest technologies. For more information on Subtle Technologies' festival, check it out on our events listing page: http://electricrunway.com/event/subtle-technologies-presents-seamless-visions/

You may have heard of smartphones and even smart rings, but what about smart earrings? Today on the show, fashion tech journalist Amanda Cosco sits down with Ashlyn Bird, co-founder of Ear-O-Smart, the world’s first smart earring. While Ear-O-Smart may have started as a direct-to-consumer product, they’ve recently pivoted to focus on offering a universal backing that’s comparable with almost any pair of earrings. The backing reads bio-signals, such as hart rate, calories, and activity, and makes this information available via a companion app. Amanda and Ashlyn talk about why the ear is the best place to gather biometrics, and the challenges of shrinking down a sophisticated piece of hardware into something that fits discretely behind the ear.