[gajomi]

This makes me think... are there any special circumstances in which clothes need to be folded in such a special way and with sufficiently high throughput that this kind of machine could make headway? Oftentimes general purpose technologies can come to market only after predecessors in niche areas.

[zimpenfish]

As a side comment mentioned: hotels would be an ideal case because they have a lot of standard things that need to be folded (sheets, pillow cases, towels, etc.) and sticking to those basic cases could probably bring the cost way down and reliability way up.

(But I suspect you don’t need a fancy machine for simple shapes - a simple folding wooden rig would do and be almost as quick. Hell, I’ve got a cheap plastic thing that’ll do shirts in seconds.)

[dagw]

hotels would be an ideal case because they have a lot of standard things that need to be folded

Large hotels and commercial laundry operations already have expensive specialized machines for folding. This does not seem to be targeting that market.

[toyg]

> Oftentimes general purpose technologies can come to market only after predecessors in niche areas.

There are already such machines in industry (in garment-making, hotels etc). The challenge is that they are typically specialised towards specific types of garment. Nobody in industry really needs a generic machine; but that's the only configuration that the home market will consider. The only sub-niche big enough that could maybe sustain a specialised machine in the home is "shirts and trousers" - but there the real annoyance is ironing, not folding.