Our goal was to create a tangible experiences that wasn't limited to its tangibility. We wanted to create an amazing physical experience, but have it be enjoyable by anyone in the world via the web.

The Thread Screen allowed people from all over the world to have an experience that traditionally would have been designed solely for those that could make their way to it.

Our server watched Instagram for new tagged images, then queued them up to be played on the screen. Each image is downsized to 80x80 pixels and its colors are remapped to fit the 36 color palette of our thread. The color remapping process uses an algorithm that measures the distance between two colors in terms of human- eye perception.

Once the color for each pixel is known, we calculate the exact amount of steps each motor needs to travel to display the correct color on the front of the spool. This is achieved via a 1.7m long piece of fabric that goes back and forth several times behind each spool, acting as a belt drive.

The Thread Screen is currently in our HQ in Brooklyn. It is still fully operational, but does require a team to keep on top of it when it's running.

The thread screen received more media and social impressions than any other campaign Forever 21 has ever done, with over 280 million impressions in only 7 days.

It has been called "a true piece of art" by many in the media, and there have been some chats about it going into a museum.

While there has been a great deal of interests from various parties to create more or similar items, we've chosen to focus on new products at this point.

We believe that the F21 Thread Screen might be the most complex machine ever built for any campaign, achieving a long list of firsts in tech, software, and marketing.

It was conceived, designed, and built entirely from the ground up, and is made of over 200,000 parts – 8 times the amount that are in your car.

While the engineering might be impressive, the experience isn't overshadowed by it. The experience to the end user of seeing themselves made from thread is truly enjoyable, leaving the tech as an afterthought, which is always our ultimate goal.

Forever 21 was looking to run an awareness campaign that would create a large amount of social and media buzz, with the goal of positioning them at the crossroads of fashion, technology, and art.

Our biggest limitation and restriction was that we only had one shot to get this right, and that meant ordering thousands of parts that had to work . There was no time or budget for re-orders.

The hundreds of custom designed parts all went through varying levels of prototyping. We prototyped various fabrics, with various printing techniques, with various elastics to achieve certain tensions. We built test rigs to see how the fabric would hold up over time. We 3D printed and CNC milled parts before having them injection molded or laser cut. We built full test assemblies. Long story short, there isn't a single part that didn't go through several iterations.