Customized, 3D-printed bike helmets offer comfort and safety

As founder and CEO of Redwood City, Calif.-based KAV, Whitman Kwok has worked with his team for seven years to refine the materials, processes and design needed to make his company’s 3D-printed, made-to-order bicycle helmets.

An engineer with an MBA from Columbia Business School, Kwok was on the cycling team at Harvey Mudd College in southern California in the mid-1990s. He raced competitively and said that, unfortunately, the helmets didn’t fit his head very well.

He proceeded to spend the next 20-plus years of his career in enterprise software and has now been involved in six startups. But he still puts more miles on his bike than car and couldn’t help but think that there had to be a better way to make a helmet. So in 2017, he founded KAV and set to work on finding a solution.

At the time he thought: “Everyone approaches this as a mechanical engineering problem, but it’s actually a software problem.,” he said in a March telephone interview.

He also thought that conventional helmet makers, despite their good intentions, “were hampered by the constraints of using EPS foam.” When it came to cushioning impacts, he said, “The architecture has been EPS foam. That is very inexpensive and very accessible, but it has a lot of limitations.”

He said that the industry had been on this EPS ride for 30 years and in that time society had developed the internet, iPhones, and electric cars. So when it came to helmet technology, he figured we could do better.

“From the get-go,” Kwok said, “we knew the materials were going to be foundational to the helmets that we're building, for very obvious reasons. You can only make something as good as the underlying material allows, especially in 3D printing.”

Additionally, he noted, the technology driving 3D printing had advanced tremendously, offering new design and manufacturing opportunities.

But few had tried such an approach since most helmet makers traditionally had relied on injection molding products overseas. Kwok and his teammates realized –– between software technologies, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning –– just how far both material science and 3D printing had advanced.

 “We looked at the intersection of those things, [and thought] this is going to allow us to make a helmet of all new materials.” And, he noted, they also can customize the helmets so that it has a great look and feel. Additionally, a better-fitting helmet also will offer enhance protection.

 Kwok teamed up in 2018 with engineer Dave Stoutamire, who had worked at Google, and who joined as chief technology officer. They then brought on board Mike Lowe, who had served as the vice president of advanced concepts at Easton-Bell Sports and had also worked at BRG Sports and as VP of wearables for Podtek Inc. Lowe joined KAV Helmets in July 2019 as VP of product in charge of ergonomics and design. Together, the three co-founded KAV.

The three of them figured that they had the industry and product expertise to tackle this challenge differently –– “and much, much better, like not just incrementally,” Kwok said. “There's an opportunity here,” he thought, “for a 10x product. That's very rare and that's exciting to me, because not only you get to create something new, but you can actually save lives, with no hyperbole.”

As part of their mission to do things differently, Kwok said KAV also decided to create its own safety lab. He said this was unprecedented for a firm of their size. “We’ve built one of the most sophisticated safety labs by collaborating with Virginia Tech and instrumenting our impact rigs to not only collect data on the head impacts, but what happens to the helmet itself.”

But KAV still needed to perfect the materials they were going to use. That’s when Jabil Inc. entered the picture.

Based in St. Petersburg, Fla., Jabil is a mammoth manufacturing company with more than 250,000 employees across 100 locations in 30 countries. It recorded more than $25 billion in sales in its most recent fiscal year. But it also was trying to build out its additive manufacturing business and liked what it saw with KAV.

“They were excited that we had a clear vision for how we were going to do mass customization,” Kwok said. KAV wasn’t planning to market $1,000 helmets. The company’s current price point is $300, which is comparable to other high-performance offerings out there, and they want to lower that even further. He says that Jabil was impressed with the engineering talent that KAV had.

“And so,” he said, “we gave them very clear specifications. We had the lab and procedures in order to test and validate. And they had a fantastic skill set to do the formulations and tolerances that we needed, as well as access to many suppliers.”

Jabil took up the challenge. “Off-the-shelf 3D printing materials did not meet KAV’s requirements for printing a customized bike helmet,” Jabil said in a case study about the project.

“They needed a material that could withstand extreme environmental conditions and high velocity impacts. KAV needed to create a helmet that was not only protective but also looked good. They wanted an additive material that, when printed, did not show visible layering on the final product.”

Leveraging its extensive material science expertise, Jabil says it created “a completely new and customized material that met KAV’s requirements in just nine months, with the delivery of an ISO 9001 certification in an additional six months.”

Jabil process engineer Levi Loesch called this “pretty astounding considering how much innovation we needed to do and the fact that there was no other material on the market even remotely close to the performance that that we ended up developing.”

Additionally, Jabil said its global manufacturing footprint and efficient supply chain capability “will help KAV expand its business and continue making a positive impact.”

KAV calls the resulting material PolyCarbon Composite –– a specialized formulation in 3D printing filament form that they developed with Jabil after about 35 iterations. They constructed it from polycarbonate with a proprietary polymer blend that KAV says “provides strength, superior energy absorption and naturally wicks heat 8 times better than EPS foam even in the most extreme conditions.”

Early on, the partners experimented with a carbon fiber nylon composite material, which performed well but came with one major drawback. Because of the carbon fiber, every helmet had to be black.

“Naturally, for mass adoption,” Kwok said, “it was kind of ironic that we could make a fully custom product that fit 8 billion different heads but had only one color. So the PolyCarbon was this long road to make an alternative. It has a completely different base.”

But changes in color pigmentation also significantly change material properties, he noted, so for every different color they chose, KAV had to run through a battery of tests to make sure that it behaved consistently with the base material for the PolyCarbon.

Jabil makes the filament for KAV, but the rest of the production occurs in the helmet maker’s northern California headquarters facility. KAV is busy building a new plant in Buffalo, N.Y., that will provide up to five times more production capacity than the firm has now in Silicon Valley.

Kwok says the Buffalo plant “will focus primarily on our sixth-generation production platform (hardware, software and materials). It’s a bit like silicon chip manufacturing where each generation of the factory allows us to make increasingly sophisticated helmets. For chips, it’s smaller transistors allowing faster CPUs. For us, it’s a more sophisticated helmet design.”

Regarding the continuing evolution of materials, he says: “What we’re effectively doing is refining the production processes to eke out higher and higher grades using the same base material. There are very few manufacturers capable of producing the materials to the purity and specs we require. Every batch of material is tested, and we’ve been steadily increasing the bar for what’s acceptable.”

Another key to the KAV helmets is its use of what it calls its Hex Honeycomb Structure. Kwok previously also worked on rocket engines and so is very familiar with the use of honeycomb structures in aerospace. This technology offers a very high weight-to-strength ratio. KAV has a portfolio of patents  for its 3D-printed helmet liners, in addition to various manufacturing trade secrets. The low-density, anisotropic material has excellent shear and compression properties, while also maintaining its rigidity. In the event of a crash, the company says, “it collapses and crumples, absorbing the impact and safeguarding the wearer.”

KAV’s top priorities, Jabil recalls, were to create an additive material that could protect bikers’ heads, print according to the customer’s head measurements and look amazing. By building to production rather than building to inventory, Jabil was able to help KAV respond to the customization needs of its consumers.

“Our customers were mind blown that they could have something made for them at approximately the same price as other high-end helmets,” Kwok claims. “They absolutely love it. They’re blown away by the comfort.”

KAV offers custom-made helmets in three different colors –– grey, black, and white, giving customers choices. It makes each helmet to order via a simple custom-fitting process, using 3D printing, and deliver them within two to three weeks.

KAV released its Color Exploration Program in early April, so cyclists can create their own signature helmet with 400,000 unique color combinations and a truly perfect fit. It makes each helmet to order via a simple custom-fitting process with their iPhone app, and then they 3D print, and ship the helmet in as little as two weeks.