Electroloom launched back in late 2013, a radical device that had the potential to upend the world of clothes manufacture. The device could -- theoretically -- create a garment in any shape we saw fit using little more than electricity and raw materials. The 3D printer for clothes also created fabric without stitches or joins, making its products lighter and stronger than typical cloth.

And yet, just A couple of years later, Electroloom had run out of money, with investors abandoning the project. The dream had died as quickly as it had begun, leaving plenty -- including crowdfunding backers -- to wonder what exactly had happened. Now, a year later, company co-founder Aaron Rowley opens up about what went wrong and what killed the Electroloom.

It was at California Polytechnic State University that Rowley was first exposed to the process known as electrospinning. Field-Guide Fabrication Electrospinning, to use its full name, is a process used to make medical implants and air filters.

Imagine a sealed plastic box, with an electrically charged metal plate that can be any shape you desire. A customized mix of liquid polyester and cotton filaments is then sprayed onto it through an electrically charged nozzle. The airborne fibers are drawn to the plate and form as a series of nanofibers, gradually building into a single piece of cloth.

It's not all magic, however. For one thing, the process takes a very long time to complete: up to 16 hours for a single garment. Even though results were slightly crude, the lack of stitches and joins offered the possibility of new ways to create clothes.

Rowley's interest in the technique didn't start until after he began tinkering with 3D printing at night, after his day job at Boston Scientific. He soon found the technology too limiting, saying that, "conceptually, the world is not made of completely solid goods." Soon after, he decided that "rigid 3D printing isn't the Holy Grail," and explored other methods of creating objects.

It was a short step from there back to the experiments he had undertaken as an undergraduate in college. Electrospinning seemed, at first blush, like a way to break past the orthodoxy of existing manufacturing methods. He teamed up with Joseph White, another CPSU student and friend, to examine the wider potential for the technology.

But before Rowley and White could spend any time really looking into the research, they were thrust into the spotlight. In 2014, the pair applied for a design grant from Alternative Apparel, because the first prize was free access to TechShop, a maker space in San Francisco. They won, and in addition to unfettered access to the hardware space, they received another prize as well: attention.

"The reality is, everything just really snowballed. I had been messing around with it," says Rowley. "After we won, there was these investors that heard about it and started talking to us." He was caught up in a "wave of enthusiasm" that stopped him from having the time to "really sit and think: Is this the right technology?" He adds that "there were a lot of things that I think I didn't think enough about before really committing to it."

At the time, Rowley had little more than a document, some renders and a vision for how things would go. But he had optimistically promised that Electroloom would have a workable product within a year. By May 2015, the company had launched a Kickstarter designed to develop a number of prototype devices that could be used to finesse the product, much like Oculus' initial run of developer-friendly VR headsets.

That was when the problems really started to mount up.

"We were making such decent progress, and things were going so smoothly, that it felt reasonable to make certain assumptions." These included the idea that it would be easy to build a desktop Electroloom reliable enough to build a developer community. "The machine created big electric fields, which caused so many challenges from an electronics standpoint." Rowley explains that "our hardware couldn't withstand a lot of the fields that we were creating."

When they did manage to get the devices working, even more problems became apparent, including a terrible user experience.

In a regular 3D printer, a user can place a plastic filament into an extruder and, with some patience, get it working. But operating the Electroloom wasn't that simple, and Rowley "didn't really have a great user experience for putting chemicals into the machine." In fact, the team "couldn't get things to that baseline [level of] quality we thought we needed for people to really get value out of these developer machines."