Zipper Manufacturing: From Judson to ABB Robots

Most people zip a jacket or a bag several times a day without wondering how the zipper was made. This post looks at zipper manufacturing from the hooks and buttons it replaced, through Whitcomb Judson's clasp locker of 1893 and Gideon Sundback's redesign of 1913, to the chain and slider machines that let YKK make zippers by the kilometre. It then covers what is happening now, from YKK's new plant in India to 5G smart factories in China, and where ABB robots such as YuMi, the IRB 360 FlexPicker and the IRB 660 could plausibly fit.

Metal, moulded plastic and coil zippers side by side, each with its own slider. Photo: Woodbine9 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From hooks and buttons to Sundback's hookless fastener

Before the zipper, clothes and boots closed with buttons, hooks and eyes, buckles and laces, all sewn on by hand in workshops full of seamstresses. Inventors tried to do better. Elias Howe, better known for the sewing machine, received a patent for a garment fastening in 1851 but never seriously tried to sell it. In 1893 Whitcomb Judson, a Chicago engineer, patented a "clasp locker" meant for shoes and showed it at the World's Fair in Chicago that year. It used a row of hooks and eyes closed by a slider, and it sold poorly.

Seamstresses at their stations in the Consolidated Garment Company workshop, 1919. Photo: Unknown photographer via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Gideon Sundback, a Swedish-born engineer working for Judson's fastener company, redesigned it into something close to the modern zipper: rows of small interlocking teeth on fabric tape, closed by a slider. It first went on sale in 1913, and his patent for the "Separable Fastener" was issued in 1917. Sundback also designed the machine that made it. A zipper is only cheap if the teeth can be fixed to the tape automatically, so the machine was half the invention. The name came later, in 1923, when B. F. Goodrich used the fastener on rubber boots and called them zippers.

Buildings 109 and 112 of the Scovill brass works in Waterbury, Connecticut, where zippers were made. Photo: Historic American Engineering Record, Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Zipper manufacturing became a heavy industry over the next decades. In Waterbury, Connecticut, the Scovill brass works had buildings set aside for zipper production. In Japan, YKK, founded in 1934, began building its own machinery. Its CM3 machine of 1959 punched teeth and fixed them in alternation, and the CM6 that followed after 1964 made YKK a leader in high-volume production. The pattern still holds: machines form long chains of teeth on tape, the chain is cut to length, and sliders and end stops are added at the end.

A metal zipper on blue tape, its teeth fixed to the tape by machine. Photo: Oto Zapletal / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Smart factories and a new YKK plant

Demand is still growing where garments are sewn. On 10 October 2026, Tamil Nadu Industry News reported that YKK, the world's largest zipper maker, had committed to a Rs 1,651 crore zipper and fastener plant in Tiruvallur district, announced at the Vettri Tamil Nadu Investment Conclave 2026 and expected to create about 4,316 jobs. Tamil Nadu is India's largest garment exporter, and a local plant would shorten lead times for apparel, footwear, luggage and bag makers that now import zippers or buy them from other states.

The sign outside PT YKK Zipper Indonesia, one of YKK's many overseas plants. Photo: Akhmad Fauzi / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

In China, zipper maker SBS was named on the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology's 2025 list of National Excellent Smart Factory projects. The company says its factory runs eighteen private 5G base stations, has a 17.5 metre automated warehouse with more than 90,000 storage slots, and uses automated guided vehicles across more than 3,000 square metres of workshop. It reports that warehouse throughput rose from 600 to nearly 1,200 cartons an hour and that its defect detection rate is above 95 percent. These are the company's own figures, and it also reports that labour productivity rose by about 53 percent.

Workers at sewing machines in a large garment factory, where most zippers end up. Photo: YeraC / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

We found no published ABB project in a zipper plant, so what follows describes possibilities. Slider assembly joins small parts such as the body, puller and sometimes a locking spring, and ABB's dual-arm YuMi IRB 14000 was designed for small-part assembly next to people. Sliders and stops coming off a conveyor could be picked by an IRB 360 FlexPicker using conveyor tracking, and an IRB 1300 could tend die-casting or press machines. Engineers would test such a cell in RobotStudio before building it.

ABB's dual arm YuMi assembling small parts beside a lab worker. Photo: ABB

What zipper factories automate next

The next step in zipper manufacturing is likely to be inspection and changeover. A factory may run thousands of combinations of tape colour, tooth size, length and slider style, often in small batches, so plants will want cells that switch over quickly and check every slider with a camera. Zippers themselves may get motors, too. YKK showed a remote-operated prototype at CES in January 2026, and in tests at Taiyo Kogyo's factory in Hirakata, Japan, it closed two disaster-relief tents in about 50 seconds.

A metal zipper slider with its pull tab, one of the small parts robots could assemble. Photo: Oto Zapletal / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Sewing the finished zipper into a garment is harder to automate than making it. Fabric stretches and slips, so most zippers are still sewn in by an operator at a machine, a problem covered in our post on garment sewing automation. Robots handle rigid parts far better than soft ones. Cost is the other limit: a zipper sells for very little, so a robot cell has to pay for itself through volume, fewer defects or less waste, and many smaller plants will keep relying on skilled operators.

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker robots packing small items at high speed. Photo: ABB

At the end of the line, the work looks like any other packing hall. Finished zippers are counted, bagged, boxed and stacked on pallets, a job that ABB palletizing robots such as the IRB 660 already do in many industries. Plants that add robots also need technicians who can program and maintain them, and guarding or speed monitoring wherever people work nearby. With new plants opening in India and smart factories spreading in China, slider assembly and packing are the jobs most likely to move from hands to robot arms next.

An ABB IRB 660 palletizing robot stacking boxed products at the end of a line. Photo: ABB

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