I remember using machine tags Last.fm back, back in the day (late 00s, maybe even 2010). That was still the time of the mashup/remixed web pages, and APIs were more open and you could do very fun stuff crossing Google Maps, Facebook, Craigslist and whatever.

Then, Last.fm was a good site to keep track of the events (concerts/festivals) you were planning to go or you had visited.

Every event had an ID (let's say, 3792998), and you could add photos to Flickr with a machine tag with certain prefix (in this case, the tag would be lastfm:event=3792998). So, when you visited an event on Last.fm, it'd query the Flickr API for photos tagged with that machine tag, and show photos from that concert.

It was cool, but I think Last.fm removed that feature at least 10 years ago...

Here you can still list Flickr photos tagged like that:

https://flickr.com/photos/tags/lastfm:event=*

Edit: Oh, I didn't remember that Flickr would also link back to the Last.fm event. The Internet was quite a different thing back then. Flickr blog post about the feature: https://code.flickr.net/2008/08/28/machine-tags-lastfm-and-r...

Are they dropshipping preexisting designs, or are they making custom orders to a knitting company?

Edit: totally sincere question, I don't know their process

But the site doesn't say anything about being new, and in fact says it was invented in 1995:

  When Was 3D-Knitting Invented?

  The concept of 3D-knitting was first envisioned and then developed by the
  Japanese company SHIMA SEIKI. They launched their first WHOLEGARMENT knitting
  machine at the ITMA trade fair in 1995.

But this talks about the mass production of garments. Nobody at the Zara factory is having a quiet evening knitting on the sofa.

The idea of this is: knitting on demand, customizable, less waste.

You can still knit your things at home if you want to do your own stuff, or relax a bit...

That plus the ellipsis makes me thing that it means the additional threads that would open for next connections...