What does 3D printing bring to the entrepreneur?

Once the price of 3D printing equipment drops, entrepreneurs will flock to explore how to use it to make more products.

Article | John Patrick Pullen

A ball, a teacup, a gear, even an electric car, although the 3D printer cannot print money, it can produce a solid prototype of almost everything.

3D Printing utilizes the technology of adding material, which is used in the traditional paper printing. However, it is not the traditional two-dimensional input printing mode, but rather the generation of real entity prototypes. At present, 3D Printing has several leading technologies, such as melting deposition modeling (fused deposition MODELING,FDM) technology, the principle is similar to the traditional printer ink-jet box, can be used for printing heat material through the feed tube into the printer, and then stacked three-dimensional "ink-jet" printing in kind each layer. The other is selective laser sintering (selective laser Sintering,sls) technology, which is similar to a traditional laser printer, with the use of powder material printing, the printer first in the laying of the printed layer to scan the parts section, The powder is then sintered together with a high intensity laser to obtain a hard formed part material. Another is the stereo lithography (STEREOLITHOGRAPHY,SLA) technology, which is similar to the selective laser sintering technique, but the printing material is liquid resin.

Bruce Bradshaw, head of marketing at Objet, said: "Today, whether it is a small company of two or three people, or nearly hundred people's business organizations, these large and small enterprises can maintain advantages in the market competition, all benefit from 3D printing technology." For example, for some special market marketing needs, enterprises can even use 3D printer to produce nearly thousand pounds of gorilla model. "Objet is a 3D print service provider in Israel that is now merged with the Stratasys company in Idenprery, Minnesota. Bradshaw said that in the past three years, objet annual income growth rate of up to 35%, and its outstanding performance of the main driving force from SME customers. At the same time, the average cost of 3D printers at the general base level has dropped from the initial $200,000 to $15,000.

Another Olloclip company, located in California's famous surf resort Huntington Beach, is renowned for producing photographic accessories for the iphone. The iphone's external camera, produced by Olloclip, also uses 3D printing technology to make product models and is well received by a large number of customers, one of the best selling devices in the Apple Store. Patrick O ' Neil, chief executive of Olloclip, said: "Without the 3D printer, I can't imagine that the company will achieve such a splendid sales performance."

Olloclip has invested 50,000 of billions of dollars in 3D printing, not only to produce prototypes of the company's own products, but also to copy the latest iphone. In this way, once Apple launches its latest iphone, Olloclip will be able to design its own camera footage at the fastest pace possible. Olloclip Company Design Director Chong Pak said: "We can design a lens sketch in the morning, after the completion of modeling at noon into the printer, the evening design samples can be accurately produced." "Olloclip's industry needs to react quickly to product design, and in the days after the iphone 5 launch, Olloclip released the latest external footage that matched the phone.

The biggest challenge for Olloclip has been the Chinese shanzhai, with a large number of shoddy olloclip imitations impacting their Asian markets and bringing a huge impact on the company's reputation. The reason for this is that the Olloclip company had to rely on a number of companies to provide rapid prototyping services to help produce samples, the biggest drawback is the easy to leak product sketches. But now, thanks to 3D printing technology, Olloclip can safely keep its computer-aided design (computer-aided Design,cad) sketch files inside the company. "Of course you want people who have received a product design sketch to work ethically, but you're not really sure about that," he said. But if the product prototypes are made in-house, there's no need to worry about that. ”

The efficiency of 3D printing has greatly improved the ClearCorrect company's business. The Houston company is a manufacturer of stealth braces. When 3D printers were not introduced, they used milling machines to make models for their customers ' teeth, and then produced a thin-walled, transparent plastic hoop through thermal moulding. In addition to easy to damage the milling machine, the cost is also very expensive, and the energy consumption is enormous; more inconvenient is that the milling machine can only make a dental hoop model at a time. Company CEO Jarrett Pumphrey found that using 3D printing technology, ClearCorrect Company A production batch can produce 60 ~70 models, each model production time is only 5 minutes, and milling machine production of a model takes 13 minutes.

ClearCorrect, which grew 30% in sales in 2012, now has less than 400 square metres of office space and only three to four employees to operate a 3D printer to produce a hoop model. Prior to this, the 130-person enterprise covers an area of 11,000 square feet, with 10 to 15 employees operating a milling machine model.

However, for many ordinary people, 3D printing technology is still unreachable. Shapeways Company saw the business opportunity and decided to provide 3D printing service to the public. The New York Company has over 30 types of 3D printed materials, such as plastics, glass, metals and ceramics. They set up trading platforms on the Internet, where users can use the platform to sell printed products. At the same time, Shapeways company also for 8,000 shops self-employed to provide a very low threshold to join, the company only charged products 3D printing materials fees and 3.5% transaction fees. At present, Shapeways customers include jewelry designers, small technology equipment production companies, household utensils manufacturers. The number of 3D printed products produced and sold by Shapeways for these customers is extremely limited, but it remains extremely cost effective. The company's marketing director Carine Carmy said: "Shapeways Company's corporate value concept is to provide customers with personalized customized products, but the price is absolutely not lower than the physical store sales of those goods." "Translation | Kai Shan