Helping to plan our daughters upcoming wedding has drawn us into 3D print wedding planning for favors and decorations. 3D printing opens up the door to customized gifts and accessories and the wedding industry is ripe to take advantage of this technology. A 3D print wedding is the perfect time to create unique to you and personalized items on what is widely believed, at least here in the US, to be the biggest day of your and your spouses’ life.

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3D Print Wedding Planning

It is engagement season for a lot of people, and I don’t know about you, but I’ve been seeing a lot of engagements pop up in my Facebook feed. Even if we didn’t, we’re deep into wedding planning ourselves, not for us but for our daughter. That’s right. She’s getting married next year, 2017, to the original editor of this podcast.

I had forgotten about that, actually. It’s the first hundred episodes I think, that he was our podcast editor. He’s now moved on to bigger and better things, more in the film area where he is very skilled and very talented. Anyway, he helped us out in the first 100 episodes. We obviously met him through our daughter.

We are knee deep in 3D Print wedding planning for bracelet favors.

They’re engaged and they’re getting married next July. We have been charged with doing some 3D print wedding planning. Or 3D print wedding accessories. I’m told I need to design a new 3D printed bow tie, which I’m actually excited to do. I haven’t done a bow tie before. Obviously, I did the necktie. I need to make 50 of them, apparently. We’re giving them out as favors. Every man at place is going to have them, and then I have to do at least another 50 bracelets for the women. 3D print wedding favors.

Interestingly, our sister-in-law, Laura Curtin-Hazzard is an amazing wedding planner and is actually helping us out with this wedding. She works at a company called DB Creativity. She is also starting a podcast that is very cool, called Wedding Confessional. It’s a cool podcast. It’s fun. She gets to interview quite some people, including one person I know she interviewed, which has shocked me, someone who was a runaway bride four times before she actually got married and she’s still married now. Holy mackerel. I don’t think she was a model for the Julia Roberts character. That’s just who she is and what had happened to her.

Laura had written a guest blog post for us, I think a year ago, almost year ago. There was some really cool items she highlighted that she thought would make great things that you could customize and personalize for your wedding, whether it was just little things that you might want to put on as favors but things you might want to use for table décor. She had some really cool perspectives and some neat ideas. I think that blog post is full of great ideas.

Our daughter wants to not only have the bracelets for the women and the bow ties for the men be favors and things they can actually wear during the event, but they’re also supposed to be I think napkin rings. That they’re dual function, that they would encircle or be around … Whether it’s the bow tie strap portion that’s going to hold the napkin or it’s slipped over it, like the bracelet would be slipped over a napkin. We’ll have a table decor and then you take it home with you.

Actually recently, I have already made a couple of different bracelet designs for Tracy to wear at a recent conference. Also, as a side note, I had the opportunity to test out some new filament, which we’re going to have a separate blog post review for, from a company called Rigid Ink that I think is in the UK.

They sent us three different kinds of filament to try. One was sort of a yellow color, one was gold or bronze sort of color and one’s a silver color. Actually, I had a pretty good experience printing with them. I have some photos. There’ll also be a set of separate review about the filament that’s a little more detailed. I’m not going to go into it here.

3D Printed bracelets using Rigid Ink samples.

I wore those bracelets and I really like the bronze color. It had a really nice effect on it. It really did look metallic, lots of people were fooled by it and couldn’t wait to touch it. The silvery colored one was still a little too flat gray to really have that more higher quality effect of it, but it was still nice looking. It still had a nice clean quality to the filament but just didn’t have quite that silver color to it that you wanted. It was just more of a gray.

It worked out just fine. Hopefully, we can a little more deep dive on them and try a couple of different temperature settings and then do a full review on that Rigid Ink as well. Definitely, we will.

3D Print Wedding Planning – The Ring

There’s been some other things to think about, not just like Alex’s ideas about … Alexandra’s our daughter, Alex we call her. Alex’s ideas about doing a bracelet and a bow tie. There were some ideas that were really cool, including actually 3D printing your own engagement ring. We’ve seen this done.

Noah Keating, who lab grew a diamond as a starting point for creating a whole 3D model and custom setting for his fiancé, Nina Tandon. Not only do you design the setting, but you grow the diamond. That’s wild. Is it still a diamond if you grow it? I think technically it maybe is. I don’t know, that’s a good question. What kind of diamond that was? I’ll have to research into that.

Of course, then if you put it in the Ring Cam box, which we did an episode on which was really cool in the past. That Ring Cam box, and now you’re videoing her response or his response in terms of your proposal. How cool is that? Everything is customized, everything is personalized.

I love it. Really the whole wedding thing, wedding event or industry, is such a great opportunity for 3D printing. Talk about the ultimate event where you wanted to be uniquely you and customized for you and your future spouse and your family. It’s just a ripe opportunity of accessories, table accessories or otherwise, personal accessories, to use 3D printing. I love the idea of it.

I hope that someday we will hear of a complete 3D printed wedding where everything is done customized like that, including the food. I’ve seen some of these things when I was interviewing 3D Systems in which they were creating soup bowls where the croutons were actually custom shaped and had your initials on them so they were each their own place setting. In the middle of your soup bowl it had your initials on it.

Jenny Wu – 3D Printed Ring with keepsake box.

What a cool event to experience that would be? It can really go fairly far to it. Jewelry, there is just so many things in and around that area. We’ve reviewed many, many things. Do you remember that Jenny Wu ring we had? That was a really cool looking ring. It wasn’t quite an engagement ring style but it was just such a cool ring. All of her jewelry was just beautiful. Absolutely unique and gorgeous and uniquely designed for 3D printing. It really was.

I love the boxes that they came in, that was like another thing. You want to save that box. That’s the perfect kind of artisan quality that you want to something when you get engaged. Just that cheapy box is just not good enough. No, it’s not personal agreement. Actually to me, that’s maybe the first thing that I would do.

I’ve actually designed a ring box and used it as a test print for a lot of reviews of 3D printers. Even if you’re not going to design or have custom made a unique ring, maybe that’s a little out of your price range. If you think your fiancé may not be into being video-d, because, some girls are not. They don’t want to be surprised at they’re on video. Some men either.

Maybe you want to do something unique with the ring box, make something personal and not just the typical little light gray clam shell ring box with the little gray fuzzy stuff on the inside and set it there. You can make it more of a keepsake and more special.

3D Print wedding planning – don’t forget a color coordinating ring box.

3D Print Wedding Planning – Time Commitment

Not to go too far, because hey, we love 3D printing here, but there’s a time and a place for it. The last thing you need to be doing when you’re stressing about planning a wedding is to be making every single thing related to that wedding. Thinking about when’s the right time for it. If you can get it off the shelf, I just don’t think, as much as excited as we are as doing like 3D printed silverware, we’ve talked about it before, how much fun that would be, we really don’t need to be 3D printing 200 plate settings for a wedding.

No, but what if you could 3D print one cake cutter? There’s a time and a place for it. That’s what we wanted to also point out. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s costly. Unless it’s a statement piece or something personal or really is just something that really sings you, that’s really why, this is what you’re all about and this is who you are.

We appreciate the fact that Alex, she doesn’t 3D print, but the fact that she appreciates that about us and so does Jonathan; they appreciate that about us and that’s something we can contribute and do. She can make it something that she wants and loves and couldn’t find out there, now we’re all contributing. It’s the doing of it that is as special and designing of it that is as special as actually just printing it.

It’ll just be too bad we can’t get pictures of everybody in their bow ties and their bracelets for this blog post until next summer. We’re going to have to either do another episode with the results, maybe the postmortem on the experience. Bow ties and bracelets, coming up in July, August 2017. Why not?

3D Print Wedding Planning – The Opportunity

Here’s a really big opportunity for wedding designers and wedding planners as well. This is a business opportunity. You may not be very CAD capable, that’s not your strength. Here’s where teaming up with some product designers make a lot of sense. Here’s where creating a specialized catalog or having access to some so you can really do some of these high level designed events. How cool is that?

It offers you the ability to offer a wider range of products and the stuff that you find on the shelf everywhere in those awful catalogs. I’ve seen some of them. Also, to have a significant differentiator for your particular wedding planning company, you’re talking about a unique assortment.

It’s the same way we we’re talking about bakeries being able to offer that and not having to have that expensive artist and labor within their own facility, but being able to subcontract that out to do the design work and then you do the printing and you take care of the more labor intensive side of things and making sure that it gets installed and do all those things. You already have people and you already have a logistic system in place to handle.

The design work, you just have a resource that you can job out to. That’s a perfect kind of partnership and cooperative relationship that would really make both 3D printing and the wedding planner successful. Seems like a perfect marriage of options to me. Sorry, I couldn’t resist. Please don’t drive off the road over there, if you’re driving.

If you’ve been to a wedding lately and seen anything uniquely done that was 3D printed, we would love to hear about it and any 3D print wedding planning you are doing of your own. Please send us a message on social media, @3DStartPoint.

3D Print wedding planning – create a stand out and memorable cake | Image via 3D Systems

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