Consumer Level 3D Printing with Chris Campbell of FormURLife

Dispelling the myth that consumer level 3D printed products are cheaply made and cheaply designed with Chris Campbell of FormURLife. The opportunities that 3D printing provides to the end user market are far beyond just creating prototypes and design iterations. Looking at all the things and little details that need to come together to create a quality consumer level 3D printing product, as well as some business marketing take-aways that this successful 3D print business has honed in on.

This episode is fun and interesting because we don’t too often get to talk about consumer level 3D printing, and we are glad to have sponsors like MakerBot who make this episode possible. We don’t get to talk about quality of product that’s at that level already. We aspire to it and we talk about wanting it and when is it going to be here, when will see more of it in reality being sold consumer level end use 3D printed product. We feature it. That’s actually how we found this guest today. We feature it in our monthly, whatever the month is… This month it will be the Halloween picks. FormURLife was featured in our back to school featured products from last month.

Chris Campbell of FormURLife. They make these really cute and cool looking flash drives. We thought they were just really cutesy. I’m going to be honest with you, when we put them in our back to school list, we thought, “really cutesy, looked cool, wouldn’t your sixth grader love to have their name on a USB flash drive?” At least then, they’re not going to lose it when they go to school. A lot of kids have to bring flash drives to school. That’s been one of the things, because they share computers and they have to turn in things at school. To have your name on it, it seemed like a really great back to school item.

Then they sent one to us. They sent three of them to us actually. One for each of us in the office here with our names on them. The quality of them is outstanding. It really impressed me. It was much better than I expected them to be, in really, everything from visual to tactile to the impression of the weight when you hold it in your hand. USB flash drives, I have another one here on my desk that’s plastic.

I’ll tell you, in America, we don’t realize it or we don’t like to admit it. I don’t pretend to understand other markets so those of you in the UK or South America, Eduardo, I’m not speaking about you. I know in the US market, when something is heavier, we do place a higher value on it. We buy things by the pound here. It’s sad sometimes because I don’t think that’s environmental friendly.

But when I have a typical Sandisk or some other brand USB flash drive, I’m holding one in my hand right now. We even have a scale that’s very light. I maybe should measure the difference in the weight of these. We have scales that can measure this very light weight. I can even tell just holding it in my hand. This one that you can buy it at any Big Box store, it’s plastic, is so light weight. The value of it is really only about the number of gigabytes that’s on this drive.

You hold the one from FormURLife and there is a weight to it that commands your attention. It’s not just that, because the whole time we were interviewing, we had it in our hands. We were touching it, we were feeling it, we were twisting it. We were constantly holding it in our hand the whole time. It’s got a tactile quality that’s very nice.

Not only are you becoming attached to it because of how it feels but you’re becoming attached to it because it does have your name on it. That connection to customizable product is just the way I see the future going with 3D printing. We’re happy to talk to someone who shares that vision and who’s actually started down that road of building a business doing that. Consumer level 3D printing is a viable business model as well.

We’re really getting ahead of ourselves here. Let’s talk to Chris Campbell of FormURLife and let’s hear a little bit about how he got started and what he’s doing.

Listen to the podcast here:

Consumer Level 3D Printing with Chris Campbell of FormURLife

Chris, thanks so much for joining us on the show today to talk more in-depth about consumer level 3D printing. We’re really happy to have you here. I’m interested to learn more about FormURLife.

Thank you so much for having me.

It was really cool, in preparation for this interview, we received a couple of USB flash drives customized for some of us here in our office. These are really very impressive little products, I have to say.

Thank you very much. I really appreciate that. Just wanted to send a little something over so you can feel it and really know what we’re doing here.

I think that was really smart on your part Chris, because we saw it on the website. They’re cute and they look nice and everything. But in our mind, we were still thinking FFF 3D printing. When we got it, because they’re not, they have a really nice weight to them.

That’s one thing we pride ourselves in. I think it’s really important to us that the customer satisfaction, the quality standard, be as good as possible, especially with going into a 3D printing industry where consumers don’t always have the best image of the industry.

That’s so true. These are flash drives, one says Tom, one says Tracy and then one says Grace for our assistant. They’re fun and playful, but I tell you, as a product designer, and I use a lot of USB flash drives. Actually, this is a perfect thing to have. I use them a lot. I’ve often encountered things that I need to plug in to my USB port that are too large and interfere with the adjacent ports on my computer.

I can’t plug in another USB in the next slot to it or I can’t plug in the power cord of the computer because whatever is plugged into the USB is just too big. These things are really appropriately sized. Everything that I was able to plug in is compatible. It’s a well done, thought out product, quite honestly.

Thank you very much. I appreciate that. We do spend a lot of time in the testing phase, the R&D, to be sure that we produce a product that’s as good as we can. The great thing about 3D printing is if it’s not exactly what we want, we do it again right after. Two minutes after, we make a change, print a couple more, until we get it right. That’s one of the best things about what we’re able to do here. That’s how we’re able to continue to provide the highest possible quality parts. At the end of the day, 3D printing isn’t just about being able to rapidly prototype. It is a new way to produce the things you need and love. The quality should never sacrifice. It should be something you would expect to walk into any store and be able to purchase.

I’m so glad you said that. Let’s step back a little bit so we can get a little background and everyone else can get a little background on you and your company and how you got started, Chris. Tell us a little bit about what made you want to start FormURLife.

I’ve always been a tinker-er. I really love to make things and design. I think in my past, I’ve been thrown into a lot of situations where improvement is necessary. In medical, in military and space actually. I think it’s just become part of the way I think now. To move on and start something like FormURLife, it’s the epitome of where I’ve been going. It’s extremely satisfying to be able to offer that outlet. Both for myself but also for our customers and for the industry.

That’s great. We’ve seen a lot of 3D printed product companies not do well. Mainly because they’re all over the place. They’re too broadly focused. You’re narrow focused on providing a core set of designs really, but doing them really well. I think it’s been a really smart startup strategy. How long have you been doing this?

Thank you. We’ve been in business about two and a half years now. We started selling our first products in June of 2013.

That’s great. That’s longer than a lot. By 3D print standards, that’s a lot longer than most. Most are like 2014, maybe. But most of them in 2015. That’s great. Are you only selling them over your website? Are you selling them in other places or just over the website?

Right now we only sell on our website. We started on Etsy. We got a really great turn out and really great customer satisfaction, so we started to sell directly on our website. Right now, this is primarily where we sell. We are looking into some other things as well.

Are you printing these in house? Is your manufacturing all internal? Or are you jobbing some of these out?

Proud to say we do everything in house. Everything from the design, R&D, production, implementation. It’s a lot, but I think that it allows us to really understand our products and to really understand the best move so we can continue to be agile.

Chris, because everything is so customized on your site and all of these products, somebody’s name is different. My name is not spelled EY, it’s spelled with a Y. You have the ability to produce all of these and any version of it, but it does require a bit of labor and time. You have to output them individually. How are you accounting for that cost efficiency and time efficiency in your process of how you’re producing these custom designs?

It doesn’t matter how you make something. There’s always a special touch that you have to add on there. There’s always a little bit of work involved. Especially with 3D printing, it’s not a new industry but in the public eye, it is relatively new. It’s starting to pop up around everybody. I think in terms of being able to produce an affordable product, just like the industry, it’s early. Our margins aren’t as good as they will be when the technology is affordable and ubiquitous. I think that for us, it’s okay at this stage. We really enjoy having the flexibility to offer something new and to provide something that’s never been seen before.

Chris, is this a full time effort for you? We often find businesses in the 3D printing industry are really a side business because people aren’t making enough to quit their day job. Can you give us a little bit of a picture into what this is like for you now?

For me personally, this is a full time gig. This is what I do when I wake up and this is what I’m doing until I fall asleep. We still have a startup mentality here. There’s two of us full time and the rest of the team are contractors. We have to maintain flexibility because of the industry. I think we’re still trying to understand, like everybody else, where it’s going. We have a good handle on what our customers love and how to produce something really novel and functional. I think that we have to maintain that flexibility and modularity.

I think that mentality is really important, especially when you’re an early entrant into the market, which you obviously are. While 3D printing is much older, we all recognize that, the market portion is in its infancy. You’re an early entrant there. Having a broad enough mindset to be able to say, “I recognize my margins are low right now and they’re going to improve as efficiencies improve, as volume improves, as all of these things change in the marketplace.” That’s great.

Also recognizing that you have to have flexibility that your business model might need to change tomorrow as well is extremely important. We commend you for that because that is not always the case when someone comes in, especially into a new market area.

Thank you.

Chris, what is really the biggest hold back to you growing the market for yourself?

It really does come down to the hands on deck required. The real bottle neck with this kind of startup comes down to being able to produce a high quality product. It’s very easy to 3D print a product and ship it. This is quick and the machines are automated. To produce a quality product that consumer will want to buy and use and share and show, I think this takes more time. I think this is where the bottle neck comes from, the production side of things.

And the value proposition issue, right?

Right.

It takes a lot of time to produce a good design and dial that in. At the end of the day, if you can’t command that value from a product standpoint, from a sales standpoint, then you have a disconnect.

Absolutely.

We see the same thing on our end. Some of the designs that we’ve worked on take 200 hours to design, refine, so that they work wonderfully in the 3D printer. At the end of the day, you could never recoup all of those unless you were selling at a volume at which it was thousands of units. You end up having to discount the value of that just to get a place in the market.

Yeah, I think that’s very true. I think that that weight is being alleviated a little bit more each year. You have huge companies like HP and GE getting into the game. This is really where you’re going to get mass customization, mass manufacturing customized goods from, on a scale that anybody can begin to really approach them.

I was looking at your USB flash drive, and not just the 3D printed portion, but the actual USB drive itself, which really your design is a person’s name or whatever message they want to put in letters. It’s a housing for it, which is important because the product needs to be bigger than the technology needs to be.

What I’m impressed by is your logo, FormURLife, on that metal part right after it says the amount of gigabytes of the drive. That’s your branding on there, which is really subtle but it’s there. If anybody were to find this drive on someone’s desk and look at it, they can see where it came from.

I imagine getting those parts ordered, and I don’t know if they’re printed or if they’re laser engraved or what it is that puts that information on there, but in order to get that, here in the US, customized for you, that’s not a small effort. You probably have to buy a few of those and stock in order to get it that way. I don’t know that people, when they buy this product, really appreciate the sourcing and logistics and everything that goes into making this cute little thing.

Thank you very much. That storage one thing that we actually spent quite a bit of time on. When we were making this product, we wanted to have our branding on there. I think that’s really important. Not because we need to be the most known company, but because I think it’s important for people to understand where they get what they have. In terms of how they can relate and understanding that this products have a lot of time and compassion and energy put into them.

I think we didn’t want to slap it on the back where everybody could see it. We wanted it to be there discreetly so that if somebody did have an interest, they could find it. We decided to go this route. We thought it looked nice and we thought this was a good complement to the product.

I think it’s really smart because this is the case, especially when you’re a new entrant, it’s a new market, you want to know who the players are, you want to know who that is. You’re also making it so that you have enough flexibility to do promotional products. In the promotional product world, it might not be somebody’s name. It might be their company logo that’s at the end of your USB drive.

In that case, they don’t want you to have any prominence over their brand. Having it there subtly so that someone who said, “I got this cool thing,” now I want to order one for my company. Where are they going to go? They need to be able to find you. That branding, that product branding, is so critically important that you’ve been able to include it in an ingredient way without being in your face.

Thank you.

I also think, and this is really something that I really want to touch on, is the amount of time it’s taken you for the attention to detail. You mentioned that it took you a lot of time to find that source that get it right. The attention to detail in growing a company, it so often falls to wayside. This is a classic problem. “I’m a startup and I don’t have a lot of money. We just won’t do that.”

In the end, sometimes that cascades and gives you problems long term and that you really didn’t establish your brand with enough deep roots. It allows you to do all the legwork and everything, and then someone to come in on top of you.

Getting yourself and doing this deep and making sure that the quality is there and making sure that you’ve refined all of this is really what is going to give you the longevity in the marketplace, be able to withstand that competition when it starts to come in.

Not only just because you’ve built yourself and been known, but actually, you’ve made all the mistakes. You’ve learned from them, you’ve built them out of the process. They’re going to make them again and when they make them, they don’t have that strength that you can rely on.

Right. We like to think it’s representative of the way we work and the way we treat our customers. It’s a small thing, but I think every play matter. It’s very important that whether it’s for the benefit of the company or the benefit of the customer, that everybody feels that they’re getting the best that they can get.

You mentioned to me, before we started talking, about how you’ve been doing some user experience upgrades to your website and everything. Tell us a little about that, because that’s all a part of this 3D print experience. Right now for people, it’s still novel. The experience of ordering is just as important as the product that you get at the end.

Absolutely. I think it’s really important, and a lot of times, overlooked that when you try to produce a custom product or when you try to let people take control, that buyer fatigue sets in relatively quickly. This idea that you can have unlimited options and unfortunately a lot of times people tend to offer just that. I think it’s important to really hone the types of features that you’re offering to somebody. Because at the end of the day, if a customer has a million options and they only look at five of them, there’s no real benefit to having a million options.

There’s a cost to complexity actually.

Absolutely. This is actually, in 3D printing industry, it’s said that complexity is free.

But it’s really not.

But it’s not.

Complexity is actually what’s hanging up the 3D print industry right now. Because it’s too complex. Because they think that … They, the industry, we’re a part of it too, but the starting point. I would say mainly the 3D print manufacturers and the software companies. I’m going to going to lump them as the ‘they’ I’m talking about right now. They have this mentality that it’s so flexible. You can do anything you want. That’s why 3D printing is so much better than everything else.

The problem with that is that you limit yourself to the audience that understands that and recognizes that, which is why we’re in a maker pro-sumer world right now. It’s the 3D print converted already, those that get that this complexity is important and they want it. But you can’t get to those that might want it, which you know because you were in that world of Etsy.

There’s a might want world in Etsy who don’t quite have the CAD skills, don’t have quite the complexity skills, but that doesn’t mean they don’t understand the power of something customized within reason and within limits. They get that. By creating a lower complexity play and a constrained design, you’ve allowed that.

At some point, when everybody is comfortable and everybody has the ability to 3D model anything they want and print it on demand and they’ve got a printer in their home, then we cans tart to unleash more and more complexity and allow people to take more control into their own hands.

But I think right now, when people go shopping for a USB drive, 90% of them are looking at capacity to price. Not everybody is looking for the fanciest or not even the highest quality. I think that it’s really important that we are able to offer something at a price point that people are willing to say, “That’s way cooler, it’s way more functional. I’d way rather have that because I can, because it’s an option like everything else I’m looking at.”

That’s really the world I want to get to. While I appreciate the fact that you’ve taken control of it and you put it on your own website and you have that there and you’re building up better user experience and putting in 3D design capabilities, customizable capabilities and viewing, that’s fantastic.

At the same time, I really just want to shop on Amazon and be able to just go, “I can choose that. That’s the most awesome gift. Great.” I want to integrate it into my shopping process as a consumer. When 3D printing is like that and it’s just another output material, it’s just another output method and it won’t matter, that’s when 3D printing has really tipped.

I think it’s coming. It’ll be here next year.

Someday? Next year?

Yeah.

2017 has been my projection too.

I think it’s important to really start to harness the “3D world” that we’re starting to move toward. Everything is becoming more 3D. Not just the graphics and videos that we are used to watching in video games or at the theater. I think even Apple activities has 3D icons for your successes now. I think that Apple has not necessarily been the leader in 3D.

The user experience that we want to offer should be just as you mentioned, people should be able to move seamlessly between the 2D and 3D world, especially at the rate technology is advancing. I think that the sooner we can blend our reality with our digital experiences, the more ubiquitous 3D printing and 3D modelling will become. I think this push for VR and webGL in the last few years has become a very popular way showing 3D content in your browser.

Just as these are starting to improve, we need to start blending this into our user experience. We’re starting to move from our current design experience into a 3D design experience that allows you to interact with your objects and allow just a little more immersiveness in that experience so that people can relate and people can really start to understand the power of customization and appreciate the improved value, the perceived value that really comes from custom, bespoke items.

That’s the key right there. I agree with you. There is a consumer awakening that has not really happened yet in that regard. It’s happening in small ways here and there, for sure. That’s really the awareness that needs to tip and it becomes the point where people don’t really think about that it’s 3D printed, therefore you can do this with that. It’s just that there will be a generational experience and expectation that people can have that kind of product but they can have it their way. Not just the way that they find on their Big Box store or on Amazon.

Something you said earlier, I really don’t think everybody is going to learn to do CAD and everybody is going to have a 3D printer. Just the way that everybody doesn’t sew their own clothes the way they did in maybe colonial times here in the US or maybe even earlier than that. Because it was a necessity. You didn’t have a store always to go walk into to buy clothes that have been made by somebody else.

I think there is a huge market that actually will eclipse the 3D converted of consumers that when they realize they can have a product just the way they want it, just by going online and ordering it that way and waiting a couple days to get it, will absolutely do it. That’s the exciting future as I see it.

Exactly. This is one thing that we’re trying to push now. Traditionally, online orders these days are very quickly. A couple of days, as you mentioned. Amazon has crazy delivery times. Same day. I ordered an external hard drive yesterday that showed up yesterday. I think that’s really amazing.

To be able to offer this similar experience is something that we pride ourselves in. It’s not next day but if you order something today, you’ll have it in 2 days or 3 days in the US. There’s no delay because of production or labor or shipping. Shipping is uncontrollable of course, but to some degree we can really offer a competitive priced product in a competitive time frame with no repercussion.

Not really on our end either. Some labor of course, we mentioned before. This is business and manufacturing, this is a very normal thing. It can grow and scale. We’ve started small and really got to a point where we can scale quickly and offer really awesome products with really no downside to ourselves or the consumer.

What I like about your business model is you’re a good example of how you don’t have to stock 5, 8, 10, 12 different colors of Tom USB drives or Tracy USB drives. Like those old license plates we used to have when we were kids. The bicycle license plates you’d find at the Five and Dime store. I don’t know if they call it that anymore. It puts my daughter to tears.

You have the rack of them and they would never have your name. They’d be stuck with a bunch of names that they couldn’t move. It’s really mass customization in a perfect way. You’re stacking the core product, the hard drives, the USB drives, whatever. Then it’s not really a product until you make the rest on demand. It’s truly the digital inventory.

Absolutely. That’s really what’s enabling us to move relatively quickly in this industry. We’re young but we’re also profitable. We’re producing new products regularly. We’re really able to show people that 3D printing isn’t just for rapid prototyping. It really can offer what you would want to buy anywhere else.

I think one thing that really separates what we’re doing is offering truly functional products. I think you have to need something to really go out and search for it today. Even on the internet, as easy it is to find things. I think this is something that is going to start to be more prominent. I’m really excited for it.

As are we. I’m excited for what you’re doing. I agree with you 100% with what you said there in what you’re doing and why. It’s an end use product. We’ve had some other interviews, especially I guess within the last month even, where other companies that still are focused and 3D printing as a rapid prototyping solution as their primary business model. There’s nothing wrong with that.

To me, it is the future but it’s also the past. That will always be there because people will traditionally manufacture products and need to rapid prototype them. The opportunities that 3D printing provides to the market for unique end use product is what really gets me excited. That’s the opportunity that we saw that got us so excited that we started this podcast because we weren’t moving fast enough.

Chris, is there anything else besides heading to your website and buying some of these cool 3D print USB drives? You also have hard drives, external hard drives and picture frames. You have a bunch of products there. Is there anything else that we can do as an industry to help your company grow?

I think we just need to continue showing people that you can always do it better. You can always do it smarter and more efficient. I think that it’s important as the industry grows that people grow with it. I think that solutions are presenting themselves and will continue to present themselves to really enable people to start taking advantage of some of these really neat technologies, like 3D printing.

3D scanning is becoming very popular in the public eye now and allowing people to do some really amazing things. I think it’s the kind of thing that will grow on its own. I think any help we can give it is great. But I think that this is the kind of thing that will revolutionize the world in many ways, many ways. I don’t think I necessarily requires anybody to do anything more.

Just be along the ride to support. Thanks so much, Chris.

Thank you so much for taking some time with me.

Consumer Level 3D Printing with Chris Campbell of FormURLife – Final Thoughts

That interview on consumer level 3D printing, when you think about this company, they have a very small product line in terms of the types of different things you can buy, which I think is really smart. Even with that small offering of the kinds of products, there’s still, in many ways, such a wide variety of ways that you can order it. That’s part of what’s exciting about it. I’m excited about it because they’re doing it. They’re succeeding. He said they’re profitable. I take him at his word on that. It’s what we want to see. I’m so excited about it.

We got ahead of ourselves before the interview, keep going on and talking about it. The entire time through the interview and even until right now. I may have to remove this thing from my desk so that I just stop holding it my hand and toying with it and playing with it. Just use it for its intended purpose.

There’s something about the design of the product and the execution that is absolutely top notch. It’s got consumer quality level. It’s got consumer quality 3D printing from its output, but it’s got it in the design as well. You want consumer design level. It has to have a match. All those things have to connect. They haven’t sacrificed anything in this design for 3D printing it. They haven’t sacrificed the visual design. They haven’t sacrificed color. They haven’t sacrificed fit and finish and function.

This is why, in case any of you other companies out there that have a product and you’re thinking about maybe either wanting a review of it or you’re thinking about, “Maybe I should write in to Tom and Tracy and get on their show.” This is why you actually send us a product. It’s not that I want a free product. In fact, most of the time people will send us a product, when we’re done with it we’ll send it back. Or if we want it, we’ll buy it.

These are very inexpensive but they sent them to us. They have our names on them and they’re customized so we’re going to keep it. The reason you send us a product is I would have never known from the photos on their website that they have had these USB drives made specifically for them and they have their ingredient logo, FormURLife, on it. I think that’s incredibly important and a really good lesson for any business.

Somebody sees this procedure and they say “Where’d you get that?” “Some website.” People aren’t always going to remember the website name. It’s right there on the product. It’s unobtrusive. In fact, if you’re older, you might need reading glasses in order to really make it out. But it’s there.

Also, I just think that is so critically important. So few products really think about the importance of those review models to go out. When it goes out, I need the experience of the whole box. It came in a little kind of tube. Their packaging was very cool also. We know because we actually had a product back in the late 90s that was packages very similarly. It’s like a plastic tube with a little cap in it.

We know how inexpensive it is. You don’t have to buy them in extreme high quantities. You can do what you need to do and keep your cost down on that and then put your money into the design of the product and how it’s going in. That’s exactly what they did.

It’s a good experience too though. You’re receiving it in something. It just didn’t come loose. It just didn’t come in a pat and pack. It wasn’t wrapped in tissue. It didn’t come in just that bubble mail or by itself or a blister pack where it just cheapens the value of it. That would have been too costly anyway for something that’s customizable.

All in all, because we got that experience of it, that it gives an ability to dive deeper and to really think and take more seriously your products and your companies. Chris and Mary and their team, they’re really smart in how they’ve approached all this and I’m really impressed with them.

I’m even more excited about, you started to mention it at the beginning of our post here, that you were talking about them having a very limited product line. I want to talk about that really briefly because from a business model standpoint, it is the smartest thing that they could have done. It’s probably the reason why they are in revenue and they are profitable right now.

We get too excited about all the things we can do but we don’t really think about what we should do in a business model. The reality is we should get our product, our core product and our core strategy, and get it making money and doing what it’s supposed to do before we start exploding our complexity and our systems.

Although it’s critically important once you launch that first product and it starts succeeding, that you have product number two to come in on top of it prior to product number one maybe falling off. Because every product starts, does really well, it lives. Then it plateaus and it dies. No product lasts forever.

You have to have your systems in place. If you have to build that all the way with one product, build that all way with one product and recognize, as soon as that system is in place and the product itself has proven itself in a limited way in the market, that’s the time to come in with your second.

To just blowing that up into too many options and too many choices, that is a way to kill your company fast to be honest with you. We’ve seen it happen way too much. You spread yourself too thin. There’s lots of other examples of that, not in the 3D printing industry necessarily.

One of the shows that we like when it’s on is Restaurant Impossible. What does Rob Irvine do? Every time he goes into a restaurant, one of the first things he does is cuts that menu down. Sometimes in a quarter of the size that it was. Because there’s an operational efficiency level that you’re not understanding. That complexity itself has a high cost.

There is a high cost of complexity to a business model, especially a business model that doesn’t have a large team and a large set of capital resources. You have to have it sized right for your team and what you have. They’ve really done that here. That’s why they’re in revenue. Good for them. Very impressive and exciting. Surprisingly so.

Some of these interviews, I often say that I get surprised when I’m in there. At a relatively finite product line, I think, “Are we going to have enough to talk about here for a long podcast?” The reality is, there was so much of interest to talk about. The complete execution from start to finish of the product and the packaging and every aspect, it’s such a great complete example.

I want to really make sure that this came across to you guys. This is an industrial printer. This is not an FFF desktop printer that they’re doing it on. It’s a commercial printer. They’ve utilized it in a really smart way and they’ve done a lot of things to refine it and get the color better, to get the finished feeling better. They’ve done a lot of really smart things to make it transcend the printer that they have and that it is. I think transcend also what the original intent of the printer was, which was for prototype parts.

When this printer technology was conceived, it was not about delivering end consumer product at a quality level that would be acceptable. It was about trying to mimic, as close as they could, what a consumer level product could look and feel like. They’re actually doing what we aspire to do, and that is make end use consumer product with 3D printing. Fantastic, well done.

Important Links

• FormURLife
• 3D Print Promotional Products Inspiration
• Mixed Emotions about 3D Print Sales

Episode Sponsor

• MakerBot – Ideas in the Making

About Chris Campbell

Chris’s passions for technology, design and innovation are what drive his curiosity and desire for knowledge. A master of 3D Scanning and 3D Printing technologies and fluent in 5 programming languages, he has more than a decade of experience working as an industry professional utilizing skills in 3D Modeling & animation, video editing, compositing and VFX for film. Working with companies such as 3D Systems, Autodesk, Disney and NASA (to name a few) have afforded Chris a hugely diverse and in-depth knowledge base from which to draw upon. Chris has more than 25 published works in the Entertainment, Military, Biomedical, and space industries and holds three IDEA Awards, receiving ‘Gold’, ‘Responsibility’ and ‘Best in Show’ awards for his works with Scott Summit in Biomedical Engineering and Prosthetics. His work can be found today on display at the prestigious Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York and he has also had the honor to have had his work on display at the Museum of Design and Architecture in Chicago and the Autodesk Gallery in San Francisco. Eternally inquisitive, dedicated and imaginative, Chris is more passionate than ever to be taking the helm of FormURLife, his first 3D printing company.

Listen | Download | View

Hear the episode of the WTFFF?! Podcast by using the player above OR click to download any episode.

Help Us Help You!

Have some feedback? Leave a comment below. We will read and respond

Please also review us on iTunes and share via the social media of your choice.

• Here’s How »

• 3DStartpoint.com
• 3D Startpoint Facebook
• 3D Startpoint LinkedIn
• Hazz Design Twitter
• 3D Startpoint YouTube