Forming the Digital Supply Chain with Victoria May of Digital Forming

London software house, Digital Forming, has really dialed in the digital supply chain process. We first heard of them as part of the Lowe’s Innovation Lab Bespoke project and could not wait to have them on the podcast to talk about their online preview and customization tool in relation to 3D printing. They provide more than just customization tools and services for companies of any size, large or small, and this is one of the killer apps that integrate design and retail with 3D printing.

I would call this a follow-up episode to one that we did a little while ago. Episode number 322, which was about the Lowe’s Innovation Lab and all the companies that surrounded it. This was the company that, when we were doing the first series of interviews, I couldn’t wait to talk to. I was disappointed we weren’t able to organize them. It was already a lengthy enough episode. We had three interviews in one episode, which was a record for us. I think four might have been a little too much. This one, I think, deserved its own interview.

The company is Digital Forming. We mentioned them in that previous podcast about the Lowe’s Innovation Lab. This is the way that you can customize some of the 3D print products that are available in that test store, in that charter store, for lack of a better word. Bespoke designs, it’s at Lowe’s.

We were really fascinated by that software interface, that plugin interface because it was so seamless. It was so well done and it had really great constraints that were really easy to manipulate. It seemed highly capable and it just worked really well. We wondered, “How difficult is that?” We kept hearing from each of the different people we interviewed about Digital Forming. We were like, “We need to talk to this company and see what they’re all about.” We reached out to them and we have on the show today, Business Development Manager, Victoria May.

A little bit about Digital Forming, it’s a London software house. They have created this customization platform, but it’s a lot more than that as we found out in the interview. I just want to jump into the interview with Victoria and go through that. The way she describes it, it has so much depth that you don’t realize from just this company description. Let’s go to the interview, which is sponsored by MakerBot, and then we’ll talk about it more on the other side.

Listen to the podcast here:

Forming the Digital Supply Chain with Victoria May of Digital Forming

Thanks so much for joining us, Victoria. We are really excited to talk a little bit more about Digital Forming and what you guys have done for both the Lowes Innovation Lab and what you’re doing for 3D printing and the digital supply chain in general.

Yeah, sounds very good. That’s what we do.

Let’s talk a little bit about, just start back at the beginning. You’re a London software house. What year did you guys start?

Digital Forming started back in 2012. It’s been going for about four years now, working on our technology. The last year or so is when we started these bigger projects with things at Lowe’s.

I read your bio. It says that you started as a product designer, a product designer for software or a product designer of 3D print products?

I started as a product designer for 3D printed products. When I started, we had a project with a company called Argos, who’s over here in the UK. I was designing some jewelry for 3D print. It was a jewelry project. I somehow stumbled away from the product design side and more into managing the projects and eventually what I do now.

Which is Business Development Manager. That’s fantastic. I want to table that and come back to it because our favorite subject to talk about is project design in 3D printing. We’ll table that, we’ll come back to it. I definitely want to touch on that. Let’s talk a little bit about why the customization and making it accessible has really helped companies like Lowe’s make their product sales function better.

I think the main thing is that we’re living in a very digital age and customers are already starting to expect to be able to customize products. You see it more and more. If you go buying trainers, you’ve got Nike ID now. It’s one of the biggest mass customization platforms that any of us have probably seen so far. Taking it on the 3D side with what Digital Forming does, we’re taking a leaf out of that book by using the 3D printing as the manufacturing. It opens up a lot more doors.

Companies like Lowe’s can offer all sorts of different products. On the site, there’s 3D printed vases, photo frames, all sorts of things really, door knobs. We’re just using the technology in a great way to facilitate the users to be able to customize them how they want, the different colors they want, adding text and that kind of thing. I think it’s just a really great way for companies like Lowe’s to engage their consumers in a new way.

What I think is the most interesting and surprising to me, because we’ve looked at a lot of these software interfaces overtime and other ways. We too believe that to democratize the 3D print technology, we have to make it simpler.

Your software interface, the way that it works as a plugin … A plugin, I assume that’s the right term for it but I’m not a software person. The way that it works, it’s so seamless. I don’t know. You don’t even feel like you’re entering something different. You just feel like, all of a sudden, “Of course I can control the color. Of course I can control the texture.”

For sure. That’s something that we’ve really worked hard over the years to make sure that that’s how the customer feels. Many people who offer similar sorts of things tend to be a pop up window and that kind of thing, whereas we’ve worked really hard to integrate fully into whatever kind of website we’re working with to make sure that the experience is as seamless as possible. You don’t really realize you’re doing something different until you’ve realized that there’s a 3D object spinning around in front of you on the screen.

I know. Some of it also is the fact that you guys seem to be popping from what is the photographs of the products right into a rendering that doesn’t really even quite look like a rendering. It still looks very photo realistic. You don’t even realize you’re switching over from one to the other. I think that’s a nice feature.

Our software developers will be very glad to hear you say that.

Good. What is Digital Forming’s plan? Where are you guys going with this?

That’s a good question. Basically, Digital Forming’s plan is to reach out to other brands and retailers, like Lowe’s. We’re talking to lots of similar companies like that. Also, within the 3D print field of what we’re doing, we’re talking to 3D manufacturing bureaus. We have offering where we can help them have people uploading STLs and digitalizing them through our system and pricing them through our system.

We’re hoping to branch out into medical because we see that as a really great way to use our software for something that people struggle with everyday. Having things like prosthetics, you see a lot of 3D printed prosthetics. The whole point of them being 3D printed is because you can get them to fit exactly to you. By using our technology to make those adjustments and tweaks to something we see as a great market for us. We’re just going out there and seeing what else we can do with our software.

Victoria, I have a question about your business model. Can you share with us what is it that you’re doing with the retailers? Are you actually selling software to them? Are you licensing software? Or are you operating on a model of, like in Lowe’s case, on a revenue share based on the products sold? I’m not asking you to tell us exactly what you’re paid, just what is the business model you’re engaged in there.

It’s varied; slightly dependent on the client we’re working with. Generally, our business model is, we’re a software as a service type form. The way we do our business model is we have standard setup fee that we charge. I say standard, but it depends again on the level of integration.

For example, when you look at the Lowe’s site and you say how seamless and everything it feels. That’s because we’ve fully integrated with the whole eCommerce platform and everything. When you’re buying a product and it goes through to the cart, we’re still working that. That’s still us making sure that all of that information goes through fully all the way out to the checkout process.

We have set up fees to enable our guys to make sure that all of that is done seamlessly. We have a monthly fee which covers costs like the rendering and the general hardware that goes on in the background to sustain this kind of site. We have a rev share on top of that most of the time, but again that really depends. That’s generally how we work.

That’s great. Thank you so much for sharing that with us. I think there’s a lot of the 3D print industry that we keep talking to that are still struggling with how their business model should be working in the industry. I agree with that model for you guys. I think that that really makes a lot of sense.

Really, where we’ve seen things fall apart … We were really thrilled to see the Lowe’s integration with you guys, with the product companies and everything coming together. But it’s still a bit disappointing that it’s a separated entity. In our mind, in order for the 3D printing market to really become mainstream, for it to tip, they need to be integrated into normal shopper experience.

Just on the regular Lowe’s program so that you can have a 3D print product right up next to a regularly sold product and let the customization sell that product individually and not have to be, “I have to log in to a separate site to buy something 3D printed.” That’s not logical for most consumers. They don’t know to accept that yet.

I totally agree with you. I think that a lot of the reasons usually with the retailers is just not knowing how customers are going to react. They do things like we’ve got here with Lowe’s where they do something a bit separate and see how it goes and then move on to the next level where they’d eventually integrate into the main system.

I think it’s partly that and also partly just the technicality from a big retailer point of view to integrate something different into the main site can sometimes be daunting. We have a smaller client in the UK who sells all sorts of home wares and different goods. He actually has what you just described. He has this site, if you want a normal site. Within that, there’s a customization tab.

You go on that and it shows the product that we’ve offered him with the customization all on the same site. You can buy a coffee table as well as a 3D printed phone case in the same check out process. It will go through as normal. The STL file produced from the custom order just obviously goes down a different route for the digtial supply chain.

The way we see trying to integrate it more into mainstream is by starting to use our tools more for people, offering them to do marketing campaigns. Getting a bit more mainstream and using social and that kind of thing to get a bit more a buzz about something. We hope that that convinces people that this can go mainstream and this can be put on normal sites and people can handle the change that they see.

It’s becoming more common. Like I said, you have the Nike ID. People aren’t scared of customizing their trainers. You have companies like RayBan where you can customize your glasses, so why not take it to the next level and have the 3D customization in a digital supply chain. I think it’s just a matter of time really until we see more of that.

Also, probably when we see the material costs come down. Sometimes, in some cases, depending on the materials, the number of days it takes to receive the item. I think we’ll certainly see a lot more take up from being integrated into mainstream systems.

I agree. I think that that’s happening though, the idea of the digital supply chain. I love the idea that you’re talking about that. It’s just on the backend. It just goes down a different channel right straight into that supply chain.

Is the rendering that is done, like in the example of Lowe’s website, is all that happening on their website? Or is there a part of that that’s happening on your company’s server, somewhere?

Exactly. One of our points that we like to get across with our system is that we have a fully secure rendering system. Sometimes, you guys may have spoken about it in the past, when companies are using the technology called WebGL to view the 3D file, which means that the files aren’t necessarily secure.

If you’ve got a little bit of know how, you can right click on the image you’re seeing and you can actually take that STL or OBJ file, whatever it might be, and not have to go through the processes of buying or downloading that file the correct way.

What we do is, as you say, we have our rendering on our service. When you’re actually interacting with products on Lowe’s, although it looks like you’re seeing the item in complete 3D and it’s exactly what you think it would be, you’re actually just seeing really really fast images coming across. All of the rendering is happening securely on our servers. There’s no way that anyone could ever access the STL files.

That’s fantastic. I’m really glad to hear that. Let’s shift gears a little bit and talk about that product design side of things. One of the things that Tom and I talk about here a lot, because we have a product design background. We’ve never sold a design into the industry on purpose. We’ve held out. Although we have given away one of our designs in the last year. That’s just a new thing for us.

The main reason is because we think that in a way, we’re looking at a system by which the product design is not yet valued. Until the product designers are of value and the product designs themselves are valued enough to be a part of the revenue share process in a significant way, then we aren’t ready to participate in it. That’s the choice that we’ve made here.

Because in a digital supply chain, in a digital on demand product world, that design is it. To expect that to be something that’s crowd sourced means you get bad product design at the end of the day. You get someone who maybe doesn’t have the experience of making safe consumer products or will take the time, because you aren’t making money until it starts selling and out there, won’t take the time to really test the design files and do all the things, like or instance, 3DShook took the time to do.

That’s really where we’re seeing it’s constraining the industry in general. I’m very curious what your view point as a product designer is.

I get what you’re saying, especially with the 3D printing and the amount of different files that you can download for free online. You certainly see a lot where perhaps the person designing doesn’t necessarily put too much thought into whether they’re actually printable. I know that from working in a 3D print bureau in my past. You get a little part that aren’t unprintable and people just don’t understand why and you’ve got to go through all this process.

I think that it, in a way, starts to devalue the designers and the knowledge they have. To design for 3D printing and all the different processes that there are, it’s a lot of knowledge that you have to have. I think that with our platform, we hope to engage product designers to be able to show their designs at our parameters so that you can do a bit of tweaking. Your customers can come along and change things here and there. But only within the parameters that the designer feels is right.

Whether it’d be for aesthetic reasons or something that doesn’t fit the brand or mainly for printing reasons. The designer still has that control and I guess they want to offer that to customers and people interacting with their products. I think it’s an interesting topic. You certainly do see from the amount of free files that you can access, you can certainly see what you’re saying there with some of them maybe don’t have as much value as they should have.

It’s interesting, as you were answering that last question, it brought up another one in my mind. Which is when your company, your software, is it actually manipulating STL files? Did 3DShook deliver to you STL files to manipulate? Or was it some other kind of file format?

They provide us with STL files. I guess to answer that, I’ll take a step back and explain how we create these customizable products. What Digital Forming has spent so long developing over the years is not just online interaction that you see. We’ve also got our Digital Forming Studio, which is a desktop software, which is where designers create the customizable experiences.

When we get given an STL file, for example from 3DShook for this project, we can bring them into our software and then we can add the parameters that they allowed us to add in the software. Where you might see something simple like, let me go on the shop and have a look, something simple where there’s just some text, then within our software, we add our text tool.

We put on the area that we want the text to be and we add the constraints. It might be that you can only write up to 10 characters and these two types of fonts are available. That’s all set up actually in our software.

Likewise if you go on something like the bloom vase on the personalization section of the site. That one’s got a lot of customization. That’s basically created by us bringing in multiple STLs into the Digital Forming Studio and morphing between them.

We’re actually editing those STL files within the studio. We apply the constraints and we then basically set up the interface and upload it onto the platform. That’s where all the magic happens and it turns into an online customizer and the rendering becomes secure and all of those things happen.

Wow. Is that Digital Forming Studio that’s a desktop software that you all developed, is that something you only do internally or can a company purchase that software and do their own customization that then you serve for them to their website?

It can work either way, really. It just depends on the company we’re working with, whether they’ve got a design team that want to get involved or whether it’s something where they’d rather we take on the role and use our design team in house to create those customizers.

Obviously in the case of Lowe’s, we set up the customizers. We have other clients where they set up the systems themselves and they’ve used the Digital Forming Studio, obviously with our help. We just consult them when they need. It can really work either way.

The software can be downloaded as a trial for anyone to use. We go from there. It’s very simple to use. The basic tools where you can switch between geometries, adding text, you can pick up in just a day. When it comes to morphing and shape manipulation, then it takes a little bit more time to get used to, but it really just depends on your 3D knowledge before opening the Digital Forming Studio.

I love that. I love that you guys can create control for the designers because there’s a lot of things where the detail drops off if you make something too large or too small. You get into that situation where it still will print, but it’s not a good design at that stage. I like that then you give that control to person who understands the design best, or that you can.

It’s just adding the parameters around what you, as the designer, feel will look best. We use the example of a teapot with a spout and a handle. I could allow the customer to extend the spout of that teapot to be a foot long, but they’d no longer be able to pour a cup of tea with it. It’s where you stop and apply either common sense or a design eye or something.

Because the people interacting with this, 3D, it’s usually a new concept. If you gave them too much freedom, they would end up with something that’s not printable or not necessarily seen as that desirable. By the designer being allowed to apply those areas of constraints and letting everything happen within a nice, easy to use interface, I think it really changes things on the customization part.

Just what you said there, easy to use interface. I want to paint a mental picture of that for our listeners. We’ve, actually in the past, done some discussion on a past podcast about creating designs for 3D printing by using code instead of a traditional CAD software.

There are others, like on Thingiverse, only because it’s the biggest thought repository out there, they have a customizer that you can learn to use but you have to become a computer coder to use that. To use the constraint side of it and the customizing capabilities of it. From what you’re saying, it sounds like your software is much more user friendly and you don’t have to be a computer coder to use it. Is that correct?

Yes, exactly. That’s exactly the theory. Basically, anyone can sit down in front of our Digital Forming Studio and have access to a few 3D files. We have tutorials online, for example. You can sit down with the first tutorial and you can go through it no matter what your level of CAD experience. It’s a simple customizer. You create something with just a few iterations. Still, to get to grips with that at first, it literally is within an hour you’d have created your first customizer.

The idea for us within that studio is that you, as a designer or someone who’s in charge of creating the products and creating the parameters around them, you can set it up. It’s in a nice easy to use interface. You then apply the constraints. Obviously, it’s hard to visualize on the podcast, but you basically can drag and drop the sliders that the end user will up seeing. You drag and drop them onto your interface, you apply parameters.

For example, you might see something like a slider on the site for Lowe’s where they can change the sizes, the neck of a vase or something like that. In the software, that goes from X direction to Z direction or length. We set that within that. You then can upload that to our cloud and interface is done. All of the work is done.

The only that needs to be done on our side is then to put it in the space where you see the nice final uses in space. Really, there’s no need for anyone or any of our clients to ever need to know the coding and scripting and all this kind of thing. The platform is so easy to apply all of those features without that knowledge on a customer level.

I think that is really important for our audience to understand, and actually for me to understand because I didn’t understand that before this discussion. I think that that really makes it much more practical and attainable for companies who are creating digital on demand products, to be able to offer these advanced features of customization and personalization that they might have thought in order to do it, it would take a lot more investment in coding to do it.

I think it also brings a lot more, because we didn’t quite touch on that but we mentioned it, that you’re also bringing a lot more confidence and security into the safety of products, into that digital supply chain. Because when we put constraints in, it’s not just design and visual constraints. You’re also putting constraints, like in your example of that teapot spout, you could be making it to the point at which it would break, it would crack or the minute hot water hit it, it would just leak or something. You could be setting constraints in order to make it much safer or functional as well.

I love the idea of being able to have that much control over a design. To me, really, now, the name of your company, Digital Forming, makes so much more sense in my mind than it did initially. Now, it makes complete sense.

Yeah, we are digitally forming.

You are digitally forming. Exactly. You mentioned you have a team of people. How big is Digital Forming as a company?

We have twelve of us that sit full time in the office and a few other working out of the office. We’re a medium sized team. We’ve expanded quite a lot over the last year. We’re planning on expanding more by the end of this year to make the team a lot bigger. We’ve got a design team, obviously the software guys who are core to the tech. We’ve then got web developers and then the people like me, commercial people in marketing, operations and business development.

Obviously, Lowe’s is a very big multibillion dollar corporation. They could afford to hire anybody. Would you say that your company services are also attainable by smaller companies? Do you have programs that will fit for them too?

Absolutely. We’re working on basically making sure we have a suite of various, I guess plug ins is the easiest word, into various types of websites so that we can offer similar solution to more medium sized businesses as well as these big sized, like Lowe’s. We’re working our way to make sure that we can cover most people who want to offer customization.

That’s fantastic. I see your company as really, not only being in business for profit but actually doing a great service to the whole industry and making the commerce of digital on demand products more user friendly and realistic. I’m really impressed.

Thank you.

Victoria, thank you so much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. I can tell you right now that we are salivating over the idea of actually testing it out. I can bet there will be a review following this interview as well.

Sounds great.

Forming the Digital Supply Chain with Victoria May of Digital Forming – Final Thoughts

The reason I love doing this podcast is because I think a lot of times, I get surprised. We have somebody in mind to interview and we think we know what it’s going to be about or we have an idea of where it’s probably going to go. I think probably half the time, we get really surprised by something. This was one of those times for me.

To realize that this is not just a service that Digital Forming provides. It’s not just, if you want to be able to customize something, you hire them to make it happen. There’s a lot more to it. They have this whole software ability. You can hire them to do it if you want, but you can also do a lot of it yourself. That this is attainable for a smaller company as well as a big company, that’s so exciting to me.

I think that we’ve been looking for a long time, and we talked about it all the time from the very beginning, that 3D printing needs its killer app. This is, I’m not saying it’s the only killer app, it’s one of them. I think it’s a killer app. Because if we don’t have that, if Digital Forming didn’t create this integration process, both integrating it on the design side, the digital supply chain side, so making sure that the on demand portion of the supply chain works seamlessly, and also integrating into just about any retail platform.

Because those retail platforms are very locked, which is why Bespoke Designs, why the Lowe’s program had to separate itself. Trying to integrate that into an existing system creates all sorts of havoc and problems. The fact that they’ve developed this constant full service program but yet allowing access at all different levels of price structure or company size, that’s amazing.

Also, for someone, a company or an individual, to be able to help themselves to a degree as well. We talk about this all the time. Certainly, we’ve started many businesses. We understand the reality sometimes of boot strapping it. You don’t always have the budget to do something like what Digital Forming is doing. That to me, would be seen as a nice to have. Not as a absolutely need to have to launch your product or to start selling products online.

There’s a reason why I haven’t done a customization of products. I’m a pretty technical guy. I’ve got 20 plus years of CAD experience, 29. I have a bit of experience in CAD. I’m a pretty technical guy. But I really have not wanted to get involved in trying to figure out how to code customization of objects the way that Thingiverse and certain other programs out there have available with customizers.

I want to touch on that really quickly because I just think that not everybody has thought that all the way through. For instance, every year, we create our 3D print angel design. This year, we’re working a new one, a revision. We come out with a new theme for its message that it is. Harmony was last year. The very first year was peace. We’ve done peace and harmony. I think we did rejoice also. Someone asked us to do rejoice.

That’s the thing. The complexity of being able to offer any message in there or any message within a certain level of constraints, because we have basically anything with five to seven letters really works well. It needs to be an odd number. It looks better. It’s balanced in the design. There’s some constraints there. We would basically say we’ll do this sub set of names. We gave a list out that people could choose from.

The complexity of being able to offer anything or being able to allow these things or being able for someone to see why six letters doesn’t look good. That in and of itself is just too much to take on because you actually have to physically create each one to demonstrate it. Now, having already put hundreds of hours into the design of the angel and this year’s message or whatever that might be, we don’t have to do that going forward. People would have freedom to be able to do some of that themselves? I think that gives our ability to deliver that customize solution. It give sit legs. It gives it a possibility.

I think that you could also do perhaps two rows of texts. You could say “the something family” or “Hazzard’s Christmas 2016” whatever. You could integrate a couple different rows of it into there if you wanted to. Using this kind of a tool, making it really easy. It’s not just about executing the design with all the letters. Certainly, we could do that ourselves.

But every one that’s slightly different, all the labor involved on a one off basis of somebody who’s going to want to order half a dozen of them for their family, it’s just too much to do. If you can set this up with their software and then the consumer can also instantly visualize what that would look like before they decide to buy, there’s so many benefits to that.

Let’s actually walk through that work load just so that people can really understand it. Let’s say we took your angel, the angel design, and we said, “I want to write joy on there.” You physically have to go in, even though you may have already created the letters for joy or created the whole alphabet. But you have to drag, drop, reform, reposition, do all of that, and then re-output an STL file. We’ve talked about 3D printing fonts before.

This is a good exercise. Let’s talk about the complexity of that. On that particular design, those letters are not just on a flat surface. They’re actually radial around it because there’s not a flat surface on this design. It’s actually not just radial. It’s conic. This angel skirt is a cone shape. All of those letters are not just changed around the circumference around this, for the angle that they’re sitting at. But they’re also tipped back at a proper angle to be at the cone shape of the skirt, the general form.

You have to place letters and you have to rotate them into the right orientation. It’s not a quick thing to do. To do it once a season, like we’ve been doing it, for one new overall message, like harmony or peace, that’s one thing. We print out a hundred of them and then we give them out as gifts. That’s okay.

But to do a one off for a customer, the labor involved in that, I could not possibly charge enough money for 3D printing this thing, which takes all of $2 worth of plastic and maybe electricity for the 3D printer to print it out. I’d have to charge over $100 an angel in order to make it worth the time to do it old way.

It’s the STL, the file to go to print, the file to be sliced, that that being part of that digital supply chain and on demand and just on the fly happening automatically, that’s the extreme value. That’s the killer app part of this that I don’t think most people realize until you’re on that other end, logistically trying to figure out how to deliver this.

That to me, is really what they’ve done that’s so amazing. I think that just from a designer’s perspective, just looking at how seamless it is, how easy to use it is, they certainly made it something that you don’t have to have a lot of design skill. You don’t have to have a lot of visualization skill. You certainly don’t have to have any coding experience. To be able to use, integrate, understand, that is just amazing to me.

I’m surprised that we haven’t heard more about them before this. They’ve been around for four years. They’ve been doing some of these bigger projects for the last year. It’s really just because of Hector Berrebi bringing the knowledge of this program at Lowe’s that we learned about them, quite by accident or I guess randomly I would say.

We would have eventually found out, even if Hector didn’t mentioned it. I’m so glad he did and talked about how they were integrating with and working with them, which was so great. We would have noticed because on that Bespoke Design site, they gave them a Digital Forming brand when you pop up the button. They give credit for doing that. There’s an ingredient brand on the site, which is really wonderful. It’s like, “Powered by Digital Forming.” Which it is, it is powered by because you’re actually on their servers doing all that.

That’s the next part of it that is really killer app-ish. If that’s a word. It’s not. We just made it, we just used it. It’s killer app-ish. The killer app-ish part is the fact that they’ve given value to the design side. To the fact that I don’t want to expose our STL files, expose that in the process and make them unsecure. That, regarding that proprietary-ness of IP, does us a tremendous amount of value for both the retailer who’s selling these products but also for the designer who created them. Being able to preserve that security is of tremendous importance.

I think realistically, and I don’t know that we’re going to do this, but we realistically could. We have to understand the details and the economics of it as a business, which we don’t understand yet, but we will. We could take the angel, for instance, and put it on our website with this customizer and then we could have a flat rate we’re charging people to print per angel if they want to print ornaments and give them out as gifts or whatever.

Then we can allow them to customize it any which way. It doesn’t necessarily have to change the price. They could order and customize it all and it would be all online, interactive. Wouldn’t involve any labor. All we would do is get an order and it must output … Obviously, we didn’t ask I guess some of the details of that of Victoria. It must output a revised STL file at the end of the day.

She did say that, she did mention that. It sends it straight into the digital supply chain. It would send it and so if it needed to go one path or another. In this case, at Lowe’s, they’re going straight into Voodoo Manufacturing with the final design file. Actually, that’s who I would use for printing our things too. That’s who we’d call. We’ve already vetted them and they’re a great supplier.

I think there’s still enough time to do that for the holidays. We want to throw this out to you guys, our listeners here, and say, in the next week tweet us, Facebook us. Go anywhere @3DStartPoint or go to the website 3DStartPoint.com and send us an email or send us a message, comment in this blog post for this episode.

Let us know, do you guys want us to make that angel available for sale for the holidays and do you want to customize it? That’s a great question. I’d appreciate the opinion of our audience over that. If you guys would like us to do that, we’ll find a way to make that happen.

It’s time to do another event. This wouldn’t be a download because we’re talking about people buying a print on demand, so it’ll be a little different. I think it’s time to do something else with a product that’s available for our audience. You guys let us know. If you’re interested in it, we’ll find a way to make that happen. We are so glad to be serving you. Gosh, I keep looking at it. We’ve gotten to so many episode numbers. This is just amazing to reach this number of episodes and still feel as excited. Like you said, something is always surprising us every time. It’s all because of you. We really appreciate it.

Make sure to keep reaching out to us and let us know what you want to hear so you guys are as engaged and excited as we are. Anywhere on social media @3DStartPoint and 3DStartPoint.com.

Important Links

• Digital Forming
• Lowe’s Bespoke Designs
• Retail 3D Print on Demand is Here!

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About Victoria May

With 7 years’ experience in 3D Printing, Design & Sales Victoria has a wealth of knowledge on how to approach customisation and bring it to the forefront of your business. Studying Product Design at University and spending a year working within a 3D Printing Bureau, Victoria is able to advise companies on what will and won’t work for there business both with 3D Printing and Customisation.

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