Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Maker Faire 2013 3D Printing Stage: Why 3D Printing, Why Not Traditional Manufacturing”.
Let’S start with a video, and then i will speak hi, I’m Susan and i’m the founder of a new company called behold. I graduated from MIT and stanford and spent most of my career in product marketing at Google. 3D printing is going to change our future up until now have been in an industrial age of consumer products where products are largely manufactured overseas. Product cycle times can be up to six months.
Access to manufacturing has been available only to large companies and those with enough capital and large minimum orders create inefficiencies as the waste in the process. When breakthrough technology happens, and here the breakthrough technology is 3d printing, we can start to shift to a modern, more adaptable from consumer. This means better more innovative products and new world independent designers and brands more manufacturing at home and less waste for our planet. We are entering a new era of what we like to call responsive product design where, from concept to production, there are only a few simple steps. An innovation can happen much more quickly with direct feedback from consumers. We invite you to join us in building this new vans. The cross creative manufacturing in bring you be home, hi everyone.
My name is Susan, as you solve them in the video I’m a founder of behold, we’re a new company in 3d printed consumer products and we’re one of the makers here in the 3d printer village, the top today is going to be focused on 3d printing versus Traditional manufacturing, so my background is a mix of tech and manufacturing. I’Ve worked for seven years in product marketing at Google and I also have worked at a consumer apparel company where I was directly responsible for relationships with our suppliers. The manufacturers for product design, as well as online sales, and so why am I starting a company in 3d printing whenever, for my most recent experience, whenever I ran into shortcomings, I thought what if we could just 3d print all of this, and so the more I Looked into it, the more I was pulled in and 3d is really at a stage. Now too, it’s in a really boom stage right now and I’m really excited to be a part of it. First, I want to talk about quality control.
I think most of you know that when you work with developing countries as manufacturers, this is a problem I’m going to be comparing manufacturing today with 3d printing in the future, just to put them on more equal ground and so quality control. When you have labor involved, there are a lot of inconsistencies and it is difficult to have things be the way you want them to be, which is why there is a need for quality control when 3d printing is much better, it is going to be a repeatable Process what you see when your prototype is going to be what you get and it will be continued to be produced from the same machine. Another point about quality control is that if you go to a manufacturing country and meat suppliers, you really need to have a strong relationship with these suppliers in order to count on them for the quality control, because otherwise what happens is it will arrive to you here In the US – and you will still need to do your own quality control and this kind of relationship can take years to build and it’s difficult for small makers like ourselves. Another big point is time to market. There is a very long delay whenever you do traditional manufacturing, so it is six months or more and in what happens with this kind of delay is that there is more uncertainty.
What are the hot products going to be six months from now? You can do your best forecast, but it’s still going to have a large amount of uncertainty which you’re probably not going to guess right, and so you have to manage around that. Another point here is that it hinders innovation. The reason for this is, you have a sales relationship with manufacturers and what most of you are going to try to do things that have been proven and they will. You know that the chances that it will work are pretty high, so you will just keep doing more of the same with slight differences.
New ideas won’t likely make it there, because there a certain degree of risk and those will be shut down earlier. So a smaller people, I believe we are willing to take the risk – and this can happen with 3d printing now, because your cost of failure are not so high, and so you can go, make a prototype, make it happen. If it fails, you make another prototype and make it happen again. This chart shows the timeline comparison of B holds company launched. If we had gone the traditional route versus 3d printing, really it would have been about nine months compared to our actual timeframe of three months. We started in april of this year and within three months we were able to launch by the end of july and so we’re brand new company.
This is our first time exhibited. My notes are flying away and what’s involved if we were to go through traditional manufacturing, the concept and prototype phases are about the same, but then you’ll have to add on fundraising and that takes a significant amount of time. Let’S say two months, then you have to go into production. These factories are not sitting idle waiting for your order. Ya got ta, you have to put yourself into the queue the things have to be produced and then shipped over here once it arrives.
You have inventory management, which is pretty significant, so you either, if you don’t have a fulfillment service to go with, you have to manage. What’S involved is storing this inventory, hiring staff and crew to manage doing fulfillment, and all of this is really a lot on a small company. So for us really we had the concept prototype and the inventory phase is really optional. We decide to do on a hybrid model where we want to keep some things in inventories so that when someone orders from us, you have a great shopping experience, because you receive it in a few days. If you have to wait a few weeks in order to receive your item, then there’s a little bit of lost momentum there, and so we want to keep that experience seamless and we just keep within what we can manage. We keep some inventory. This is one of our products which is being with being passed around right now, and you can see it is a double-walled espresso tumblr and it’s a new concept in ceramics. We really try to push the edge of what’s of what we can do in product design within what’s available in the latest materials in 3d, and so ceramics is one of the newest materials. I think many people don’t even know, and it really brings it to another level.
We now have products that can really feel like finished goods. This slide shows you that we went through 35 iterations of this product before we were happy with the final result and really with 3d printing. We can make these changes rapidly. No problem. We can make pretty precise changes if we were to make the prototype each time and build it from scratch. There’S gon na be things that, where we can, you didn’t get right. We have to do it over and when you’re doing 3d printing you can once you’ve, you know done the model, then it’s a machine, that’s building it.
So it frees up your time to focus on the idea is to focus on how else to make it better. So that’s really powerful as well. The point I want to make here in our designs, so we offer this in three different colors and its innovative designs, responsive to you. The responsive part is extremely important because it’s really now we’re in a world where the consumer product industry can be responsive to consume, to to all of you for internet and software, that’s already happened. So what happened there with internet making software releases much faster? It’S going to happen with consumer products, and so we really want to bring this to life and all of our designs are tested with users outside of our team.
To make sure that we’re you know there are things that we may not have thought of and there’s different contacts, and we bring all of that into back into the designs and we’re always coming up with new versions. We’Re able to come out with a new prototype. Every week it’s for the inventory control. Okay.
Now I just want to make a broad point about sustainability, because really there’s a lot of research being done in this area. It’S still unclear if 3d printing is clearly more green than traditional manufacturing. It depends on so many things. It depends on which type of material it depends on how much energy this machine is actually using, but really in theory.
I would say that the reason so many people are backing 3d printing is in part to move to this more sustainable world because real in theory, if we are creating less waste and each product takes, and you traveled less to get to you, then it should be Greener – and so I’m just going to make that point, because there’s still so much research being done in this area, okay, so at maker faire we are announcing a new program called behold lab it’s taking what we have been doing with usability testing and scaling it out To involve more people, so, if you sign up for the program, we will be sending you the prototype and you send us feedback and your feedback will directly influence the product design. And so I think, in conclusion, what I will say is that 3d printing empowers small makers like ourselves to do things that we were not able to do before, and I would you know now: everyone has access to manufacturing and we are really in the midst of A maker movement that is stronger than it’s ever been before and so now is really our time. Thank you I’ll. Take questions.
Anyone! Ok! Yes! Yes, okay! So the question was: how does 3d prints around? I could work so 3d? Printing ceramic is, it does need so. First, it’s the clay, it’s a wet clay, that’s printed through an X. What I’ve seen is extrusion and there’s different types of printers. Some use air pressure to push it through and some use mechanical pressure to push it through, and so it’s wet clay, which is then dried and then put into the kiln and the rest of it is the normal ceramics process and then it would be manually glazed And put back into the kiln, yes, it is.
The question is: how much is it cost reduce the ceramic tumblr? It is really the priciest thing that you know other than the precious metals. It is pretty pricey because of this multi process in this manual labor, and so our ceramic tumblr is available for ninety nine dollars and that’s only a little bit more than what it costs us to produce. So it’s still very high.
There are multi-material printer is out there. We are not doing that right now, but it’s definitely it’s being done. Okay, there are no more questions, we’ll wrap up. Thank you for your time. .