Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Case Study: Alice Taylor, MakieLab”.
Hi i’m alice i’m from london and i run a company called makeylab, which is about a year and a half old we went live last may in open alpha with a 3d printed toy. It’S a doll for starters, but 3d printing, making toys from game stuff and basically my background is in digital media 15 years of that, and i found myself in 2010 at the new york toy fair at in the basement, with all the digital people and upstairs was The physical room and the digital and physical, despite being co-located, were basically kept quite separate, and i was there and somebody pretty famous, had got just got off stage being about their 50 million users in whatever i think it was moshi monsters or something similar and uh. Guy put his hand up at the back, and he said well, this green business. Don’T you just want kids to go outside and play with a hoop and a stick, and it was one of those moments where you go they’re going to do both that gd’s out of the bottle half the time the screen will be with them in their pocket And and how the hell is this stuff still so separated? So i went upstairs and walked the floor and was kind of amazed that all these piles of hardware that looked the same and seemed to come through a pipeline that looked like it hadn’t changed in a very long time.
I was given this book in this. At the same time, the real toy story that describes basically the three decades of the american, the british, the german toy industries and how they’ve wholesale moved to the far east and kind of what that’s meant to the toy industry, which was once upon a time. Quite artisanal kind of made of inventors and hackers and has become this giant boxed shipping system and uh.
I’M also married to corey, who wrote that book makers and he and i hung around – make spaces and fab labs and stuff. So i knew about 3d printing and one of the first things that happened when makers came out. Also, 2009 was somebody random from the internet sent. This is the front of one of the book covers and uh somebody modeled it in 3d and then had it 3d printed and sent it through post to us in london and it came out the envelope and i immediately wanted to pop it all out and start Putting it together but corey, shouted at me and told me, i wasn’t allowed to do that. That’S the off button, which is the forward button. That’S what the hell is this thing doing it’s one button! Okay! So that’s what the toy store looks like if you’re a girl, um, it’s not hamley’s.
Families is the biggest british one and until very recently there was a girl’s floor and a boys floor and uh. You know if you walk into the girls floor, it’s generally all pink and it’s mostly dolls and and craft stuff and in the case of families it was dolls, craft, stuff and a beauty salon for nine year olds. But this is how it’s set up and i’m doing my research. I was like okay, i’m gon na start a toy company um. I naively thought that when you go into a toy store that you as a maker or an inventor inventor, would create a product and and take it to the shop and do a little sales pitch to the shop people. And they would choose that thing and put it on the shelf. Not so so in the case of this one and i think most of them their retail, their their real estate situations, so mattel owns half the store and if you want to make a doll, you have to buy space against mattel, so that basically counts us out And counts out makers: it counts out the inventors, the independents, the startups, the small companies. This is why this whole system looks so huge, so going back to the toy store, um, the the toy fair. I was sitting next to somebody at lunch. We were all crushed in like this, and this amazing thing happened next to me, which was an inventor pitching toys, r, us and the guy was there with his book that had a little toy stuck to the front, and he said so here. It is. What do you think toys r us person said yeah? This is how it works.
You take that to china, you have it made, you get them back into the warehouse in the states and then we’ll discuss doing a deal. You know maybe a hundred thousand units and the guy was like wait. What do you mean? I have to pay for all of that and then we talk about having a deal and the toys r us guy was like yeah, that’s how it works so dolls. I’M a parent of a five-year-old girl.
I wasn’t allowed to play with dolls as a child, which i’m very glad about, because my parents gave me lego and computers, and here i am today. Nevertheless, as an adult, i was like dolls they’re avatars. I play world of warcraft, you know why can’t you just 3d print an avatar and turn it into a doll. Dolls are weird right: um there’s a one of the great phobias is pediophobia, which is the fear of dolls and robots mainly suffered by adults. Dolls.
Definitely by male adults: kids – don’t suffer from this at all, and you find in the more female community that there’s a lot of doll, modders and hackers, and when they’re let loose on characters, they tell stories they make they craft they hack, they bend they shape. In that case, the this doll’s owner sanded off the bottom lip to produce the overbite mod because it’s cute, so we set out with the 3d printing idea – and this is an interesting thing – we’re completely um funded by vc money at the moment. So i have yet to prove whether this is viable business, because we are first and going first is always fun, but what we did was we decided to make a toy with a capital t, go out there and stick it through toy safety testing.
So the way it works is, you could turn up to the site or currently an ipad, app, androids etc later and make a doll with sliders. It’S just an avatar builder, except we’ve got an automated software driven manufacturing platform behind it, which automatically packs the pieces sends them off to the 3d printer. The pieces come back to us all carefully, can’t say how labelled so that each piece goes to the right person. We stick it together, stick on the wig, the eyes, the clothes etc that the person has chosen. Stick it in the box and send it off to them. This process takes two weeks. Did you get a doll that you’ve made each one is unique, has a code in the back of the head, you can take it apart. You can put arduino in the head and wires through the neck and there’s a space at the back for batteries.
In case, you want to make it into a robot and scare the bejesus out of everybody. This is this is what they look like when they come out of the machine bone white only so we had to figure out how to do dying. This is what happens when they get into the hands of makers and and crafters. So you know open alpha. That’S what we did. We just said right we’re just going to put it live even when they’re bone white, even when they’re 100 pounds, even when they look like that thing out of the japanese horror movie.
Just because we want to see what people tell us what they want and they want lego backplates, they want. You know certain types of wigs. They want to be able to paint they wanted skin colors. Obviously, so we started experimenting with that turns out.
If you boil nylon polyamide, it comes out 3d printers in pg tips, tea bag, tea, you get caucasian industrial dyes work fine, so we use dylon now to produce. We’Ve got four colours now we’re trying to figure out how the hell you want to make makeup. If every single face is different, come and tell me how to do that, if you know how to do it, um and that’s where we are – we’ve got a little.
This is stolen. Sorry from games workshop off the internet, but we 3d printed it because basically our software, a doll is a robot is a dinosaur as a car. You guys can do this because there’s things like shapeways and the internet uh and you can make a 3d shape.
Stick it out there and have a toy if it’s made in that nylon polyamide, it will pass toy safety testing. So that’s a little thing that we’re doing next we’re going to do fighting robots with magic, wands and girly things like that. .