3D Printing Services

When a traditional printing company came upon hard times during Covid they looked to diversify their offering and turned to 3d printing services to provide an additional revenue stream. However they were starting from a low baseline and wanted help generating leads to justify the capital expense of their 3d printer.

Firstly we wanted to get a good understanding of the industry and of the client and of what their 3d proposition included. As this is still a relatively new technology the capabilities of 3d printing or Additive manufacturing as it is sometimes called are not widely understood. As a result we needed to understand if our role was to educate or to focus on attracting people looking for this service, or a combination of the two.

The initial focus was to develop an online presence that would be found for people looking for a 3d printing service, typically near to them. Although as we both understood more and more about the industry and clients the geographical proximity is not always relevant to the client but can help in some instances. 

As the 3d printing equipment the client had was top grade commercial equipment we also wanted to attract customer for a commercial 3d printing service as well as residential clients who may only want a single replacement unit for a broken part.

Understanding that 3d printing is a fantastic too for producing prototypes this was an area for us to focus on. Rapid prototyping services are searched for by budding and seasoned inventors and 3D printing provides a perfect solution to produce a first prototype at a relatively low price. It also enables easy changes to be made to the design or to the material it has been printed in once testing and feedback has been received from the first prototype. Understanding the customers also helped us understand what sort of site, style and approach we'd take. There are a number of national 3d printing companies including international ones looking to service the UK market. However, they provide avery impersonal service of fiel upload with minimal human interaction. With the client we wanted to provide that human element to encourage dialogue, so that we can help with design suggestions and material suggestions. As well as making a first time potential user of 3d printing services feel that not knowing about the service is actually alright and we'll guide you as much as required.

Also by understanding what the 3d printing equipment could do we could provide a fix for individuals and business who were struggling to get legacy parts for old equipment. The client could provide a service to architects to 3d print scaled models to help bring architectural designs to life quicky.

For first time inventors with nothing more than a hand drawn sketch on a piece of paper out client's design team could use that to create an STL file, which could be fed into the 3d printer to provide a cost and time of manufacture for the item.

If you are in a 'newish' industry or added a new service which you are struggling to get tracking for, then simply get in touch today.