3D printing for the masses
Two Toronto entrepreneurs are tackling what could be the ultimate business challenge: turning a specialty high-tech product into a consumer item fit for a child’s bedroom.
The technology: 3D printing. Currently geared to technical specialists and hobbyists, 3D printers tend to look like industrial robots or half-finished art-school projects, and have only recently crashed below the $1,000 threshold.
And let’s face it, most consumers have no idea what to do with a 3D printer, a machine that forms 3D figures by meticulously depositing melted filament in wafer-thin layers. The bestknown applications involved creating customized dinosaurs, action figures and jewelry for children, a synthetic jaw made for a Dutch senior, and a ratchet wrench designed by NASA that was printed out aboard the International Space Station last month.
But Tom Zelenka and Jeff Alford contend 3D printing will change our lives — and that children in particular will be inspired and educated by the ability to produce 3D models of anything they can imagine. Their company, Poieo3D, has designed one of the first home- and kid-friendly 3D printers. The $700 Poieo is the size and shape of a microwave oven, with a design that shields young hands from the moving parts, and robust enough to endure knocking about. It also consumes a harmless, biodegradable filament made of corn starch and sugar cane.
“We think 3D printing will be transformational,” Zelenka says. “But when we looked at the market for home printers, they were mostly more than $1,000, and tended to look like hobby products.”
But selling “safe, reliable and easy to use” to a mass market is one of the toughest tasks in business. Most of today’s 3D printer manufacturers aim at specialty sectors, such as manufacturing, health care or design. These are markets you can identify and target with precision. In contrast, the consumer market is vast, expensive to reach, and dominated by sophisticated retailers who want only proven, well-capitalized suppliers whose products are best of breed.
Poieo’s co-founders, though, may be the unlikely partners who can pull this off. Zelenka, 41, has a mechanical engineering degree from the University of Waterloo and an MBA from Rotman. With experience in production, consulting and big data, he recently raised $2.5 million for a promising health-care analytics startup. Although the company ran into problems sourcing the data it needed, its orderly wind-up saw investors get most of their money back.
Alford, 59, is a management accountant, specializing in R&D tax credits, who advised a company developing 3D systems for the iPhone. He’s also chief executive of a $30-million-a-year beauty-products distribution company, CBON Canada, so he knows how to build brands and sell to retailers.
The two met at a hockey arena, where their children were taking hockey lessons. Over dinner they started talking about 3D printing and how big they thought it could be. “There’s no limit to what 3D can become,” Alford says. One Forbes analysis recently predicted the market for 3D printers, supplies and services will quadruple in the next four years, reaching US$16 billion by 2018.
But Poieo’s first marketing step, a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, was a non-starter. It raised little more than $12,000 in the campaign that ended last week, far short of its $100,000 goal. Alford and Zelenka dismiss the campaign as a marketing experiment, saying it taught them valuable lessons about addressing their target markets directly. Parents, for instance, have all kinds of questions about 3D printing, Alford says. “Once they find out what it does, they’re interested.”
Zelenka expects to raise up to $500,000 in capital this month, mainly from investors who supported his analytics venture. The pair will also try crowdfunding again, but this time it will conduct a social-media marketing campaign targeted at the company’s other key market: teachers. “Every teacher I’ve talked to knows about 3D printing and wants to know when they can have printers in their schools,” Alford says.
Poieo recently hired its first sales rep to try to tap the school market. The company is identifying ways 3D printing can fit into the curriculum, such as studying how gears and pulleys interact, or learning anatomy by printing out replicas of human bones.
Still, Zelenka says schools that adopt 3D will be giving their students a huge advantage. He says 3D printing can replace many of Canada’s lost manufacturing jobs, so it’s important to get these tools into students’ hands as soon as possible. “This is one of those disruptive technologies that’s very important for kids to learn.”
Poieo expects to begin its first production run this month. But it will still be some time before the company has the volume to approach a Staples or Best Buy. Zelenka says retailers have expressed interest, but won’t commit to buying anything until Poieo is able to deliver hundreds of units at a time. It’s a chicken-or-egg situation, he says.
Success will derive from building alliances with other key players, including investors, financial institutions and retailers. “It’s not the two of us taking on the world,” Mr. Alford says. “There will be need for huge strategic partners at every step of the way.”