How One Company Built the 3-D Printer Market Layer by Layer

Upstart 3-D printer companies have captured the attention of makers, but a 30 year old company called 3D Systems is having a record year on Wall Street. The company just announced an 81 percent increase in sales of their 3-D printers, catapulting their market capitalization over $4 billion. Their Cube 3-D printer is the first of its kind for sale at a big box store like Staples. And while MakerBot might have snagged the sweet brand name “Replicator” from Star Trek, 3D Systems got the exclusive license to print personalized 3-D figurines of Starship Enterprise crew members coinciding with the new movie’s premiere.

This success is especially impressive since it seemed like science fiction on March 9, 1983, when Antoinette Hull got a late night phone call from her husband, Chuck, who was busy tinkering with a “3-D printer” prototype at his lab. After hundreds of failed experiments that looked like plastic spaghetti, he had finally gotten his machine to work. Dressed in her pajamas, she got in the car and drove to the lab where she saw the first 3-D print — a little plastic cup she carries in her purse thirty years later.

According 3D Systems’ current CEO, Avi Reichental, the fact that Hull was able to get his first rapid-prototyping machine up and running at all was impressive considering how limited and expensive the computers of the oil painting reproduction were. Remember, at that point, the world was still a year away from the launch of the now-iconic Apple Macintosh, CAD tools were underpowered and out of reach financially, and standards that modern 3-D printing entrepreneurs take for granted, like a file format to communicate between computers and 3-D printers, didn’t exist.

Undaunted, Hull got to work building out the technical and commercial infrastructure, all of which needed to be created from scratch. While 3D Systems has taken a lot of heat in the maker community for suing upstart Formlabs, Reichental points out that they invented and opensourced the .STL file format, providing a tool now used by the entire CAD/CAM industry.

Despite Hull’s passion for rapid prototyping, the path to commercial success was treacherous, and in the late 1990s, the company was on the brink of collapse. When Reichental was asked to join 3D Systems as CEO, he didn’t have a clear idea about how to fix the company, but the enormity of the opportunity and the potential for 3-D printing to change the world was too big to pass up.

The company stabilized under Reichental’s leadership, but the rise of low-cost 3-D printers transformed the organization. “Our democratization effort, the focus on the consumer, changed everything,” says Reichental. “We’ve pushed every part of our culture to develop more functional, more powerful, more affordable, but simpler to use products.”

Sharing an in-depth roadmap can be dangerous, since it can tip off more nimble startup competitors, so to help limit the danger, 3D Systems seems intent on acquiring every 3-D printing company in the market. Since 2011, 3D Systems has acquired 16 different companies that do everything from core R&D to fun app experiences  “A third of our acquisitions are not revenue generating,” says Reichental. “We’re buying technology building blocks that will allow us to offer new services in the future.”

Healthcare is an important growing segment of the business that touches a diverse range of product categories including hearing aids, surgical tools and dental products. While it may sound dry, medical applications account for 14 percent, or about $50 million dollars a year, of 3D Systems’ revenue, and it has huge growth potential. Invisalign uses 3D Systems printers to produce its custom orthodontic braces and generates half a billion dollars in annual revenue, making even a well-funded Kickstarter project seem a bit inconsequential.

And while medical applications can generate a lot of revenue, 3D Systems isn’t ignoring their entry level systems either. Their low cost systems are repackaged versions of pre-existing printers, but the company is spending a lot of resources to buff them with user-friendly software. The company is also attempting to establish a marketplace along the lines of Thingiverse. An acquisition called MyRobotNation made it possible for kids to access high-end printers and create a robot army with a simple web app and a credit card.

These pieces provide plenty of interesting touchpoints for newbies, but are still far from being fully integrated. For instance, there is no way to export a robot designed on the web to a personal 3-D printer, a weakness Reichental recognizes and is working on improving. “We’re systematically and passionately removing the friction between our technology and the 99 percent of the population that is mesmerized by the concept of 3-D printing,” says Reichental. “We’re trying to develop technology that turns complex machines into ‘coloring book simple’ apps and portals to create an end-to-end capability.”

Still, Reichental and his team are taking a long view towards the market and not ignoring any facet of it. “We’re beneficiaries of the convergence robotics, sensing, mobile, cloud computing, and AI,” he says. ”It’s one of the most exciting periods in human history — we’re on the verge of renaissance that will impact manufacturing, healthcare, and education.”

Playing host to a physical QWERTY keyboard similar to the BlackBerry Q10, the newly unveiled BlackBerry Q5 is aimed at the youth market, and acts as a replacement of sorts to the likes of the BlackBerry Curve 9320. With the handset coming in four varying hues, black, white, red and pink, the youth market is further targeted by heavy focus on the BBM messaging service that took BlackBerry to non-business market success in a previous life.

One area in which BlackBerry has saved pennies on the BlackBerry Q10, is in its build quality. Whereas the BlackBerry Q10 feels like a solid, well manufactured handset, the budget BlackBerry Q5 features a predominantly plastic construction.

Lining up at 10.8mm thick and 120g in weight, the BlackBerry Q5 looks and feels notably cheaper than its BB10 siblings, but this does not mean it is a poorly designed handset. Adopting a familiar form, the QWERTY keyboard and touchscreen display share the space on the handset’s face well, with a spattering of open, unused space around the handset’s lower and side edges the only signs of a reduced effort in the device’s aesthetic.