Product Development with 3D Printing

3D printing is a powerful tool in product design. Due to its unique characteristics and the relationship between cost and quantity, it is well suited for developing new products.

This week I’m meeting with a client who is designing new products. I thought it would be a good time to share some ideas about how 3D printing can be used in the early stages of product development.

Incremental / Job Production

As discussed in precious write-ups, 3D printers are well suited to producing low quantities of parts. This is because the fixed costs of mass manufacturing, such as producing a mould, are too expensive to justify making a single part. 3D printing can produce low quantities of parts at a similar unit price as high quantities.

Stage 1: Rapid Prototyping – The original use case of 3D printing

3D printing has been around for a long time and the original use for the technology was in rapid prototyping. The reason that 3D printing is good for prototyping is simple: a prototype is only a single unit and 3D printers are suited to low part volumes.

Imagine if you had to make a mould for each part of a prototype, or to set up an assembly line for each – the costs would be too much.

When the cost of prototyping is reduced, it can be done more often. Instead of spending 100 hours perfecting a prototype and triple-checking for mistakes due to its high cost, you can spend 1 hour and just print it. The low cost of 3D printing allows you to take risks and make mistakes, leading to greater design freedom and faster improvements of your designs.

IP protection is another consideration. 3D printing is easy to bring in-house and allows you to protect your designs before they hit the market. If you have a truly exceptional product and outsource its production - the design could easily be stolen and produced without your permission.

Stage 2: First Sales

I’d like to start with an analogy to compare 3D printing with mass manufacturing, such as injection moulding.

If it were a poker game, mass manufacturing your part is like going all in. If you’re right, you will win big with high sales and low part costs. If you’re wrong – you’re out of the game. All of your money went into mass producing a product without demand.

3D printing your parts is like slowly playing poker hand by hand. You back out when your product isn’t good. You bet more when you’ve made something great.

So, when should you go all in in poker? If you have a great hand and you’re willing to risk it all. But beware – a competitor at your table may have a better hand. Perhaps, even, they cheat and they know all about the hand you’re holding (In the movie Lock, Stock and Two Smoking barrels, the poker scene shows this beautifully). 

When should you take it easy and play long-term? When you aren’t sure how good your hand is and you also don’t know what your competitors have. This is likely the situation you’re in during product design.

So, unless you have a perfect product (a perfect hand), the experience to identify it and the courage to go all in, I recommend taking it easy. 3D print your part, improve it over time and learn. Eventually, you will have a product worth going all-in for.

There is a daunting experience which many product designers will face. At some point, you have to finalise your design and move into production. I’ve spoken to people in this position – small business owners who have a product idea and want to take it to production. Often this is injection moulding – which has a huge upfront cost.

If there’s a mistake in your design or something that could be improved, you’re going to have to sell 1000 units before you can fix it. For some, this could mean the end of their business if the design isn’t right. The same is true for any production method with high setup costs.

In the early days of a new product, feedback is inevitable. Customers may complain about something, or you and your team might identify a potential improvement. With 1000 units in inventory, this feedback is inevitably ignored until they are sold – which may be too late. The reputation of your brand and product quality could be ruined.

This is why I believe that where possible, 3D printing should be used for the early production runs of your parts. There are no minimum order sizes and minimal setup costs for each unique part. You don’t even have to purchase a 3D printer – this can be outsourced to someone who already has one.

By 3D printing your initial production run, you can adapt to customer feedback and continue to innovate your products.

If you’re just getting started, chances are that money is hard to access. Because of this, investing large sums of money into injection moulding could risk a total failure of your business.

Scenario 1: 1000 Units Sold

As an example, lets say person A injection moulds 1000 units of a product and Person B 3D prints on-demand. After every 10 units sold, some feedback is received from customers, or your team identifies potential improvements. If Person B can improve the 3D printed design by 1% after each set of feedback, by the time both people sell 1000 units the 3D printed product would have a +170% improvement.

At the end of this process, the person who iterates their product more will likely have a better product. In addition, these benefits occur throughout their sales and their customers will be increasingly satisfied.

Scenario 2: A lack of demand (100 units sold)

There is also the possibility that no one even sells 100 units. Perhaps there just isn’t demand for the product. In this case, Person A will have 900 injection moulded parts unsold and gathering dust.

Person B on the other hand, can quickly pivot into a new product. The lessons learned from their constant improvement can be applied to the new project. If they purchased a 3D printer, it could be used to help with any product. The person who purchased a mould will have it on a shelf gathering dust along with the unsold parts it produced.

Scenario 3: The product is perfect

If the product is perfectly designed with little room for improvement, of course mass manufacturing is the way to go. This is the endgame for product design.

However, in this article, we are talking about the development of something new. Anything new will likely need to be improved and adapted to the market. This requires product improvement, which is difficult when mass manufacturing is used.

I recommend using 3D printing to achieve this perfection. The rapid rate of iteration will allow you to refine your products repeatedly. Once you run out of improvement ideas and your customers run out of complaints – make the part using mass manufacturing. 

I hope this article helped you see how 3D printing could help you to develop new products, it is one of the classic uses for 3D printing which we will discuss more in the future.

As always, thanks for reading,

Simon